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rainman::|:| said:
Except for the fact that, if you assume a Mac virus is a hoax/misunderstanding, you'll be right. The reason we can all assume this is because it simply hasn't gone any other way, ever. If, just once, someone actually had a virus when they came in panicking like this, then you could then point this finger.

So it's like your fireman's scenario, only, the person really is mistaken, the firefighters know it, should they still hose down the building?

Uh, how does the fireman know ? (I guess I missed a part in your reasoning, sorry :confused: )

I like the comments of Makosuke (ie, (1) the skilled people will see when a virus is here, and (2) you will see it on Macrumors), of NicP ( (3) viruses are only for non-advanced people) and of yellow ( (4) shout down whoever claims he saw a virus).
Hence, advanced people would never catch a virus on their machines (see 3), which makes it impossible that they ever see it (see 1), therefore they'd never report it to Macrumors (see 2). Now, the only way they'd hear about a virus would be via non-advanced people, which they have to disregard (see 4). :eek:

I know I'm playing Extreme Devil's Advocate, but it's just my nature of being careful . I enjoy everyday the lack of viruses on OsX, and I know it's safer than other operating systems, but I don't want to fall asleep on my convictions.

The "it never happened before" does not provide much of a safety feeling to me. I'd rather have my computer unplugged "the day it happens", because all these days of not-happening will have been rather useless.

We received several Security Updates from Apple, including in the previous versions of the Holy OsX, there must be a reason. And the new alert when you download items (for example .dmg files) in Safari also appeared with a reason, I guess Apple's engineers said "woa, be careful, there's an open door here" (like for potentially malicious widgets, at their beginning), and not because they said "nah, no risk, we run with OsX".

Oh well, you get my drift anyway :rolleyes:

Arnaud.

(PS: Sorry for whoever wanted to skip the virus-debate; I just assume it's a forum, where people talk about things they consider important, and "viruses" is the topic, no ?).

(PPS: Emails and other written items are tricky, you hardly ever know the tone used by the writter. For the sake of clarity, this is not a furious answer, quite the opposite, it's a cool-with-the-breeze, let's-talk-together one :) Enough crap going on in the world already...)
 
No one is saying there isn't known and unknown exploits in Mac OS X, the same as in any other OS. There are. Plenty of them too.

What we're saying is the chances of a MR user discovering a wild virus that is heretofore unknown to anyone else in the world is astronomically slim statistically. Those of us who work in the profession are more likely to hear about it from SANS, Qualsys, McAfee, Norton, or even Apple long before an "infected" user appears to post here. Therefore, we can say with 99.999999% conviction, it's not a virus, nor does it need to be debated as such. Will there be a wild virus/malware/exploit someday? Probably. Is this one? Definitely not.

There are other threads that deal with the debate on Mac OS X and future wild exploits. We can stick with those to discuss the issue, no need to reflog that dead, dead, dead, dead horse. dead.
 
hey everyone. i just wanted to say im sorry for my stupidity. it was wrong of me to panick over such a dumb thing...i know there hasnt been a virus for the mac and there is a good chance there will never be one. im sorry i wasted everyones time...i will think before i post next time. thank you all for the help though.
 
I don't think it was a stupid question. Are you a computer professional? Do you have time to peruse forums like this, gleaning every detail out of them? Probably not to both. I think you just need to have a thick skin when you ask, because you're probably going to get screeched at (I am guilty of this). But it's not a stupid question to ask when you're not sure.
 
applecrag said:
hey everyone. i just wanted to say im sorry for my stupidity. it was wrong of me to panick over such a dumb thing...i know there hasnt been a virus for the mac and there is a good chance there will never be one. im sorry i wasted everyones time...i will think before i post next time. thank you all for the help though.

That's why we're here. To waste our time. Thank you very much for helping us! ;)
 
applecrag said:
hey everyone. i just wanted to say im sorry for my stupidity. it was wrong of me to panick over such a dumb thing...i know there hasnt been a virus for the mac and there is a good chance there will never be one. im sorry i wasted everyones time...i will think before i post next time. thank you all for the help though.

Wow, no worries about it, you haven't been wasting our time at all :)

I think everyone here was happy to bring a piece of answer (despite the strength of argumentation) and you've got an idea now about the subject, something of a crash course... I also learned some more myself, maybe I'm not the only one ?

And anyway, people annoyed by this thread wouldn't have followed it !

Arnaud :)
 
applecrag said:
hey everyone. i just wanted to say im sorry for my stupidity. it was wrong of me to panick over such a dumb thing...
Panicking isn't generally a good thing, but "there are no stupid questions, only stupid answers". (Ok, years of computer tech support have caused me to doubt my convictions a bit, but your question certainly wasn't stupid, just a little flustered.)

