Quote:
Originally Posted by jonnynitro138
If its not a threat how can I immunize my system of the 40,000 plus files that won't protect? To me that's a very big number for a threat to come into. -- Jonnynitro138
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Yep, every car that drives down the highway next to your house
"could be a potential threat" that you
"must protect against." Uh huh.
Forget the oh-so-tempting "biological metaphors." Your computer system
is not biological, and therefore it
is not vulnerable to 'virues.'"
The analogy of "a virus"
does not hold with regard to computer software, and here is why.
Let's say you are walking down the street, just minding your own business, and you just
happen by pure-chance to inhale a copy of the Ebola Virus that just happens to be wandering in the wind. Biology being the ill-designed first-generation system that it is,
that rogue RNA strand
will happily clone itself into yours, thereby quickly (and very gruesomely ...) killing you
unless your ever-vigilant immune system manages to detect it and destroy it before being overwhelmed.
Computer systems, on the other hand, were designed in an environment that was surrounded by very-bored MIT college students with plenty of time on their hands.
From the very beginning, they were designed such that
not every thing that "any ol' piece of software" asked the computer to do would actually be obeyed by that computer. Instead, operating systems were designed
to ask the following question, with the following result.
"40,000 plus files?" Heck, there could just-as-well be millions. The secret, on Linux and Windows and everyplace else, is that you
must not wear your
SuperDuperMan suit
anywhere that you positively don't have to.
