On Wed, 19 Oct 2016, Sam O'nella wrote: an 8080/Z80 compatible CP/M virus??? Or are you talking about a virus in some sort of MS-DOS image? Or an MS-DOS boot sector virus that wrote itself onto the "boot sector" of a non-MS-DOS format?

Yes, I discovered the virus years ago. I thought I posted a cleaned version somewhere is not on my site somewhere. Bill Degnan twitter: billdeg vintagecomputer.net On Oct 20, 2016 8:17 PM, "Fred Cisin" <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:

On Sat, 22 Oct 2016, Eric Christopherson wrote: http://www.vcfed.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-34683.html includes a post: MasawVx July 30th, 2014, 08:59 PM beware!!! there are 3 viruses detected on the archive. i scanned it using f-prot windows. [Found virus] <Stoned.E (exact, not disinfectable)> C:\AARDVARK_Tape_Backups\25jul96\sydex\dos\pc-7000.td0->(TeleDisk) [Found virus] <Stoned.E (exact, not disinfectable)> C:\AARDVARK_Tape_Backups\maslin_c_d_10apr97\ddrive \sydex\dos\pc-7000.td0->(TeleDisk) [Found virus] <Stoned.E (exact, not disinfectable)> C:\AARDVARK_Tape_Backups\maslin_c_d_3oct95\ddrive\ sydex\dos\pc-7000.td0->(TeleDisk)

Any disk or archive you come upon from the early 90's should be scanned for viruses before use on a vintage machine. USe a modern PC as it's no biggie to clean old viruses that way. Scan before you use on an older machine, scan inside of ZIP files not just the zip itself. There were three viruses that I found years ago on the most-often seen Maslin archive set. Old stuff that's not an issue for modern machines. b On Wed, Oct 19, 2016 at 1:17 PM, Sam O'nella <barythrin at gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, 21 Oct 2016, Steven M Jones wrote: 1) WHY would they delete older threats from their database? You are NOT talking about a shortage of storage space! 2) Are you going to boot your machine from that image? YES. The media panic over the Michaelangelo virus revealed much about the anti-virus "industry". Let's start with the NAME. There was no name IN the virus. It was a copy of the "Stoned" virus that somebody added a nasty payload to (overwrite 100 sectors of disk). WHY was it named "Michaelangelo"? Because somebody in the "anti-virus industry" looked at a calendar to see what was special about March 6. If they had been in Texas, instead of using a KQED calendar, it would have been named "Alamo", which is a far more credible event to name a virus after. 'course it could have been completely random choice, or termination date of somebody's employment. Wikipedia says, "There is no reference to the artist in the virus, but due to the name and date of activation it is very likely that the virus writer intended Michelangelo to be referenced to the virus." Hmmmm. Named after the date (by anti-virus people); because it was named that, that confirms the accuracy of the name. Certain college administrators declared that every machine that was infected would have to be destroyed; "it is impossible to remove the virus". Have I mentioned a colleague whom they tried to terminate for removing machines from dumpsters? At UC Berkeley, agressive scanning was done in student computer labs, and "hundreds" of infected disks were found and DESTROYED. ZERO copies were retained for ANY analysis. Nor was even a count kept, nor followup to try to get students with infected disks to scan their home machines. John McAfee predicted that 5 million computers would be wiped out. The press were called in. On March 6, there were apparently DOZENS of drives wiped. Few, if any records kept to verify numbers. McAfee, as expected, took full credit, and declared that the REASON why it was dozens, instead of millions, was because his warnings were heeded. Six months later, when he took his company public, he raised 42 million dollars. He is currently a fugitive as the "prime suspect" in the murder of his neighbor in Belize (apparently NOT virus related) The "Alameda" virus, with some similarities, but no payload, was discovered at Merritt College. At sister campus, College Of Alameda, an employee who is the brother of an ant-virus author requested naming rights, and we all were glad to let him have that moment of family glory. Later, after one of our students transferred to Yale, it was discovered again, and named "Yale" virus.

