Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!rutgers!rochester!pt.cs.cmu.edu!andrew.cmu.edu!bader+
From: bader+@andrew.cmu.edu (Miles Bader)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Enhancer 1.3 package
Message-ID: <0XQTTpy00UkaICgRhk@andrew.cmu.edu>
Date: 4 Nov 88 18:33:25 GMT
References: <12839@eecae.UUCP> <6531@xanth.cs.odu.edu> <622@quintus.UUCP>,
	<5053@thorin.cs.unc.edu>
Organization: Carnegie Mellon
Lines: 19
In-Reply-To: <5053@thorin.cs.unc.edu>

bell@unc.cs.unc.edu (Andrew Bell) writes:
> In article <622@quintus.UUCP> pds@quintus.UUCP (Peter Schachte) writes:
> >So why not compromise for the 3000:  EEPROMs?  The kernel would be
> >distributed on disk, and you'd run a special program to load it into
> >the EEPROMs, but thereafter you wouldn't need the floppy to power up.
> 
> Aren't you going to have incredibly horrible virus problems if you do this
> sort of thing?  A malicious program could infect your machine to the point
> that you couldn't disinfect it yourself.

You could make the eeproms have a write lock that get's flipped to
"writeable" only by some button you use (in conjunction with power
up) to load new releases.  Since it's very, very, very unlikely that
a "kickstart" type disk would become infected (because it's always
used before there's any other software loaded, so there can't be any
viruses waiting around), this would basically make a virus in your
kernel impossible.

-Miles