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From: jalden@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Joshua M. Alden)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Im not quite dead yet (re: nVIR infection)
Message-ID: <13852@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU>
Date: 8 Jun 89 19:36:04 GMT
References: <197@wehi.dn.mu.oz> <2047@internal.Apple.COM> <744@loligo.cc.fsu.edu>
Sender: news@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU
Reply-To: jalden@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Joshua M. Alden)
Organization: Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
Lines: 35

In article <744@loligo.cc.fsu.edu> pepke@loligo.UUCP (Eric Pepke) writes:
>In article <197@wehi.dn.mu.oz> jon@wehi.dn.mu.oz (Jon Eaves) writes:
>> 1) nVIR is NON-malicious. It only infects applications, the system and 
>> finder.
>
>We had an attack of some strain of nVIR the other week.  NCSA Image, when
>infected, crashed 100% of the time.
>
>Sounds pretty malicious to me.
>
>Eric Pepke                                     INTERNET: pepke@gw.scri.fsu.edu
>Supercomputer Computations Research Institute  MFENET:   pepke@fsu
>Florida State University                       SPAN:     scri::pepke
>Tallahassee, FL 32306-4052                     BITNET:   pepke@fsu
>
>Disclaimer: My employers seldom even LISTEN to my opinions.
>Meta-disclaimer: Any society that needs disclaimers has too many lawyers.

    The point, Eric, is that the virus is not deliberately designed to
do something like erase a disk.  No Macintosh viruses that I know of
right now are deliberately designed to cause general destruction or
widespread damage or non-function (please correct me if you know
otherwise.)

    If a car rolls down a hill and kills a family at a picnic, they're
dead, but the car was not malicious, nor the parking break because it
failed, nor the driver because he forgot to set it, etc, etc.
'Malicious,' when talking about viruses, refers to a virus that
intentionally erases all disks after the 100th startup, or searches for
particular programs to destroy.

/---------------------------------------------------+--------------------------\
|                   Josh Alden                      | HB 48, Dartmouth College |
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