I disagree. I see nothing about "a single-user OS without background processing" that would prevent a virus from infecting other programs, even including the OS, when it's run, and potentially doing something else as well. Perhaps you are using some meaning of "virus" other than "piece of software that infects other software to propagate itself"? That's the only meaning that makes any sense to me. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

On 24 October 2016 at 04:03, allison <ajp166 at verizon.net> wrote: It's been discussed and there are /claims/ they existed... https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.os.cpm/V1-zYzA6Uzg -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven Skype/MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? LinkedIn/AIM/Yahoo: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R)

From: Sean Conner Sent: Monday, October 24, 2016 2:00 PM Viruses. The Latin word _virus_ means "slime, poison", and is a collective noun, like English _milk_ or _flour_ or _sugar_. It did not form a plural at all. Furthermore, it is a neuter (neither masculine nor feminine) o-stem noun, very very odd because it ends in -us rather than -um in the nominative. -us is overwhelming the marker of a masculine o-stem, or occasionally of a masculine or feminine u-stem (whose plural would be in -us), and very rarely of a feminine o-stem, or often of a neuter s-stem (like _genus_ "kind", whose plural is _genera_ "kinds"). The -i marker of nominative plurals is restricted to those masculine and feminine o-stems; -ii is restricted further, to o-stems in which the stem vowel is preceded by -i-, so _domus, domi_ "house, houses" vs. _genius, genii_ "tutelary spirit(s) attendant on a person from birth", _Julius, Julii_ "a _gens_ (clan) name, members of the Julian _gens_", _Cornelius, Cornelii_, etc. Neuters in all ancient Indo-European languages, such as Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, end in -a (or a regular development from *-a). Presumably, if one were able to specify a plural in Latin of the word _virus_, it would by rule have to end in -a. But the speakers of Latin did not speak of discrete slimes, it all being one to them, so we will never know. The word _virus_ was used as a synonym for _venom_ as late as the early 20th Century in English, as in Burroughs's description of the deadliness of the _virus_ of Martian serpents (in _The Gods of Mars_), which confused me no end when I was reading the Martian novels for the first time at the age of 14. The modern usage derives from the medical term _filterable virus_, referring to a disease-causing agent which was unresolvable under a microscope but which could be mechanically filtered out of water, unlike a poisonous chemical dissolved in water. The word _filterable_ was dropped at some point in the literature, then electron microscopes came along which *could* resolve viruses, and we come into the modern world. More than you ever wanted to know, I'm sure. Rich Rich Alderson Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer Living Computers: Museum + Labs 2245 1st Avenue S Seattle, WA 98134 mailto:RichA at LivingComputers.org http://www.LivingComputers.org/

What Fred said. Across the board. Thank you. That was informative, authoritative, and - impressive, managing to combine this with the other two - interesting. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

On 22 October 2016 at 00:05, Steven M Jones <classiccmp at crash.com> wrote: I would certainly expect them to, yes! I used to work for AVG; I can ask if you like. But yes. Also, they include malware signatures from other systems, in case of attachments etc. which can't infect the host machine but could if passed on to one of the target OS. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven Skype/MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? LinkedIn/AIM/Yahoo: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R)

On 22 October 2016 at 18:54, Terry Stewart <terry at webweavers.co.nz> 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 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. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven Skype/MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? LinkedIn/AIM/Yahoo: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R)

On 22/10/16 20:21, Fred Cisin wrote: And "Engineering" (aka some teenager playing on their parents' Mac) decided to convince Marketing that they were wrong? And the whole scene unfolds with a tedious inevitability... ;) Cheers, -- Phil. classiccmp at philpem.me.uk http://www.philpem.me.uk/

