ROBERT KING wrote something original about Virus Hysteria


RK> It's sad, the level of ignorance present in the OS/2 community.
RK> You show me a stupid basic application that relies on the operating
RK> system to do any and all I/O. Virusi by-pass the operating system
RK> entirely. Get it? Good.

So, you think that virus writers are smart enough to write one single
bit of code that can detect and operate every single MFM, RLL, ESDI,
SCSI, SCSI-2, IDE, EIDE hard disk controller ever made?  (in only a
few hundred bytes, even?)  I think that you have an extremely
exaggerated opinion of their abilities.  Even the companies designing
the chips in some of these controllers have trouble doing this WITH
THEIR OWN CHIPS.
Like most dos programs, viruses generally access hard disks through
BIOS or DOS services using an interrupt instruction. (including 25h,
26h: absolute disk read and write, and 13h: BIOS disk services).  Trying
to use either of these to change the hard disk in a dos session in OS/2
DOES NOT AFFECT the hard disk.  OS/2 terminates the program attempting
it.  DOS programs which attempt to access I/O ports that they are not
specifically permitted to die a similar death.  Try to change the global
descriptor table?  Nope.  Set the processor back to real mode?  Sorry,
you can't do that either.  The only time viruses can entirely bypass the
OS/2 operating system is when you boot DOS instead of OS/2.
 Get it?  Good.

BTW, the language of the conference is English, not latin, and in
English, the plural of 'virus' is 'viruses'.

 * KWQ/2 1.2g * "Taglines: steal all you want.  We'll make more."


--- QScan v1.14b / 01-0093