Oooh.... so there's a scary Gnutella worm out there giving nasty warning messages to Gnutella users. Eeeek! Scary virus like software makes me afraid to turn on my computer!
Give it a rest. OK, I can see how frightening a thing like this is on the
surface, but what's going on here? Someone has made a bullshit straw dog for the
media to ignorantly sink their teeth into. The breathless scare-hype is out that
if you use that scary bad pirating-condusive software you could have horrible
things happen to you.
First of all, you can't have them happen to you without double-clicking on the
damn icon to run the script. This ain't no Outlook Express "run it
before you know it's been downloaded" deal. It takes actual participation.
And this begs the question: Who in their right mind is out there downloading
files CLEARLY MARKED as VBScript from a totally unknown source and then running
them? You've got to really really want the monster in your living room to do
that, or else be too stupid to get the correlation between moving the mouse and
seeing the little arrow move on the screeen, in which case Gnuella may not be
the choice for you anyhow.
Once again, we watch a media feeding frenzy designed to scare us using no hard
facts, and lots of smoke and mirrors. Maybe those people at ZDNet should stop
smoking whatever it is they smoke over there and snorting stuff off of those
mirrors. Then they might go to the library and look up the words
"responsible" and "journalism". Then come back here and
bring us a 12-page essay on how those words might be used in combination with
one another.
Eroding the users' trust in Gnutella? More like eroding the readers' trust in
Journalism.
