[Ti] Off_Topic: Are there OSX viruses?

Arjan Bos arjan.bos at hetnet.nl
Sun May 23 10:23:22 PDT 2004


On 20 mei 2004, at 23:53, cheshirekat wrote:

> On Thu, May 20, 2004, the following words from David DelMonte
> ddelmonte at mac.com, emerged from a plethora of SPAM ...
>
>> Despite my questions on this yesterday, as a Mac User since 1986, I
>> don't believe I have ever had a virus.
>
> I've been a Mac user since 1993 and have also never encountered a virus
> on any of my Macs. I know many pc users who have gotten viruses as 
> little
> as 2 weeks ago.

Here's something to ponder over:

Computer viruses act in the same way as biological viruses in that they 
need a certain threshold of infected cells / machines to remain active. 
If the number of infected cells / machines drops beneath that 
threshold, the virus dies out. In other words, the virus has to find 
more cells to infect than their death rate.

So what we see here is that even if a virus exists for OS X, it needs 
to be /very/ contagious before it can spread around the world. In the 
windows world even a flu can infect a lot of machines.

Kind regards,
Arjan

---
Multiple exclamation marks are a sure sign of a sick mind

-- (Terry Pratchett, Mort)



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