About the 21 video's

[smirk]

Im not trying to be a party pooper and I may be completely wrong, if so I appologize to sesw, you may have all good intentions. In my time I have learned a lot about the web, and one thing to watch out for is .exe files. These are program files that a capable of containing viruses, and or Trojan horses, just letting out a warning to everyone before downloading.

 

[sesw]

*.exe files

Smirk, you are right. *.exe files can contain viruses, and trojans. I however, run my files through 2 seperate detection & cleaning programs before sending them out, just to be safe. I use Norton for the viruses, and Lockdown 2000 to scan for Trojans. The irony here is that I can't send out these particular *.exe files, at this time. My mail server can't handle the file size as attachments.

 

[Machival]

About the .exe filetype

Just because a file is .exe doesn't necessarily mean that it runs a risk of carrying a virus. If you create and compile a program with, say, C++ or something and make an .exe file out of it, it's not like "Oh, no! Better watch out! It's an .exe file! It could have a virus in it just because of the filetype!" It's better to be wary of the source of the files rather than the filetype itself. The risk of viral infection comes mainly from the shady, malicious provider and not because of the fact that it's a .exe file. It's not like viruses just 'happen', like, at random or something to certain files. If that were the case, due to the high number of .exe files on your computer right now, you'd be running a very high and very constant risk of infection at any given moment. People put them in there purposely. The .exe files in question are actually self-extracting (most likely zip) archives that he, from what I can gather, compressed himself. If they had a virus of some sort in them, he'd have to have put it in there himself.

I've been downloading .exe files (especially a great deal of self-extracting archive .exe files) for several years now and have never gotten a virus from one yet. (*knockwood*) I'm not saying you shouldn't be careful, but, I mean, consider the source, really.