Is having a computer an excuse to stop thinking?

The IT department at school sent out a mail about upgrading their spam filters. Good idea. At work, I get at least 50 daily notifications from our mailserver about user’s mails being deleted due to virus. Funny thing is, most of the infected mails don’t even make it to the virusscanner because they are filtered out by our own spamfilter, which is first in line. Made me think how virus mails actually tend to behave a lot like ordinary spam these days. And how system administrators actually get spammed from their systems, every time there is a highly distributed virus e-mail roaming the Net. As if regular spam isn’t bad enough.

What is that makes people turn their brain function to sub-zero levels as soon as they sit down in front of their e-mail programs? Do people really believe that someone from Namibia is sending them a legitimate business proposal, guaranteed to make them money, if only they open the attached executable file?

Just goes to show that no matter how hi-tech and advanced computer software gets, it only takes one thoughtless moron to convert everything to chaos. *sigh* .. anyways, there’s an interesting (slightly technical) article about the issue here.