Not so long ago the Internet was rather simple. You could not get a computer virus from an e-mail, and certainly not from watching porn. In fact, I remember how I scolded someone back in ’98 because he was dumb enough to forward a chain-mail to everyone in the company that warned for opening an e-mail with a certain subject, because supposedly it would give you a virus. Back then that was impossible unless you opened an executable attachment yourself.
However: anno 2004 you DO get a PC-virus from e-mail (especially if you’re a windows user), and yes: looking at porn CAN give you a virus! Well, actually not really a virus, but still some shitty stuff:
Some computer hackers have taken some pornographic JPEGs and augmented them with an exploit that uses the JPEG vulnerability that Microsoft recently announced, as reported by Computerworld. The exploit isn’t a virus, but instead turns the compromised computer into a bulk-mail spam machine, proof once again that the hackers and the spammers have teamed up.
What?s really neat about this exploit is that many people had long expected that the JPEG decompress routines, because of their complexity, almost certainly had to have some kind of buffer overflow in them. But it took literally years for someone to find it…
Scary stuff not?
Once again: systems that are safe (so far) include: Linux and Apple OS X.
Hmm, and one of them (Linux) is even free! So why bother using Windows?