Wednesday, June 23, 2004
Who watches the watchers
Hotmail have apparently adopted a policy of deleting email accounts that are reported to be sending spam. A good thing, you might think, and indeed it might be, so long as a) the report is verified, and b) the owner of the account is given a chance to defend themselves (the account may have been hacked, for example).
Hotmail are currently doing neither of these things, and are simply disabling accounts as soon as a report is received. This means that troublemakers can make life difficult for anyone whose email address they care to report. So the question becomes who watches the watchers? There's enough ways of causing e-trouble already without reactionary, Machiavellian approaches like this. What we need is a more measured approach, and a recognition that just because it looks like someone is doing a good deed by reporting malicious activity, that report in itself could be malicious...
and just to really get the controversy going, how much money do the anti-virus people make from viruses? if I made a living from selling anti-virus software, I'd make sure there were plenty of viruses out there... (hypothetically speaking - I'm not really that evil)
Hotmail have apparently adopted a policy of deleting email accounts that are reported to be sending spam. A good thing, you might think, and indeed it might be, so long as a) the report is verified, and b) the owner of the account is given a chance to defend themselves (the account may have been hacked, for example).
Hotmail are currently doing neither of these things, and are simply disabling accounts as soon as a report is received. This means that troublemakers can make life difficult for anyone whose email address they care to report. So the question becomes who watches the watchers? There's enough ways of causing e-trouble already without reactionary, Machiavellian approaches like this. What we need is a more measured approach, and a recognition that just because it looks like someone is doing a good deed by reporting malicious activity, that report in itself could be malicious...
and just to really get the controversy going, how much money do the anti-virus people make from viruses? if I made a living from selling anti-virus software, I'd make sure there were plenty of viruses out there... (hypothetically speaking - I'm not really that evil)
Comments:
Post a Comment
(c) 2003-2005 Russell Beale
Atom
RSS