AKICOLJ

[desperance]

I know my awareness of current anti-virus strategies is stunted, on account of the whole Linux thing, but I've just seen a set of submission guidelines that baffles me. The call is f or electronic submissions, as attachments, in .doc or .rtf formats - but "Submissions without virus protection will not be opened and read so please ensure your virus protection is up to date."

I don't actually know what that means. They can't be asking for active virus protection to be embedded within the attachment, because (as far as I know) you can't do that in .rtf format, and I would assume not in .doc either.

If they just want an assurance that whatever you send has been scanned for viruses by up-to-date software, then that is surely something they need to do at their end, because lesson one is not to trust what other people tell you.

Or does my complacent lack-of-anxiety about this whole area mean that I've missed a major new development in anti-viral strategy, and is everybody soon going to be demanding a level of cover that I'm simply not aware of...?

In other news, snowpocalypse: we can has. Whole inches of it. I'm thinking of taking the boys out into the yard with a camera, just to see what they make of it.

Comments

[moral-vacuum.livejournal.com]

Some anti-virus things put a little certificate at the botom of the e-mail saying "this has been scanned by [program v9.whatever]. I know AVG does.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Yup, I've seen that - but I'm assuming that you could just type that? In and of themselves, the words carry no guarantee that it's actually true.

[moral-vacuum.livejournal.com]

Chances are their own scanner will check it, but it's to make sure that these flighty artistic types have proper anti-virus on their machines...

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

Exactly. Those disclaimers are only ads for the virus scanning companies, rather than useful in any detectable way.

Their whole submission policy is so broken as to be moronic.