Kissing and computers

Have you ever had your computer crash? I don't mean simply stall where a restart corrects the problem. I mean THUD...BANG...BLUE SCREEN... KAPUT? The kind of crash where everything on your computer disappears into the ether, or worse yet, into some Russian or Nigerian hacker's database? If this has never happened to you it's probably because you have a Mac or don't connect to the Internet. It is estimated that 20% of all computers have some sort of secret viral software. These bits of malicious code use the host computer as a platform to extract data from your machine or from others you link up with through e-mail or online shopping. Generally, these bits of mal-ware (French Mal for BAD) don't cause you to crash because, like a biological virus, they need a host to live on while they infect your systems and those of the people you interact with online. Bummer huh?

One of the ways these little buggers manage to spread themselves is through forwarded e-mails. These are usually messages sent from friends ... innocuous bits of drivel about politics, strange happenings, links to videos, recipes, jokes etc. What happens is someone sends you something that you think is cute, or meaningful or sexy and without giving it a thought you forward it on to a few hundred of your closest friends. It's sort of like what they say about kissing. When you kiss someone you are kissing all of the people the person you are kissing has ever kissed before! Makes bowing sort of attractive. So now this cute e-mail you have sent your friends not only has all of the addresses of all of the people who received the e-mail before it got to you, it has all of the addresses you sent it to.

Most readers know that I love politics and frequently forward stuff I get from others ... OK perhaps frequently is a bit of an understatement ... I forward a lot of this stuff...BUT... I always delete all of the addresses connected to anything I forward and I always put all addresses I'm forwarding to as BCC so they can't be seen. Unfortunately, many friends who send me stuff don't take these precautions. Last week I decided to count the number of addresses on e-mails I received from friends ... over a 5-day period there were 672 visible addresses forwarded to me ... 672! If the 20% infection figure is accurate then potentially I was exposed (in one week) to 134 infected machines.

When I had a PC I had a crash almost annually. Since I've switched to a Mac I've had one small mal-ware that slowed things a bit until I got rid of it. Nevertheless, I'm convinced we all need to start using better digital hygiene. Effectively immediately I'm instituting a new policy ... any items I receive that have been forwarded without being cleaned up will automatically be trashed without being opened. I will miss many cool things forwarded by many cool friends. It's a small effort on my part, but hopefully it will stimulate others to take a few minutes to clean e-mails before they hit the FORWARD button.