First off thanks for all the feedback, both positive and negative, about
advertising. I appreciate those willing to communicate about this in spite of
their unhappiness, and cannot express enough gratitude to all of you expressing
support for what's going on here.
To change tracks, I mentioned wanting to comment on the Sobig virus that's
running around the internet at the moment. As some of
the
reports about this point out, this is a particularly persistent worm,
sending out such a flood of mail that at its peak, they were probably rolling
in the door here at a rate of 10 per minute. This is all part of the game, but
the thing that's making me crazier by the minute is the flood of rejection
messages from mail servers and user's anti-virus software warning that I have
sent them a virus. Obviously (to me at least) I did not actually send the
offending mail... that's one of the aspects of these worms is how they spoof
their originating e-mail address, so users and ISPs who try to help are actually
causing as big a problem as the original mails to which they are responding. In
fact, for someone like me, whose ISP is filtering these mails out at the server
level (but they know better than to bounce back these notifications), I'm getting
none of the worm mails, and hundreds (literally) of bounce messages. Yeesh.