Benjamin Geer on Fri, 12 May 2000 06:43:28 +0200 (CEST) |
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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 # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net