Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!pepper!cmcmanis
From: cmcmanis%pepper@Sun.COM (Chuck McManis)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Virus spread due to piracy?  Huh?
Message-ID: <38020@sun.uucp>
Date: 6 Jan 88 18:43:34 GMT
References: <2264@crash.cts.com> <2033@gryphon.CTS.COM> <1860@s.cc.purdue.edu>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Reply-To: cmcmanis@sun.UUCP (Chuck McManis)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
Lines: 25

In article <1860@s.cc.purdue.edu> (Patrick White) writes:
|>
|>   But, the virus is *not* spread due to piracy -- is is spread via an
|>infected disk.  Is is in no way related to the act of piracy (except for
|>the coincidental fact that a pirated disk *may* be infected).
|>   It may have been first spread via a pirated disk, but that is
|>irrelevant now.
|>
|>   So, please don't make the equation: piracy == virus, and
|>   Please, take the AIDS discussion to the newsgroup it belongs.

Well, Francois point was, the Virus spreads when you boot a disk that
has the virus on it, commercial programs don't have the virus on them,
it is illegal to distribute a disk with any of the workbench files on
it (eg a bootable disk), therefore you have to boot an illegal disk to
get infected. Unfortunately, this makes the tacit assumption that the
only way for a virus to infect a disk is to have it pre-installed on the
boot blocks. When in fact, it is possible to make infection part of some
innocuous utility that installs it and reboots the machine. So it is
not possible to equate piracy to infectedness. 

And so it goes,
--Chuck McManis
uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis   BIX: cmcmanis  ARPAnet: cmcmanis@sun.com
These opinions are my own and no one elses, but you knew that didn't you.