[LINK] Rampaging bugbear

[Viveka]

At 8:11 PM +1000 4/10/02, Malcolm Miles wrote:
>On Fri, 04 Oct 2002 12:23:28 +1000, you wrote:
>
>>Given that Windows users have put up with this badboy behaviour on 
>>their PCs for
>>years, one wonders when
>>
>>(a) Microsoft is going to close off the myriad and multiple paths through its
>>     buggy and dangerous operating system in order to stop once and 
>>for all these
>>     malicious attacks;
>
>Microsoft released a patch for the security hole that both bugbear and
>klez exploit back in May 2001. Current versions of IE do not have this
>security hole.

That's good (although clearly many people are using old software, 
given how many copies of this virus I'm being sent every day now), 
and it's evidence for the argument that it's not incompetence on the 
part of MS that causes all these MS viruses. So if it's not 
incompetence, what is it?

One argument is that it's a larger problem  - monocultures are just 
bad evolutionary strategy, in technology just like life. Some 
supporting evidence for this hypothesis is that if you remove a link 
in the MS-monoculture chain, for example by deleting Outlook or IE, 
virus resistance improves. Unfortunately, some useful applications 
rely on the monoculture as well... in evolution, i believe this is 
called overspecialisation.

An argument against the monoculture theory is the Mac. I've been 
working with Macs since 1991, and have yet to see a single virus on a 
Mac in the wild. I have met people who claim to have seen one, but 
no-one who's ever lost any data to one. The Mac OS is a very 
standardised and homogenous environment. Or is it? Until OS X, there 
was no standard mailer for Mac; people used all kinds of things. 
Probably Eudora mostly, but also Claris Email, Mailsmith, Netscape 
Mail, Green... Since email is the major vector for viruses these 
days, perhaps we can blame the whole thing on Outlook. And maybe now 
that Macs come with Mail.app built in, we'll start seeing Mail.app 
viruses.

There is an argument that there are practically no Mac viruses 
because there are no Mac developers, of any kind of software. This 
doesn't quite hold up; Mac market share is minute compared to 
Windows, but there is still *a lot* of Mac software available. Every 
application category is covered, except viruses.

Perhaps it's a boundary condition - there's some kind of critical 
mass of users, after which the Mac platform will be suddenly flooded 
with viruses too. This could be tested thus:

1. Find out when the number of wild viruses on Windows reached 10
2. How many Windows users were there then?
3. Wait until there are ten Mac viruses. Write a couple if necessary ;)
4. How many Mac users are there at that point?

Anyone feel like a googlefest?

V.
-- 
Viveka Weiley, Karmanaut.
{ http://www.karmanaut.com | http://www.planet-earth.org
    http://www.MacWeb3D.org | http://sydney.siggraph.org.au }
Hypermedia, virtual worlds, human interface, truth, beauty.
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