The best of 'Reader Comments': Viruses, viruses, viruses

No prizes for guessing what topic got the reader comments flooding in this week. It was viruses, viruses and more viruses - particularly Nimda, the current concern of the infection fearing IT sector, and the thorny issue of ISPs taking responsibility for virus attacks.

First, your responses to news of Nimda - a virus which is spreading across the world at a rate not seen since the dark days of Melissa (http://www.silicon.com/a47517 ).

Blame Microsoft.... for everything
By Steve Brown

Will Microsoft be sued for all this damage? It's their shoddy code in the first place that allows this to happen.

It's a DEFECT in their product, and any other manufacturer of real tangible products would be forced into a product recall or sending an engineer out. With the software industry it's very much buyer beware and check for the latest patches. The onus is presently in the wrong place!

It's akin to Ford making cars that regularly start themselves up and drive through their neighbours front wall, and then having Ford tell the neighbour it's his fault, he should have told his neighbour to patch his car.

No other industry would get away with such incredibly shoddy work, how does software do it? It's shameful.

Don't believe the hype
By Stephen Boylett

So far the only two affects I've seen result from this worm, are that the AV companies' websites are overloaded and my mailbox is full of virus warning messages.

I do expect a third effect though - the mass hysteria will probably push the stocks of the AV companies up a bit.

This week, ISPs walked into a storm of controversy by refusing to play a bigger part in the war on viruses (http://www.silicon.com/a47493 ). Some of you weren't impressed, others sided with the ISPs:

Consumers hiding behind blame and claim culture...
By Alex Clay

I agree that if consumers want to protect themselves from viruses then they should pay for the service.

There are plenty of ways to do this but hardly anyone bothers. Then, when it all goes wrong, it's the ISP's fault for not protecting its customers.

Another case of looking for someone to blame rather than dealing with the situation.

The ISPs should want to do it anyway...
By Pete Everleigh

So what actual costs would be involved then?

And what happened to the responsibility to protect your customers?

Surely by removing worms such as Melissa et al the ISP would ultimately relieve the load on their mail servers as they wouldn't have to deal with flood of mail sent by the viruses trying to spread.

An ISP offering a virus scanning service as part of the deal might clean up.

Think of the bandwidth?
By Brian Bakker

Typical. ISPs around the world are forever whinging about the cost of bandwidth and yet they are happy to let it be wasted by viruses.

The bandwidth freed by preventing the spread of viruses would more than likely pay for the software needed to scan messages. And, if they got clever, they could offer AV software on an ASP model (in partnership with AV software vendors) and make money out of it. I can't understand how they can ignore the business opportunity this represents. My own ISP is a typical example (name omitted to protect the pathetic). I have been on at them for six months now to subscribe to MessageLabs service or offer me something like it themselves, all to no avail.

Whatever happened to customer service?