23 Oct
2016
23 Oct
'16
7:36 a.m.
On 22 October 2016 at 21:21, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
On Sat, 22 Oct 2016, Liam Proven wrote:
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: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven
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Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R)
:-)
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 Asant? 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! :-)