[109660] in Cypherpunks
RE: Virus, Media and Open systems
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Walter Burton)
Wed Mar 31 22:02:41 1999
From: Walter Burton <wburton@pipestream.com>
To: chatski carl <chatski@gl.umbc.edu>, cypherpunks@toad.com
Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 21:33:36 -0500
Reply-To: Walter Burton <wburton@pipestream.com>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: chatski carl [mailto:chatski@gl.umbc.edu]
> Sent: Wednesday, March 31, 1999 3:18 PM
> To: cypherpunks@toad.com
> Subject: Virus, Media and Open systems
>
>
>
> What do people think about the fact that virtually no media
> reports on melissa mentioned that only Microsoft products were
> susceptable to this virus??
From what I've seen of the corporate IT world, my guess is most people
nowadays (media hacks especially) aren't aware that anyone else even
*MAKES* word processing software. Wordperfect tanked years ago. I
mean, it's still around, but nobody actually *uses* it. MS Word has
become (for better or worse) a defacto standard in the "real world."
> What about the point of view that in the interconnected
> world, one should not use proprietary software, only open
> source software :)
I don't see how that could have really helped in this situation. My
secretary's not gonna hack the source code of her word processing
program to protect against some macro virus.
If you're suggesting that open source software would've been patched
quicker, well in general I agree. But this specific case doesn't lend
itself to that argument. There is no magic "patch" for Word macro
viruses. You have to disable macro execution. I guess you could
dumb-down the script environment, but that's no solution.
\\/alter
