On 22 October 2016 at 21:21, Fred Cisin <ci...@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". -- Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • GMail/Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven Skype/MSN: lpro...@hotmail.com • LinkedIn/AIM/Yahoo: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) • +420 702 829 053 (ČR)
