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Date:	Sat, 1 May 2004 09:41:16 PDT7
From:	"J. R. Fox" <jr_fox@pacbell.net >
Reply-To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
To:	< scoug-help@scoug.com, Mark Dodel > madodel@ptdprolog.net >
Subject:	SCOUG-Help: Tales through some open Windoze

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I went to the bank yesterday. In the middle of the transaction, the
teller said "It froze up again. That's the 4th time this has happened
to me today. We just have to wait." So we waitied, and we waited.
It took about five minutes before she could continue processing the
transaction. {Other tellers had randomly been experiencing the same
thing. This is a good-sized branch, with longer lines and about 8 to
10 tellers receiving customers at any given time.} I said to her,
"XP, huh ?" "How'd you know that ?," she said. Actually, it's too
easy -- you don't need to be one of the sharper contestants to guess
that one. I don't **ever** recall an incident like this one in all
the many years the banks were running OS/2. If the system ever was
down then, it was clearly some kind of hardware or network failure.

Just received a stringent email warning, allegedly from the security
department of my ISP. I say "allegedly" because there's a much better
than 50-50 chance it is just another of those Phishing lures, dressed
up a bit more cleverly than most. It warned of a devastating new worm
called 'Gaobot,' which could severely compromise anyone running NT
through XP, and urged immediate updates of AV software and new
security patches for Win (as you know, a not uncommon occurrence), or
else. If you become a source of infection, due to not heeding this
advice, the ISP might have no choice but to terminate your account.
As soon as they took that turn, the whole thing became very
suspicious. Given how clueless so many Win users are, the idea of an
ISP policing this with their customers is simply laughable. The icing
was that they provided links for WidowsUpdate and Symantec AV, which
everyone already knows how to find on their own, and when you pass
your cursor over the links, you see a long, labyrinthine URL reported
for them. A lot of people will fall for this, because it's the sort
of thing they have come to expect from Windows. It is a continuing
pleasure to be running something else -- something so much better --
that allows you to regularly ignore such things.

jf

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