On Wed, 6 May 1998, Ezekiel J. Krahlin wrote:
> >There is one, somewhere, but it's pretty much ignored. Unix, in general, is
> >pretty much invulnerable to virus's.
>
> Invulnerable? What intrinsic quality grants Unix this remarkable privilege?
The fact that not all code runs with root privilege, mostly; and that code
is often distributed as source, and also, that Unix users pass around
fewer executable programs in the first place. Viruses spread in
DOS/Windows because they are executed, infect a file somewhere, and then
when that file is executed, they infect other files. In Unix, when
infected code is executed, it tries to infect another file, but doesn't
have permission to write it, and so the virus can't spread. This is the
real TECHNICAL reason why Unix doesn't have viruses. The other two
reasons are cultural.
Source-distributed code is much less likely to have a virus in it, because
the virus can be seen by a human. Not that most people actually read all
the source of programs they compile, but they COULD, and if they DO, the
author of the virus will be immediately unmasked. Which would be bad for
him. Finally, Unix users just don't seem to pass things around as often
as Windows users, and of what they do pass around, less of it is
executable. Windows programs all seem to want to have their own
installers, demo programs, proprietary formats for everything which
require special players, and in general, a lot of programs and
accessories. Unix users pass around standardized data files and expect
the recipient to know how to use the data.
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