Virus on Macintosh

[anthlover]

It is my understatnding that mostly Macs can be Carriers and Recipients of Office virus without much I'll effect on the Mac.

I know there are some Marcro virus that can make Office unruly....

At the moment the main benefit of AntiViral seems not to spread Office Virus around.

----

[vickishome]

9 years on Macs
5 Mac computers
9 years connected online (BBSes/Internet)
9 years running MSWord

0 Viruses.

However, I have received a huge number of emails with Windows viruses attached. Just these last two weeks, I received over 100 emails with one virus and around 60 emails with another virus. My daughter, on a Windows computer, has a constant problem with viruses. She has one virus that's contained, but cannot be removed without wiping everything clean and starting over. My husband, also on a Windows computer, updates his antivirus files every day, scans for viruses every day, and has virus protection on his emails/downloads/new files. He still gets viruses every now and then.

My other daughter who's running my old G3 has -0- problems with viruses. And, of course, I have had -0- problems with viruses on my G4 -- or any of my Macs for that matter.

I'm sure Mac viruses exist, but I've never encountered one. And it's nothing like the nonrelenting onslaught of viruses that Windows users have to endure. Windows is so full of security holes that it's almost criminal that they allow the product to be sold to the public. I sometimes sit and wonder how Windows users put up with MS's security problems. I guess they've become so used to it that they've become numb each time a new viruses infects them. I do all I can to request that Windows users keep my email address out of their address books because I get so tired of receiving so many useless virus laden emails that their Windows computers spit out on a constant basis, but it's hard to convince them that having viruses is not (or should not be) a normal part of computing.

[Jacques]

It's interesting to note, virus as myth on the Macintosh has a one-twelve vote count - and right behind it is IE as a virus coming in at a one-ten count!

Jacques

[Mikey-San]

I HAVE to be the dork here:

http://www.bartleby.com/61/81/V0118100.html

The plural of "virus" is "viruses". "Virii" is neither a word nor a proper Latin root. (The root, "vir" has a nominative plural, "viri". More than that, who says this in conversation? Your doctor calls them viruses, right? Mine does. :-))

I'm really, really sorry about this post. One part of my brain is telling me to stop, but the one with the gun is telling that part to sit down and keep its mouth shut.

[tlarkin]

Quote: Originally posted by Mikey-San I HAVE to be the dork here: http://www.bartleby.com/61/81/V0118100.html The plural of "virus" is "viruses". "Virii" is neither a word nor a proper Latin root. (The root, "vir" has a nominative plural, "viri". More than that, who says this in conversation? Your doctor calls them viruses, right? Mine does. :-)) I'm really, really sorry about this post. One part of my brain is telling me to stop, but the one with the gun is telling that part to sit down and keep its mouth shut.

Hahahaha Dork!

jes kiddin

I would like to say also I have found IE to be less buggy than safari. I still cannot pull up some of my companies internal sites on safari, however still works just fine with IE.

I do have a few macintosh viruses on disk somewhere an old co-worker of mine gave me. He said you never know when you might need these. He was kinda weird, you know the type of guy who probably kept 1000 rounds of ammunition in his house. However I have never looked at them, and I don't think they will infect anything above OS 8.5.1. I do have an old performa 6400 CD at home running OS 8.1 (its a 150 MHz with 48 MB of RAM - she's a haus) that I could toss the viruses on and see what they do. However, I am too lazy to pull the old computer out of the closet and then try to find and old school mac vga adapter to vga.

[yellow]

Quote: Originally posted by Mikey-San The plural of "virus" is "viruses". "Virii" is neither a word nor a proper Latin root.

Thank [insert non-existent-deity-here] someone said it. I cringe everytime I read/hear virii on some professional board/mail-list.

[Mikey-San]

You cringe, too? My brother. (-:

Thing is, tlarkin, IE 5/Mac's rendering engine isn't all that bad, but it's SLOW, like the rest of the app. I won't dig into IE's other problems. I'd rather go back to Reason than be here that long.

Heh.

I'm -1, Flamebait today!

[java_guy]

I had a virus waaay back when I was running on a Mac Classic. I believe it was a nVir variant as well. Anyway, Disinfectant took care of the little critter.

I'm sure if we start seeing a proliferation of virii, more anti-virus programs will follow. Until then, the best thing to do is to practice "safe" computing.

[tlarkin]

I personally like mozilla on my PC, I think its the best browser I have used in a long time. Great cookie manager, great pop up killer, its totally free and its for the most part pretty fast. Sometimes it will run chunky but not all the time. On my G4 here at work I will admit IE runs slow at times, but so does safari, and camino. I think safari will be a great web browser once apple gets all the bugs worked out of it. I still can only access my companies internal sites using IE on my macintosh computers. I have really no idea why this is, since I am not the network administrator I am just a lowly technician.

