and where precisely would this virus scanner be put?
the upload is from the (alleged) spammer's computer. from there it goes thru the "series of tubes" to the downloaders computer.

there is no 'central location' where all the files could be scanned before being made available to downloaders.

the point of this idea is that instead of marking hundreds of identical files as junk just because they have a different name.... and then new ones continue to show up and still need to be marked as junk.... you simply point out to the system -why- said file is junk. then the system can scan any results you get back and automatically junk anything that turns up.

a virus-scanner solution will not fix this. the problem originates at the source, and the source has no interest in fixing it -- the source doesn't even consider it broken. if you put a forced virus-scan limitation into it, then you're going to get someone who writes a hack for it because they don't want to use anti-virus... or wore because they are one of the ones deliberately distributing them.


me personally, i don't consider 99% of the junk results i get to even be potential viruses, simply because most of them are not executable files.
go ahead and paste a virus into an mp3 file; you'll get a bit of static, or a corrupted file, or the player will just ignore it. the players don't execute the code, they just read it.

to make an exxagerated comparison.. it would be like taking a sheet of player-piano music, and drawing the plans for a bomb on them. the player piano will just read the sheet and play the piano music automatically. and when it gets to the bomb, it just keeps on playing and can't recognize it. maybe you've damaged some of the holes the piano is reading so it screws a few notes up.

if you took the sheet out of the piano and processed it differently, sure, you could make a dangerous bomb off it. but the automated piano isn't capable of doing it, and neither are most modern media players*

*to note; make sure you turn off "automatically open links in media" wherever possible.. once the player open some random website, all guarantees are off. but to-date, i've only ever noticed this in .wmv files, and i learend a long time ago to filter out *.wmv with the existing junk filters.