We are at war…
…with the spammers. My workstation has been infested with adware/malware. Through no fault of my own, I can assure you. I have been working with PC’s since the early eighties. Yes, that was the beginning. I have never had luck using popular real-time anti-virus utilities. They seem nice at first, but inevitably lead to system corruption. For the most part I can say I don’t use them on my workstation. I have been infected with a virus exactly one time–I unwisely opened an attachment from someone I knew and came down with a nasty case of nambda. Hotmail’s virus scanner missed it, so I don’t even know if having McAfee or Norton running would have even caught the virus.
I mean, you want to believe that everyone at the virus detection companies are honest people. But given the state of affairs in our world today,especially vis-a-vis corporate corruption, it is very difficult to believe that an entire industry is untainted. Isn’t it?
Just like there must be more than a few marketers in bed with the big salami ramming spammers. All the while maintaining plausible deniability when accused of benefiting from the unsolicited ads placed surreptitiously on our computers. I just caught this crap, or became aware of it anyway, late last night and I have been running around with a fly-swatter and a can of Lysol ever since. I can only guess how many millions of PC users don’t have a clue and just suffer the ad blitz.
Hey, greedy politicians, do something really useful for a change. Fix the spam problem, especially where it relates to trespassing on my property, and then I will gladly pay a broadband tax. Considering the huge losses accumulated due to lost productivity and out-right tangible damage caused by trojans, malware, viruses, and the like, paying a reasonable tax would be a fair trade to be rid of it. Until then, the appropriater’s next cash cow is being rendered impotent by unscrupulous marketers and advertisers.
Using this Virus Cost calculator, you can come up with some examples of the tangible costs associated with getting infected by a virus. I used a pretty small company of a thousand people and an average email utilization of 90 minutes a day and came up with a lost productivity cost of $112,000 and 2,240 lost hours of productivity. Consider the cost when a nasty virus gets loose and quickly spreads around the world, affecting literally hundreds of thousands of users.
Now consider the intangible costs:
- The cost of delaying electronic transfer of needed, vital documents between corporate sites
- The disruption of corporate communication between widely separated project coordinators and team members
- The removal of administrators from other assigned duties
Now include the already budgeted cost of fighting spam, worms, trojans, viruses, malware, browser hijacks, and on and on and on. The losses are staggering. As a matter of fact, the increased corporate tax revenues resulting from capitalizing on eliminating or greatly reducing the virus cost would likely offset the need to tax the internet (which of course doesn’t mean anything at all.)
Also, as part of any economic warfare campaign, a steady onslaught of viruses would be an integral component of the strategy to keep financial pressures on large capitalistic concerns. Nah, nobody would want to cause economic harm to capitalist, would they.