[vickishome]

I use Safari 99.9% of the time. On the occassions in which a webpage won't load with Safari, I open up IE. IE seems so old and clunky and S-L-O-W after I've used Safari for so long, but until Apple works out the kinks in Safari, I have no choice but to keep IE around.

I have managed to load some of the webpages that Safari normally has problems with by changing my cookie settings. I normally run with "only from sites you navigate to," but when Safari has problems, I find changing it to "always" works more times than not. This is especially true with banking/order type places. It seems they are using cookies from other sources, and you cannot proceed without them.

[nkuvu]

Quote: Originally posted by Mikey-San The plural of "virus" is "viruses". "Virii" is neither a word nor a proper Latin root. (The root, "vir" has a nominative plural, "viri". More than that, who says this in conversation? Your doctor calls them viruses, right? Mine does. :-))

From the Jargon Lexicon (Chapter 1):

Quote: Hackers, as a rule, love wordplay and are very conscious and inventive in their use of language. These traits seem to be common in young children, but the conformity-enforcing machine we are pleased to call an educational system bludgeons them out of most of us before adolescence. Thus, linguistic invention in most subcultures of the modern West is a halting and largely unconscious process. Hackers, by contrast, regard slang formation and use as a game to be played for conscious pleasure. Their inventions thus display an almost unique combination of the neotenous enjoyment of language-play with the discrimination of educated and powerful intelligence.

I tend to use the word virii, even though I know it's not really a word, and I know it's not the proper pluralization for virus. I also use words like wedgitude and lossage in day to day conversation. (Note that I tend to avoid these terms when in formal conversations)

While I realize that many people use the word virii thinking it is correct, there should also be a realization that some of us use it with humor in mind.

But of course you're totally right, and I just wanted to toss in my two copper plated zinc bits.

[tlarkin]

I like the word 'awesomest' its totally rad

[Mikey-San]

Sorry, but that hacker/jargon thing is justification to me. You might use it that way, but 99% of people who do actually think it's correct. I've seen a lot of professional publications use it.

What happened to editors? It seems like they're going out of style or something. (-:

[nkuvu]

It's all about context, I think.

If I'm posting to a forum, or writing an email to a list, I tend to be very informal. But in professional publications (online or in print) I only use real words. I'd never say virii if I was writing something professionally.

I'll also be happy to agree that a majority of the time, it's used in such a manner that it's obvious that the person using it thinks it to be correct. As long as you recognize that there is a small percentage of us who still use it (and know it to be wrong) for humor value, I'm satisfied.

It's a similar situation to fall-through in a switch statement. Most of the time it's unintended, but there are uses for it. Um, I can provide examples for any non-programmers who don't know what I'm talking about (and are interested).

[darndog]

Never been infected, I used to run the freeware Disinfectant and kept myself up to date (read Mac mag's instead of working), so did things like creating the graphics accelerator folder (so the virus wouldn't install), and turned off Quicktime autoplay (still do that now in OS X), This was all in a prepress dept so we got a lot of disks...


First Mac was the just released Quadra 950 with a 21" Monitor, after talking the boss out of buying the 700 because we *really* needed the extra horsepower, 20, yes, 20Mb Ram, ahh the old memories of Photoshopping an image spread across four 44Mb Syquest disks, ahh Syquest disks, How I hated those bastardo things...)


...and I've been using Mac's ever since.. I just love them...

dD

[Jacques]

IE as a virus has taken the lead in the polls!

ha

[tlarkin]

How is IE a virus? It does not attack the system. Just playing devil's advocate here :}

[Jacques]

Oh no!

I thought after that great troubleshooting wrap-up, you surely would be one of the very last to be infected by the IE that is virii (spelling intended).

:)

IE attacks settings, doesn't that count against it for something?

Now with Safari, Mozilla and More Internet - there's really no reason I can imagine to even have that bugger installed.

I haven't erased it, but I won't install it if Panther doesn't!

Jacques

[mervTormel]

Quote: Originally posted by Jacques I haven't erased it, but I won't install it if Panther doesn't!

it does.

[macmath]

Deleting IE is the first thing I do after a fresh install of the OS (immediately after going through the groovy OS setup and registration procedure).

I'm not someone who goes around wearing a T-Shirt bashing Microsoft, but I refuse to reward or promote them by running anything of theirs on a computer of mine. Well, that's not quite true, as I don't trash "Times New Roman" or the other 'Microsoft Typography' fonts installed on my computer, but I do make a point not to use them.

I do not approve of their business practices, or their sloppy, often bloated software, which often seems to ignore security concerns. I recall Word documents grabbing snippets from your drive in the past and saving them within the (non-readable portions of) documents [probably an accident, but a gross error none-the-less], and of IE sending information back to MS.

Live Free or Die! ;-)

PS: It is fun, occasionally, to get carried away on some tangent and say things like this, or "Give me liberty or give me death!"