-----Original Message----- From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Liam Proven Sent: Sunday, October 23, 2016 9:37 AM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: Archived viruses, was Re: Reasonable price for a complete SOL-20 system? On 22 October 2016 at 21:21, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> 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 Skype/MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? LinkedIn/AIM/Yahoo: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R) I still have sealed packs of installation software for very early laptops with DOS. Some of them probably have the Stoned virus on them. I used to have factory original CD install disks from Zip drives, but I threw them all out, because they were all infected with viruses. Iomega was kind enough to send me clean install disks, after I mailed them back one of the infected disks. That prompted a huge recall, back in the 90s. I remember seeing web screens in the early 2000s from viruses; one was a picture of Zeus holding a lightning bolt with the caption "Watch out for Zeus, he will kick your ass!" Another was a picture of the old Kilroy was here, but had the caption of Kiljoy was here. Kiljoy would stay on for about 5 seconds, and then gradually all the network services would be stopped and then deleted from the computer.

On Sun, 23 Oct 2016, Liam Proven wrote: I can believe that. It is not impossible to redesign an OS to be immune to boot sector viruses (especially if you aren't booting from the floppies!), and reasonably resistant to most executable file viruses. "Social engineering" will always be a threat, and virtually impossible to counter, so long as there are college administrators. But, I was explicitly referring to the time BEFORE OS-X! (<1999?) Assholes who proclaimed themselves to be "experts" kept pushing our college administration to SWITCH ALL of our our student computer labs from PC to Mac, mostly using the LIE that "Macs are immune to viruses". But, we stuck to 80-90% PCs. 1) We had a dozen Macs (mostly SE?) and 5 dozen PCs. We were getting higher incidence of viurses on the Macs than the PCs, due to student disks. 2) At the time, certain key pieces of software that we needed (such as COBOL and FORTRAN compilers) were not as readily available on Mac. 3) We had only needed a tiny handful of machines with performance. PC-DOS, Win3.1, and Win95 on 386SX were PERFECTLY suited for homework of programming classes. (small homework assignments, NOT all day production!) Think about anybody who would claim to NEED performance to write "Hello, world". And low performance created BETTER sort programs, by NOT giving the opportunity to "throw hardware at it". Even the "remedial job training for the digital sweatshop" classes (WordPervert, Lotus, dBase, Weird, Office) were well suited for a large number of 386SX machines. 4) At the time, one dozen Macs cost us as much as five dozen PCs! List prices for Macs might have been close to list prices of OEM PCs from IBM, but we were willing to run cheap generic clones, and assemble them ourselves. THAT was significant, when you have a lab FULL of students (and rarely a waiting queue). But, by about the time that OS-X came out, enough students had their own machines that we no longer needed as many. Our administration ceased having the Computer Information Systems department run the labs for Business, Math, etc., and hired IT (mostly grossly incompetents from "trade schools"). They were no longer "our labs". Machines started being down for a week or two for a bad floppy or need for Windoze reinstallation, waiting for IT to get around to them. They hired an extremely expensive outside firm ("because they are experts", and because the college "IT" had no idea how to do it!) to run a public domain test program for Y2K compatibility, and dumpstered the few machines that would have had to have their date manually set [ONCE!] after Y2K.

Lest this turn into another chapter in Mac vs DOS: - Yes, classic Macs did get viruses. But as a user of a classic Mac since 1987, I think I encountered one exactly once and my experience was not unusual. They just weren't all that common and nearly everyone ran Virex anyway until Mac OS 8 days when the platform had little or no relevance to virus authors. - You may not have had a command line, but it was perfectly possible to get under the hood. You could mess with resources in MacsBug or ResEdit, shuffle INITs and CDEVs, whatever you like. Such tools were easy to get and freely available. Whether you *liked* the resource/data fork split is a matter of preference but they certainly didn't prohibit mucking around by the knowledgeable and the structured nature of the resource fork in some ways makes it easier. - No, pretty much everything was *not* just shareware/commercial. Look at UMich or Info-Mac for a nearly total refutation of your statement. Freeware existed in quantity commensurate with the platform's penetration and Apple certainly did not discourage it in those days. I have mirrors of them which you can check out: gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/archive -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Art is either plagiarism or revolution. -- Paul Gauguin --------------------

