Benjamin Geer on Thu, 11 May 2000 21:59:47 +0200 (CEST)


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[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> Viruses on the Internet: Monoculture breeds parasites


On Wed, May 10, 2000 at 05:19:37PM -0400, Felix Stalder wrote:
> Scott Culp, from the Microsoft Security Response Center was, in a sense,
> right when he told the same newspaper: "This is a general issue, not a
> Microsoft issue. You can write a virus for any platform."

This is simply false.  If your mail program doesn't run executables
that it receives, there is no way that anyone can write a virus for
your platform.

My home computer is running Linux; my mail-retrieval utility is
Fetchmail, and my mail agent is Mutt.  These programs simply do not
run executables that they receive.  There is no reason that they
should.  If someone sends me a program, and I want to run it, I'm
perfectly capable of doing that myself.  It's completely absurd for a
mail agent to make that decision for the user.

There are no viruses for Linux because Microsoft Outlook doesn't run
on Linux.  It's that simple.

Benjamin Geer
Software Engineer



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