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On Friday, May 3, 2002, at 09:51 AM, nkporter wrote: > Good Morning, > > Questions: All the virus talk has started to worry me. > > 1. Is PIEN more or less targeted than other lists? Does any one have a > basis for comparison? > > 2. What about Mac users? Am I being too confident that the virus/worm > targets do not include Macs? And do Macintosh users on the list have > detection and correction software? > > Nancy P Nancy P. I am not going to go into a lot of techno detail here. While it is technically possible to write a virus for the listserv it is very highly unlikely that anyone would want to, also I would assume the University has a lot of other safegaurds to prevent any viruses on their mainframe computers. The listserv is not a direct transmitter of viruses. ie a virus written for the listserv would not likely work on Mac's or PC's, also viruses written for Mac's and PC's are technically unlikely to work on the listserv. The current viruses in most cases are transmitted from one PC to another via the internet, email and it's address books. Mac users have to worry only about viruses written for Mac's. There are some Mac viruses, approx. 4,000 vs 60,000+ for PC's. My business runs 9 Mac's connected to the internet 24/7 and receive probably 1,000- 2,000 emails daily, and in 17 years we have seen only one worm, this was 10 years ago. We luckily were not infected at that time and for others that were the worm was more of a nuisance than destructive. Independent Software was written and distributed within a day to remove the offending worm. There are also Nortons and other Antivirus software for the Mac's however, for a business, there are too many other operational issues to make them run effectively, ie while they protected the computer from viruses they also interfered and crashed the Operating System software. For personal use they are adequate to prevent viruses. Since nearly 90% of the viruses for PC's out there are related to a consistent lack of security of Microsoft Software we have a Company Policy that we do not permit the use of any Microsoft software on the Mac's this includes but is not limited to Microsoft Office, Entourage, Word, Excel, Internet Explorer, Outlook, and Outlook Express. This has kept us 100% virus free without using any anti virus software to date. While the Mac's cannot be directly affected for technical reasons by a virus out there that is for PCs , Mac's can be retransmitters of PC viruses to all our PC contacts quite unkowningly if we use Outlook Express Email or Microsoft Office products on our Mac's. If you want more detail or info on what alternative products we use etc. you can email me directly. So you have at least 56,000 reasons to worry less and enjoy your computer more. Don 53/4 pd+ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn