mary g -

There are several nastys that infect a machine, read the address book on that machine, and then "fake" senders address using names picked at random from the address book.

It is quite possible that you're getting a lot of flak just because your email addy was in the book on someone else's machine that got infected.

If it were not for all the SPAM, a conscientious ISP could check whether the "return address" was real, but they're snowed under so if it says its from you, they block you.

Mark Cohen -

Ten years or so ago, Steve Gibson was one of the "wunderkind" of the PC (and general computing world). His "signature" program was call "SpinRight." In the old days, hard drives had a tendency to "drift" off the track, and lose the ability to read cleanly. The standard procedure was to reformat the drive, to move the tracks to where the heads happened to be, and then reinstall everything. SpinRight made it possible, in essence, to "reformat" the drive without moving the data. It amazed nearly everybody.

Better drives have made it less necessary, and the "Windows Protection Layer" pretty much prevents the kind of direct hardware access to the drive that the program used.

Steve seems to be devoting his efforts now almost exclusively to hacker/antihacker and antivirus stuff, and you're not likely to see him "sparkle" at what he does unless you get "into the inside" of that world; but based on his past performance, if he says it - believe it (with a small safety net just in case).

I'd doubt that he specifically predicted this particular "hole" when XP came out, but he has been pretty good at making both general long term and pretty specific shorter term predictions of where the next problems are likely to pop up. And his criticisms are usually specific enough to be helpful, rather than just a buch of whining like some others.

John