Date:         Wed, 9 Apr 2003 18:00:37 -0600
Reply-To:     jbrush@AROS.NET
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         Anonymous Digest <jbrush@AROS.NET>
Subject:      Re: vanagon Digest - 9 Apr 2003 - Special issue (#2003-395)
In-Reply-To:  <200304092158.h39LudIn033109@phobos.aros.net>

>Date:    Wed, 9 Apr 2003 12:55:21 -0700
>From:    Bill N <freeholder@STARBAND.NET>
>Subject: Re: virus filtering?? NVC

>Good idea.  If enough people do that, they may actually become popular
>enough that the hackers and virus writers will go to the trouble of
>writing stuff that attacks them.  That would divert attention from the
>Windows machines.  Macs are not inherently harder to hack or write a
>virus for.  They just exist in much smaller numbers, so most of the bad
>guys don't bother.

Oh yea, they are much harder to infect because they are built from the
ground up to resist such outside takeover.  The issue is not popularity.
Its in the architecture that supports the spreading of viruses. The Mac
system is well thought out and built from the ground up to be much more
difficult to infect. Same for IBMs OS/2. Windows is inherently susceptible
to viruses because of the way it coded. It is a wide open architecture,
and will forever be a lightning rod for viruses.

Virus protection is just not a priority for Microsoft. Good or bad, I
don't care, but 99.9% of hackers cannot propogate a virus through a series
of Mac or OS/2 computers. You might get a virus on your machine in the Mac
or OS/2 world, but there is no way to get it to go into the mail box and
get addresses, and open an application, and send them to other machines to
propogate the virus, or to get a wayward app to go out and damage files or
format hard drives. That is why they are called operating systems, whereas
windows is just one giant application. The virus in a Mac would not have
permissions to attack the real operating systems, whereas microsoft
windows lives and dies on letting just anyone have access to anywhere in
the system, willy nilly, without any restrictions. Again, I don't care if
that is good or bad, but it certainly is a fact.

There are not that many viruses anyway. It just seems that way because
windows applications are open to anyone, and so one virus on one machine
can turn into several million machines in very little time. Its still just
one virus, but now its all over the place. A virus that ever does enter a
Mac or OS/2 machine will die of boredom and loneliness and will not be
passed along.

John