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Comment by yoz-y

6 years ago

I’ve had viruses and anti viruses years before I had internet. Getting a virus was trivial in the 90’s when windows had no security and any program could do anything.

7 comments

yoz-y

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Crinus  6 years ago

Any program can do anything in modern Windows too, only special places like C:\Windows\System[32] are protected. I'm not against such protections since they can be easily overridden if needed and in day-to-day use they do not harm anyone nor affect negatively the usability of the system.

I'm not saying that we should go back to 90s entirely, we have a lot of good improvements over the years. I'm just hoping we'll tone down the "connect all the things" a bit since that is the main source of a lot of security issues.

  • yoz-y  6 years ago

    I agree that less connectivity is better for security, which is why I think rushing to IoT-everything is premature.

    However unless a computer cannot be physically connected to the internet, it must implement all of the protections it can. Just not having wifi enabled or cable disconnected is a false sense of security.

    • Crinus  6 years ago

      The question is about the "all the protections it can" part - what does that imply? Because "all the protections" can include user hostile (not just in terms of usability) misfeatures that give control to OS vendors in the name of security even though the real purpose is controlling what the users can do with their own devices (for a variety of reasons, with stuff like market segregation and forced obsolescence being among the more benign ones).

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kuzimoto  6 years ago

Your comment is a bit ambiguous. Are you saying that even retail software could be considered a virus just because of what it can do on the system? Or was virus software making it onto the machine in other ways?

  • yoz-y  6 years ago

    When I was a kid it was quite normal to pass around floppies and later CDs full of warez. These contained viruses more often than not especially since an infected machine would auto infect any writable media it got hold of.