🚀 go-pugleaf

jg3o+@andrew.cmu.edu (Jason Ari Goldstein) says:

>I don't know much about Macs (Being a PC person) but if I understand
>correctly every time the disk is inserted the they Virus is sread to
>the disk.  Well, why doesn't someone write an innoculation directly
>based on the virus itself.  Everytime a disk is inserted in the drive
>it would be checked for infection if so it would remove WDEF if not it
>would then 'innoculate the disk' with itself.  Eventually, WDEF would
>be wiped out the same way it was spread initially.
>
>The only problem with this is that it is a virus also, but with the
>proper prompts (allowing the user the choice of being innoculated) I
>don't think this would be a problem.  I know I would mind not ever
>being infected by a virus that kills other viruses.
>
>In the mean time, about 75% of the time I in a cluster I remove WDEF A
>or B from either a hard disk or someone elses floppies.

The big problem with this is that since the WDEF-removal code is itself
a virus, it stands a big chance of causing the same problems as any other
virus -- crashes due to poorly written code.

There have been no viruses written to date for the Macintosh which
deliberately cause damage to the system (*).  All of the problems caused
by existing viruses are in fact the result of bugs in the viruses, which
causes interference with other programs under certain circumstances.
Since the above-mentioned inoculation program would be a virus itself,
it might well cause problems itself.

(*)  Mosaic and Font Finder are not viruses (they do not replicate), but
     are instead "trojan horses" -- destructive code hidden within an
     innocuous-seeming program.

- -------
Christopher Tate                       |
cxt105@psuvm.bitnet                    | nobody, not even the rain,
cxt105@psuvm.psu.edu                   |   has such small hands.
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