Thanks for the Virus.

[Ignazio Palmisano]

Steven Vollom wrote:
>> The biggest source of my secret email address getting out is from
>> friends going to the, "send an email card" sites and sending me
>> something. Never send email to a freind through another site!
>>
>> BTW, I have had 4 emails in one month make it past Google Emails spam
>> filter and into my in box. I get about 100 spams a day in the spam
>> box, but of late that has been down to about 100 a week. Nice.
>>   
> I would love to find the fault in me, so I can try to fix and forget.  I 
> am wondering if Facebook is a potential problem.  It is something my 
> family introduced me to which is nice.  I am getting to know my extended 
> family because of the way it works.  It is the only outside program type 
> that I can think of that is new contact for me.

I don't know what the original problem could have been but I'll try to 
suggest some possible reasons, from the most likely down:

- you mentioned you are using version 9.04 (Jaunty). As of last week, 
Jaunty is in alpha 6 status. While it appears to be a very stable 
system, it's still in alpha and won't be released for another month (is 
that the beginning or the end of April?), so you may very well have been 
bitten by some instability;

- you have been trying wine and some windows program; it is possible 
that the trials left processes running in the background and eating 
memory or cpu cycles (not by malice, of the program or of anyone else, 
just by mistake - back when I was a rookie programmer, i.e. a couple of 
years ago, I happened to have the same problem while debugging stuff: 
many many processes being left open, computer crawling like an injured 
seal in the Sahara);

- you have been experiencing some sort of attack by bots or spammers: 
e.g., someone from the internet was scanning the ports of your computer 
trying to find a vulnerability, and wasting your cpu time while doing 
that. This could be done automatically and at random, so there is no 
malice against you specifically in the people who do that. They are a 
pain in the neck, agreed, but this is not too likely the situation;

- you have been visiting web sites which were poorly designed or sparked 
incompatibilities with your browser. I've never seen that happening on 
Facebook, but I have a friend who reports her laptop to regularly slow 
down to the point of being unusable when visiting Facebook. She has 
windoze XP and Firefox, so completely different setup from yours, but 
still not impossible;

- some other thing that I don't have half a clue about.

Note that none of these mean that someone was targeting YOU. I don't 
remember exactly who said that malice is overrated as a motive for 
people, and to never look for it if stupidity covers the problems you 
see (I don't mean your stupidity, I mean bugs and menial mistakes. You'd 
be surprised how many of those I've seen being made by young, healthy 
and otherwise normal university students - which are supposedly smarter 
than the Average Joe).
I.

> With the exception of email and browser use for computer related issues, 
> and occasionally Ebay to purchase something or Newegg, I don't use the 
> Internet the way I hear most people do.  Thanks for the advice and new 
> ideas.
> 
> Steven
>>   
> 
>