On Mon, 24 Oct 2016, ethan at 757.org wrote: At the time of the "Michelangelo" panic, it did not appear to be in the wild. (ZERO of the "hundreds" of disks destroyed during scanning at UC Berkeley student computer labs were retained for analysis) The AV companies had copies, and they provided them to each other and to the media. It wasn't until later that copies started to leak out into the wild. In fact, we speculated that what was being found were wannabe variants, created from "Stoned", and INSPIRED by and after the panic. The ones that we finally ran into were blatently obviously simply slightly modified versions of "Stoned", but THAT aspect was never mentioned by the AV companies nor the media during the panic. Wouldn't be surprising. I knew one fellow, with journalistic ties, who partied with both groups. He threw a Comdex party at the Landmark Hotel with a lot of strange people. There were rumors at the time, that McAfee was involved in creating "Michelangelo" and the panic. But, until there is some evidence, I would give him the benefit of the doubt; and there's no way to ask him now (he's currently a murder suspect fugitive). Creation of the "Michelangelo" variants that we saw did not require any expertise, just some disassembly of "Stoned" and some trivial patching. Creation of the PANIC was an impressive feat of showmanship. THAT (creation of the "Michelangelo" panic), and Harold Hill of Meredith Wilson's "Music Man" ("You've got TROUBLE, right here in River City") really helped train a lot of people how to make money off of Y2K. The college probably spent more than $300 average PER MACHINE testing and preparing for Y2K! (Since there were friends and relatives of upper officials working with the contractors, exact amounts spent were not clearly revealed) -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

It was thus said that the Great ethan at 757.org once stated: Memory protection does not protect you from a virus. It can protect other running processes from being modified (if they belong to other users they can't be infected at all; other processes owned by the user it's possible, depending upon the system [1]) but that's it. -spc [1] I would say "yes" in general---you do have to be able to debug your own programs and thus, intercept and modify a running process (at the very least, to set a break point).

On 23 October 2016 at 19:12, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote: Ahh, well, that's entirely fair then. That's... well, yeah, asshattish. Anyone who knew the Mac knew of viruses. They were a real problem. Can easily believe that. [Nod] Or they were seriously expensive. Win 3.1 on a 386SX, no problem. Win 95 on a 386SX: sheesh. You'd need the patience of a saint. Early in my time at PC Pro magazine, I actually benchmarked 95 versus Wfwg on a 386 with 4MB. We had to hunt for a PC that old, and borrowed it from a friend of the editor. Amazingly, app loading was a hair quicker -- 95 had smarter cache management. But it wasn't fast. True. [Chuckle] [Guffaw] Yep, guess so! Oh my yes. And they were, $ for $, significantly more expensive in the UK than Stateside. :-( C21 IT. Everyone raves about it. I'm considered a weirdo for saying some things were better before. Well, TBH, I did some of that consultancy myself. I didn't dump any kit though. Some clients took the chance to refresh their whole office, and I made sure the old boxes were re-homed or given to charity. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven Skype/MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? LinkedIn/AIM/Yahoo: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R)

Hi, very interesting machine. I've always been a fan of hp-ux... How much would you think it's going to cost, to ship to Italy ? ( near Milan ) Alessandro -----Messaggio originale----- Da: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] Per conto di Richard Inviato: gioved? 3 novembre 2016 15:38 A: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Oggetto: What interest in a Hi to everyone, I have a PrecisionBook laptop made by RDI Computer Corporation in Carlsbad, CA. It's a Model #H16-12-8-256L2S with a 4050mAHr battery, a 6.5Gb hard drive with data and a 4.0Gb hard drive with HP-UX 10.2. I also have the charger for it. It works but I have no documentation at all. Is it of any use to anyone or should I dump it? Richard Bristol, UK

On Thu, Nov 3, 2016 at 9:45 AM, Norman Jaffe <turing at shaw.ca> wrote: Well, if no one else can afford shipping :-) I'm in Seattle and would definitely be interested. I used HP-UX when I was training people on Boeing's aircraft simulator software. -- Ian S. King, MSIS, MSCS, Ph.D. Candidate The Information School <http://ischool.uw.edu> Dissertation: "Why the Conversation Mattered: Constructing a Sociotechnical Narrative Through a Design Lens Archivist, Voices From the Rwanda Tribunal <http://tribunalvoices.org> Value Sensitive Design Research Lab <http://vsdesign.org> University of Washington There is an old Vulcan saying: "Only Nixon could go to China."

