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

[Liam Proven]

On 22 October 2016 at 21:21, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 22 Oct 2016, Liam Proven wrote:
>>
>> :-)
>> A good 5-6y or more ago I restored an old Mac Classic II a friend gave
>> me. I got it dual-booting System 6.0.8 and 7.1 and had both of them
>> online via an Asanté EtherSCSI interface. To do this involved
>> downloading a lot of ancient Mac software on my B&W G3 under OS X, and
>> putting it on Zip disk, then putting the Zip media in the Classic II's
>> SCSI Zip drive.
>> One of the Systems on the Classic was repurposed from another Mac and
>> included some ancient Mac antivirus program -- I forget which one,
>> maybe Disinfectant. I was glad of it, though, as it triggered and
>> found one of my downloads was infected with an equally ancient Mac
>> virus.
>
>
> But "Marketing" convinced the public that Macs were IMMUNE TO GETTING
> VIRUSES!    :-)


No no no -- hang on.

Classic MacOS was appallingly vulnerable. It had no user-account
security at all, and every disk had a tiny bit of code read and
executed when it was mounted, AIUI, to customise the icon etc.

Personal computer viruses more or less originated on the classic Mac.

But OS X is effectively immune to all of them, and AFAIK there are no
true viruses for OS X even now. But you need to use a narrow strict
definition. There are many Trojans, but they need to social-engineer
or trick the user into agreeing, clicking OK and entering a password.
That's not a virus if it requires user interaction to propagate.

Ditto there are sploits and worms that attack OS X servers, but since
OS X servers are fairly rare, so are the sploits. And OS X has a
much-modified FreeBSD userland underneath it, and some of those
componets are vulnerable too.

So it's a bit of a hair-splitting argument.

What it is _not_ is plain marketing lies, such as "Windows NT is a microkernel".

-- 
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