Archived viruses, was Re: Reasonable price for a complete SOL-20 system?

Mouse mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG
Sun Oct 23 20:11:24 CDT 2016


>>> [...anti-virus...]
>> [...]
> Just wondering are you guys not running AV SW on your old HW?

I am not.

But then, because of my interests, the old hardware I keep is stuff
like Sun SPARCs that are powerful enough to run a real operating
system.  These are (a) inherently invulnerable to most of the malware
(including viruses) out there because they're not x86 Windows and (b)
difficult to attack with targeted malware because they are real OSes
with real interprocess protection, file protection, and the like.

Probably not impossible; all nontrivial software has bugs.  But I have
no reason to think I'm likely to be targeted by anyone with the
resources (= skills, mostly) to effectively attack my OSes.  And I'm
familiar enough with their operation that most successful malware is
likely to be noticed relatively soon.  And if I am somehow targeted by
the likes of letter agencies, there are much weaker links in the chains
for them than the things malware attacks.  And "AV SW", even if someone
produced one that ran on what I run and I were willin gto run it,
generally isn't going to notice custom-designed malware anyway.

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