Ordinary Gweilo

I have previously complained about all the hype that surrounds spam and viruses on the Internet.  I am not about to change my mind, but I am currently getting rather annoyed about viruses.  Or rather anti-virus software.

My wife has an email account, but doesn’t use it very much.  I check her email for her in the evening, and currently she is getting around 10 messages containing viruses every day.  A couple of days ago I got a few myself, sent to a non-existent email address (well, the first part was non-existent, but obviously the domain is valid). 

The annoying part about it is the way that Norton Anti-Virus deals with this threat, popping up endless messages and requiring you to click on a link to discover the subject and author of each offending email.  Only then does it delete either the attachments (or the whole message).  This wouldn’t be too bad if these messages arrived at different times of the day, but a whole string of them one after the other is mighty irritating.  How am I supposed to remember which of the messages contain viruses?

I am sure the software could be a whole lot smarter, especially as most of these messages are repeated every day and use the same email addresses as the alleged sender.  Why can’t Norton just delete the attachments and stick the messages into a special folder rather than requiring me to do anything?  It does that fairly successfully with spam, so it can’t be difficult.

Norton Internet Security is also an annoying piece of software.  I have it loaded on one PC that is not always connected to the Internet, and from this I have discovered that every few days it goes through some sort of authentication check and switches itself off if it can’t call home (or, presumably, if you have an illegal copy of the software).  It also has a curious feature that is supposed to block ads, but which also blocks useful content, rendering some web pages unreadable.  Once you figure what it is doing you can switch it off, of course, but who would guess that Internet Security means removing part of a web page! 

Symantec also decided that it needed to remind me 30 days before my subscription (for their anti-virus service) expired.  OK, that’s fair enough, but I resent the same warning popping up every single day thereafter until you re-subscribe.  Bunch of weasels.