Wow! That amount of interest wasn't expected at all. I have a best offer so far of ?100 (112? / $124) plus shipping. The cheapest shipping to the USA would be $50, into Europe would be 18? for the parcel which weighs in at 8kg / 18lb. All at your risk. I don't want to put it on ebay, I'd much rather it went to a serious user on here but I do want to expand my collection of 80-BUS (NASCOM/GEMINI) parts so anything I get for the PrecisionBook would help. Let me know if you are still interested. Richard On 03/11/2016 14:37, Richard wrote:

$50 to U.S. would likely be the same for Canada, so I'm still interested... but let's try not to make this into a 'bidding war'. From: "Richard" <mole42 at gmail.com> To: "cctalk" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Friday, November 4, 2016 4:26:14 AM Subject: Re: What interest in a Wow! That amount of interest wasn't expected at all. I have a best offer so far of ?100 (112? / $124) plus shipping. The cheapest shipping to the USA would be $50, into Europe would be 18? for the parcel which weighs in at 8kg / 18lb. All at your risk. I don't want to put it on ebay, I'd much rather it went to a serious user on here but I do want to expand my collection of 80-BUS (NASCOM/GEMINI) parts so anything I get for the PrecisionBook would help. Let me know if you are still interested. Richard On 03/11/2016 14:37, Richard wrote:

I love older machines and had to part with several SGI and HP systems in order to 'downsize' enough to fit in my apartment, so an HP-UX laptop is very desirable. Unfortunately, I don't have access to 80-BUS parts, so my offer would be for cash; I'll make my offer outside this forum. From: "Richard Smith" <richard.smith at mewgull.com> To: "cctalk" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Friday, November 4, 2016 7:10:22 AM Subject: Re: What interest in a I'm much less interested in a bidding war that most people would be. The computer is sitting on my shelf, it isn't being used, it just takes up space. I'm not a dealer in old computers, I don't rely on any profit to feed my family. I would prefer that this machine went to someone who would use it. Shipping to Canada would be CAN$64 I would be far happier to swap it for 80-BUS parts than for cash. Richard On 04/11/2016 13:12, Norman Jaffe wrote:

On 22 October 2016 at 19:36, Ali <cctalk at ibm51xx.net> wrote: Well, no. My vintage machines are, TBH, rarely powered on and I'm considering getting rid of almost everything. I don't have my own house any more. Most of the collection had gone already. My vague plan is to mostly restrict it to portable/battery-powered kit from now on -- as they're much smaller! For things like Cambridge Z88, Psions, Amstrad NC100, Sinclair Spectrums etc., it's academic. I'm not aware of either malware or antimalware for them. Most don't support disk drives anyway -- or as in the Spectrum, there were dozens and no standard, so software couldn't adapt and none were so dominant as to be worth targeting. I don't have more than 1-2 vintage machines able to run DOS or Windows and mostly wouldn't want to! The Macs should do, yes -- but then most of those are going, I'm afraid. I don't have the space any more, and when I did, I never used them except when fixing them up to sell. :-( -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven Skype/MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? LinkedIn/AIM/Yahoo: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R)

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. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

Lovely. I'm sure the sloping wood-(veener) sided case design of the Dick Smith System 80 was inspired by the SOL. http://www.classic-computers.org.nz/system-80/hardware_s80-mk1-front-800.jpg Terry (Tez)

It could have been. I think EACA were looking at something people could just pick up, take home and use without extra cables and "other bits". This is why as well as a built-in tape deck there was also and RF modulator, so it could be plugged straight into a (or "the) home TV. Terry (Tez)