Peter Alling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >The company I used to work for once embargoed jpeg files because of a >rumor that they might be infected with viruses. I e-mailed the support >people to describe just imbecilic this was but they didn't rescind the >prohibition for about a week.
A couple of years ago there was a big fuss about a virus that came out that, after it infected your computer via the usual email route, infected all the JPEG images on your hard disk. Of course, that just meant that it copied itself into the JPEGs. But it couldn't infect any other computer to which you sent the JPEG, it couldn't reproduce itself or change the way your computer worked at all. It couldn't actually *do* ANYTHING from within a JPEG, it just sort of sat there as an archive. A couple of the more cretinous anti-virus companies made a big deal of it and gave breathless interviews to various reporters - who then wrote scary articles for web sites lime MSN, etc. It was really pathetic. I wouldn't have thought any real IT people would be ignorant enough to get taken in by it but it appears I was wrong... >I don't know what software they were using >but it was interesting to open a web page and not see any graphics. That's how I browse the web most of the time! It's quite a bit faster of graphically-overburdened sites. -- Mark Roberts Photography and writing www.robertstech.com
