Spectre & Meltdown

[Fred Cisin]

>> Although reduction in sneaker-net has virtually eliminated boot-sector 
>> spread.
On Sun, 14 Jan 2018, Tapley, Mark wrote:

> I never made that connection before! Glad you toed me.

There had already been some reduction.  The first PCs with a hard disk 
would always attempt to boot from floppy first.  Once it was possible to 
rearrange the boot sequence to try the hard disk first, we had a 
substantial reduction in boot sector virus incidents.

MOST boot sector virus infections on hard disks could be trivially solved 
by the [undocumented at that time] /MBR option of FDISK.COM


The "Alameda" Virus was first discovered [and thoroughly analyzed] in our 
("Merritt College") lab. 
(We had a good idea of who might have been the author)
One of the student workers at our sister college, "College Of Alameda", 
who was brother of a guy who wrote a book on the subject, asked nicely for 
naming rights.

A few years later, the administration informed me that they had waived the 
computer literacy requirement for a student transferring to Yale.  A few 
months later, Yale "discovered" it, and named it "Yale Virus".