And just to clear up my point: As already pointed out, as of the Intel announcement there were, according to ol' Steve, about 8.25 million combined Tiger and Panther users, which represents about 66% of the userbase. There are a bit under 50K registered MacRumors members. That means, in theory, a maximum of 0.6% of up-to-date users have ever registered here, let alone post anything. That's not a very big sample, even though we're statistically a more-advanced-than-usual crowd.

In any case, there are a lot of corporate and security experts keeping an eye on Macs, so when something hits the wild it's going to get noticed rapidly, and, importantly, unless it's both a very effective virus and exploits a major security hole to install without user action (even rare on Windows), it's just not going to spread very well--unlike, say, Outlook Express users, only a small fraction of e-mail addresses point to a Mac, so it's going to be hard to spread a virus outside P2P/Warez circles.

This leads me to believe that, while a few unsuspecting users might get hit, in all likelihood the first reports of a Mac virus will be from a security house (McAfee, Symantec, etc), before it even hits any sort of noteable distribution in the wild. Either that, or someone saying "I got a weird e-mail/downloaded something suspicious, then LittleSnitch started acting up and I did a bunch of checking, and it appears I've discovered a Mac virus. [details follow]", which will then be investigated like crazy (ala the rootkit that popped up a little while ago) and reported on extensively.

It's not good to ignore the possibility, but based on the statistics, if someone says "My computer is acting weird, do I have a [the first-ever] Mac virus?", I feel fairly confident in answering "in all likelihood, no".
 
Arnaud said:
And anyway, people annoyed by this thread wouldn't have followed it !
If only that were true, but some people (not necessarily anybody reading this particular thread) seem to take perverse pleasure in reading threads that annoy them then complaining about it. These people, however, deserve to be annoyed.
 
Don't be sorry for asking for help-- that's exactly what you should do. it's just hard to help when someone jumps in, telling the advice-givers they're wrong, making us rehash something we know isn't the case. because they're smarter than us, even tho we're correct in this case, as we have always been (in saying a problem is not virus-based). Playing devil's advocate is always nice when someone's hoping for a real solution.

Welcome to geekwars.com erm MR :)
 
once again i wanted to thanks. i know you are all nice people. in a way i would consider you all "friends" because i know if i ever have a problem yall will be there to help. well...this is my last post in this thread...may God bless you all and i hope everyone here lives a happy life. thank you for all the advice given to me. i was pretty dumb to think this great OS had a virus. THANKS EVERYONE! hope to see yall around in other threads. :)
 
applecrag said:
i promise you im not a troll. i would never do anything like that to annoy anyone. listen...just ignore this thread if you dont like it. im sorry for posting anything i thought needed to be posted. but it was really shocking to see that. and after seeing how safari acted up (which it still is) i had to believe it. im sorry for everyones waste of time. i am not a troll though...i wouldnt do that to you great people....anyways thanks for the help.

I guess my sarcasm was a little too subtle; or ineffectively written. :eek: I was trying to say that you weren't a troll because you were cheerful, polite and didn't try to bait people and didn't redirect any problem back at apple. Hence, you were "the worst troll ever" because you're not trolling . . . I'm sorry. :eek:
 
Is it me or is the google logo on the attached pic of his post not accurate? Google logo has a drop shadow doesn't it always? except for these error pages- isn't that weird? I am not callin him a troll, but I think somethind is sketchy here- also, why would they still let you enter something into the bottom of that page if they are fearful of your virus or spyware?

Side note look at the tabs on his attached pic- what is up with the google.jpg link?

I am sorry you are having problems with Safari- that should be a diff. thread and we can deal with that- I have used no other browser for over a year now and love Safari. (Although it is faster on my new ibook running Tiger than on my current iMac running Panther~ Gotta get that upgrade. Just waitiing until they get all the .Mac and syncing problems worked out!
 
flyfish29 said:
Is it me or is the google logo on the attached pic of his post not accurate? Google logo has a drop shadow doesn't it always? except for these error pages- isn't that weird?
It is weird but true on all their error pages; try any nonexistant Google link and see for yourself:

http://www.google.com/nopagehere

Unlike the rest of Google's pages, these use colored text for the Google logo instead of a graphic. Wouldn't be surprised if it's a way to reduce server load and/or bandwidth from scripts or malicious code that pings at random non-existant pages at Google for one reason or another (not that Google exactly has an issue with these things, but it's the only reason I can think of).

Funny, never having hit a bad Google URL before I'd never noticed this.
 
dan-o-mac said:
Anyone else notice the first page banner ad for this thread. :eek:

LOL. Yea, I saw that too. It's normal, because what happens is these advertisement sites see the word "virus" somewhere on the page so they automatically put a banner ad there.

It's funny, I'm not saying this is the case here, but every PC user I know seems to act this way: Every freaking time they have a problem with their computer that they can explain, they just assume it's a virus. Especially when their Dells slow down because Dell is so notorious for loading sooo much crap onto their computers.
 
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