Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!dalcs!garfield!john13
From: john13@garfield.UUCP (John Russell)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Virus spread due to piracy?  Huh?
Message-ID: <4359@garfield.UUCP>
Date: 9 Jan 88 02:33:09 GMT
References: <923@rocky> <2264@crash>
Reply-To: john13@garfield.UUCP (John Russell)
Distribution: na
Organization: Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's
Lines: 27

In article <2264@crash> haitex@crash writes:
>        Of course, this virus has evidently infected some innocent
>      people as well, though if the disk needs to be booted to infect
>      a system I suspect that "innocents" have not been a big part of
>      this virus' vector.

If any one person in St. John's (city of ~100,000) managed to get hit by the
virus, I'll bet you dollars to donuts that within 3 weeks every Amiga owner
who isn't a hermit, and the main boot disks at both the dealers, and by
extension a lot of commercial software which is demoed in the stores, would
be affected.

Look, the number of bootable disks that are either PD or people's Workbenches
must be very large - over 100,000 different Workbenches just to start with
as compared with X thousand different commercial titles. If I go to someone's
house to show them how to use VT100, Shell, ARC, and all the other goodies,
I bring my Workbench; that's where they all are. I show them CheckModem by
booting off my Workbench. Most likely after they have booted once or more
from theirs. Right away, no piracy, but ZAP whoever didn't have the virus
has it now!

John
-- 
"She's sort of a 'pit baby', with interlocking jaws. We feed her on chicken 
parts."
"But baby-fighting has been outlawed, hasn't it?"
	-- Tracy Ullman describing her infant daughter to David Letterman