> Anyway, at one time I had various folks from a large software vendor
> maintaining with blue-eyed innocence that really, no-one ever
> suggested Safe Mode had any role in malware management, so why
> complain that it is insufficiently suited for such purpose?
>

I guess that narrows it down to one of half a dozen houses, max...tell me
I'm wrong (please!).

> That was a bit of a jaw-dropper, given that the advice to scan and
> manage malware from Safe Mode is ubiquitous across all forums where
> such topics arise. Right now, there will be a number of such threads,
> including in this newsgroup.

Not quite sure what to call that, but imo it's related to the phenomenon of
Fixation, to which we're probably all prone (just think NTFS advocates!),
whereby we become so habitualised as to suffer a failure of imagination and
thus to fail to see 'the obvious'.

I made something of a study into the related phenomenon of Self-Deception.
Although the two serve different purposes, they're related in that the
common end is - broadly-speaking - to further the automation of behaviour,
to habitualise, to minimize or negate the disturbing influence that is
Consciousness.

>
> So, how did everyone get this so wrong for so many years, and how did
> this large software vendor not notice for all this time?
>

The basis of the Self-Deception hypothesis is that people believe what they
want to believe. Funny, just about no-one accepts that they themselves
indulge in self-deception, but the clincher argument for the majority of
people *should* be that they understand from personal experience what is
meant by 'love is blind'.

People, for the most part, believe that which requires the least mental
effort to accept, and that which favours the status quo (because the status
quo is almost always a relative comfort zone, in which Survival is virtually
assured, therefore once the reproducing has been done, the safest thing to
do is STAY WHERE YOU ARE!). Reproduction aside, you see a lot of conformity
and wishful-thinking in the World of Windows, don't you think?

> Hence the poll: I wanted to see whether folks out there were
> considering malware management as a major purpose of Safe Mode.
>

What were the results?



Shane

--


The Sugitive

Chapter One: http://tinyurl.com/bcevp

Chapter Two: http://tinyurl.com/ag92o

Chapter Three: Coming to an URL near you soon!

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