I would not enter on my list of friends the man Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm ^[1]

At the time of writing, we are being plagued by yet another worm, MyDoom, aka half-a-dozen other names. At least one person has my name on his address list, is foolish enough to use Outlook or Outlook Express and sufficiently stupid to have opened an unsolicited and unidentified attachment. I know this because I have received hundreds of bounces from Web sites with firewalls which have rejected the receipt of the same virus. When will people learn?

This time, Microsoft have offered a reward of $250,000 for information leading to the prosecution of the perpetrators of this virus. I don t think this is a good idea. If it is generalised, it will encourage people in Third World countries to write new viruses, have a friend denounce them and split the proceeds between them and the judicial authorities. However, it could also be interpreted as an admission that Microsoft software is responsible for the propagation of this worm.

Bill Gates has recently announced, at the Davos World Economic Forum that his company will have killed spam within a couple of years. His proposal is to introduce a method whereby e-mail messages will be charged a nominal fee. The notion is that, if you and I send a few dozen e-mails per day, and each one is charged one or two cents, then this is not catastrophic. If, as is...