Keith Willshaw wrote

Yes but these ARENT moderated groups.

They do not have to be for the creator of the group to have some
control

Sorry but this is a lesson they have to learn if they wish
to use Usenet. Usenet is by definition a dsitributed
medium with no central control.

What the hell - let them burn if they make a mistake - after all,
survival of the fittest worked for millions of years - why should
we change it now.

They are being posted to lots of groups which are nothing
to do with microsoft and also sent out by email. Yes you
can prevent postng of ALL attachments to a newsgroup but
that is rather limiting and prevents people from attaching
legitimate stuff. Its surely far better to set up your reader not to
download binaries if thats what you want.

I do not have a problem with downloading from the NG - I have
a problem with the number of people who appear to have my
e-mail addy in their address book and also have an infected system.


I'm not in favour of dumbing down, especially in newsgroups
targetted at developers who may be expected to be a little
more sophisticated than the average user.

ummmmm - the mythical "average user" - who was it who said
that there will be a computer in every home and on every desk?
Seems to me the "average user" will be less technical as time goes
by because all the geeks got computers years ago - the only ones
left to get them are the ones who know very little about computers.
These people should not be bared from using them and we, the
so called experts, should have the ability to make it easy for the
most ardent technophobe to use a computer.

I suggest you cut down the crossposting if you reply
I only read microsoft.public.excel.programming

I posted to all the NG one of these "security updates" was posted to
and you replied to all those groups. I did not expect a reply and had
no idea which NG you replied in.


Posting to this many groups is frankly impolite,

Touché.

if you want to say something to microsoft send an email.

Been there - done that - actually, I phoned them. Will do it again
in the morning when I get up as I was a bit too late yesterday.

Chrissy.

In-line:

In article ,
"Chrissy" wrote:

Yes but these ARENT moderated groups.

They do not have to be for the creator of the group to have some
control

Nope - the creator of an unmoderated group has no more control than
anyone else, except (a) on their own server(s) and (b) to the extent
that they can persuade other newsserver owners. (B)'s extent is
normally about zero.

MS could (and does) limit content on the msnews servers (they
obviously delete most spam and appear to be restricting attachments
over a certain size). But that has no effect on what exists on, say,
m.p.e.programming when read from a different server.

I do not have a problem with downloading from the NG - I have
a problem with the number of people who appear to have my
e-mail addy in their address book and also have an infected system.

Nobody has to have your email addy in your address book. The swen
worm not only looks in the infected computer's address book, but
also harvests recently posted addresses from newsgroups. So your
posting your last message with your email address guarantees that
you'll be getting more spam, even if MS blocked all attachments and
filtered out all spam, since the harvest can occur on any newsserver.

I suggest you cut down the crossposting if you reply
I only read microsoft.public.excel.programming

I posted to all the NG one of these "security updates" was posted to
and you replied to all those groups. I did not expect a reply and had
no idea which NG you replied in.

That's why the Followup-To: header exists. Cross-post to many, but
set followup to only one. Anyone with a decent newsreader will then
automatically reply only to the followup group.