[muglo] Re: No Virus Protection - 10 years
- From: "Eric D." <hideme666@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <muglo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2003 09:54:19 -0400
on 9/6/03 9:48 PM, Ken at kdavis@xxxxxx wrote:
> I considered virus protection years ago, but after reading that
> MacSecrets author David Pogue felt it a waste of money, I decided to
> forego. Have used 7.5, 8.0, 8.1, 9.0, 9.x and OS 10.x.x over that time
>
> Haven't had a problem in 10 years, using 6100, 7100, G3, iBook or
> iMac, the last four of which are all presently on high speed, static
> URL DSL modem. (Course, I avoid Microsoft products or services, all
> email attachments which I suspect and anything resembling Virtual PC)
>
>
>> As a side note how many on the Muglo list have actuially gotten a
>> Mac virus (other than the Autostart Worm from a couple of years back)
>>
>> Martin Eh!
>> not innoculated
>>
One virus in 19 years of Mac use (1988 MDEF B or something like that on
System 3.2/Finder 5.3 and a Mac 512 ("Fat Mac")). I've always practiced
unsafe computing (yeah, I'm a rebel) and strongly recommend *against* Mac
users running virus checking software on a regular basis.
Sometimes it is useful to have virus checking software since it can catch
Windoze viruses on shared disks, and safely eliminate said viruses from the
shared disks. Otherwise, a Mac OS 9/8/7/6 user is a fool for running a virus
checker -- "Classic" OSes are notoriously unstable and fickle and it's not
worth adding another extension to the mix and reducing the already sketchy
OS stability (especially one as active as an antivirus software).
In OS X, well, that's a different story. Stability-wise running a well
written virus checker will add only to the CPU cycles, not to stability
problems (at least in OS X 10.2.4 and up... these versions of the OS seem to
be the most stable yet... I have a feeling Apple may have some users that
stick with 10.2 for a long time to come simply because it is so damned
stable and is fairly zippy compared to previous versions (you have to get
into the UNIX/Linux world to get this kind of stability... Windows XP Home
certainly doesn't offer this yet)).
Also, viruses in OS X will have a hell of a hard time doing a whole lot to a
computer considering any system-wide effects require the user to type in a
password (and, if you're not the computer's admin, the most a virus
infection can do is affect your own "home" directory and will leave other
people's home directories alone (unless a shared application gets infected
by the actions of an administrator user)).
Eric.
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