-=> DARYL STOUT wrote to KURT WISMER <=-

 DS> Kurt...

 DS>   Did you ever get a deal worked out on posting new virus alerts? I
 DS> know that F-Prot no longer issues or supports F-Prot for DOS, and that
 DS> Sophos changed its way of posting this information.

wow, i took WAY too long getting my offline mail reader back up and running
after switching computers... sorry about that folks, i thought i could just
copy the files over (since there was no installation involved) but it turned
out to not be quite so simple... let me know if there are any readability
issues with this message, by the way - i'm using a 'windows' version of
multi-mail now and it uses notepad for writing messages...

ok, so did i ever get a deal worked out - well, it wasn't so much that there
was a deal that needed to be made, rather it was a matter of finding a new
source of info... i never did but i've been thinking about this for a while and
i'm starting to be of the opinion that the concept of posting details about the
latest malware in the wild has become outdated... 

folks may remember that each description had a numeric value indicating the
prevalence in the wild - it was on a scale from 1 to 5 where 1 wasn't even
technically in the wild... the vast (and i can't stress that word enough)
majority of malware i was posting details about were of prevalence level 2,
meaning they were just barely getting reported so the risk of exposure was
still pretty low... combine that with the ever increasing number of them and
work/payoff equation starts to look pretty bleak... i suspect this is part of
the reason why sophos changed their notification process - the trend has turned
to a very large number of very low prevelance malware (often one-offs), and
notifying people of each and every one of them would swamp people with
information they almost certainly wouldn't need or be able to use...

thinking back on it, the reason i started reposting that information here was
so that there would still be some good content here in the absence of more
natural conversations... i toyed with the idea of supplementing those posts
with other info as well at one point (i was thinking maybe i'd take some of my
blog posts and repost them here) but i never did it... now it seems like if i
want to continue contributing useful content here i'm going to have to find
something other than malware descriptions because, although the old malware is
still out there, the newly created stuff just doesn't lend itself to that sort
of in-depth individual notification... 
--- MultiMail/Win32 v0.49