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Re: [LUG] OT Virus

 

On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 12:35 PM, Simon Waters wrote:
>  Seems harsh of those criticizing them for not providing it directly to
>  end users, as I'm guessing they have bills to pay like everyone else.

I thought so too. Also, I am fairly sure Google never claimed they
were going to stay ad-free. I do sometimes wonder who clicks on the
ads - the only times the ads on Google search are relevant is when
they are the same as one of the top results. Just having a good
website with good content and proper HTML does so much more than
buying ad space on Google.

On topic: a lot of virus-scanning is (partly) based on heuristics. And
unfortunately it has to be, as the people who write viruses never tell
the anti-virus creators about the new viruses they have written, so
there is always a time window during which a virus is active but
unknown. Scanning based on heuristics is bound to give strange results
though and there is always a small change that marks the difference
between 'probably a virus' and 'probably no virus'. 'Photos' is
probably a word that regularly occurs in emails that contain viruses,
while 'Pictures' isn't. Also, the fact that the email contains
'Western union' (albeit in the To: field and for genuine reasons)
probably doesn't help.

I have seen a few companies whose spam filters blocked anything that
contained the word 'virus'. Which is a bit unfortunate if you are
discussion anti-virus software with one of their employees.

Martijn.

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