Maybe the new FizzBuzz should be to show prospective devs some DailyWTF articles and see whether they laugh, cry, or think it's a great idea....

Well they say when all you have is a hammer... Actually, a web service doesn't seem like a bad idea to me--it's easy to implement and would allow finer grained permissions than direct database access. It's also easy to move to SSL. What would you do instead?

The less one knows about a system the more layers of firewall he will put up to protect it.

People get astonished when I insert a virus infected USB disk into my Windows machine and use Explorer to safely copy files from it. And when they ask what anti-virus I use, I say "None, never used any anti-virus in my life. I reversed engineered a lot of viruses and I know how they work."

> Please never apply to a company that I am working for!

Sure. Thanks.

I'd honestly like to know how you can "safely copy files" with Explorer.

You know a lot of viruses, you don't know all the viruses. How can you discount the possibility that, one day, the USB interface itself will be subverted to spread viruses ?

> the USB interface itself will be subverted to spread viruses ?

It can. But then I would know about it as soon the AV companies know. And I can take the precaution accordingly. If that is a zero day [remote] exploit, then I am toast, with or without anti virus.

The point is: anti-viruses would probably make me 10% more secure over what I already am. Therefore it's not worth it when one considers its cons.

If you really can enjoy the same level of semi-instantaneous knowledge of "virusdom" as AV companies, then you're the 0.00001% of the population. Your solution simply doesn't scale in the real world.

In fact this was one of the propagation methods of Stuxnet. It exploited a vulnerability in MS's .lnk file to achieve code execution when removable USB storage was inserted. See p. 29 of http://www.symantec.com/content/en/us/enterprise/media/secur...

I have a command file on my desktop, double clicking on which deletes all .pif .lnk .inf .com and -shr attributed files in USB drive [plus other things].

Yeah, so if you had an USB stick with one of those WMF exploits before the patch was out you'd be toast.

I turn off all media preview on my Windows machine.