Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bu-cs!madd From: madd@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Jim Frost) Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d Subject: Re: ARC for Unix Message-ID: <22475@bu-cs.BU.EDU> Date: 8 May 88 19:48:09 GMT References: <9209@cisunx.UUCP> <162@falkor.UUCP> <197@ists> Reply-To: madd@bu-it.bu.edu (Jim Frost) Followup-To: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d Distribution: comp.binaries.ibm.pc Organization: Boston University Distributed Systems Group Lines: 55 In article <197@ists> mike@ists (Mike Clarkson) writes: |In article <162@falkor.UUCP>, heiby@falkor.UUCP (Ron Heiby) writes: |> Part of the reason why most |> Unix systems have a C compiler available is so that people can share |> SOURCE code and compile it for their own systems. That is why there |> is no comp.binaries.unix or comp.unix.binaries newsgroup. No. MOST of the reason why UNIX systems have a C compiler available is because the UNIX environment is a development environment, made by programmers for programming. It also happens to be convenient to have the compiler online for the language your system was written in. As for why there isn't a binaries group for UNIX, it's simply a matter of heterogenous systems. UNIX runs on more different kinds of machines than any other operating system (that I've seen, anyway). It's just not practical to post binaries. Besides, nearly all UNIX systems contain a compiler *because the system was made for program development* so you're assured high penetration when you distribute source code. On PC's, virtually no systems come with a compiler of any kind, and compilers are generally expensive. Programmers buy them, but your average guy doesn't have one. Binaries have much higher penetration. |And besides, no Unix system admin in their right mind would let a binary |off the net onto their system. It's one thing for viruses to trash peoples |PC disks, but *nobody* is going to get at my 1 gigabyte SMD drive. This is terribly closed-minded. Why haven't viruses proliferated on UNIX systems? Protection, for one thing. A program generally requires special permissions to do something really damaging to a UNIX system. This is part of why root logins shouldn't have "." in their path -- you don't want to accidentally give a user program those types of permissions. On PC's, there is seldom any kind of protection at all, and it's usually easy to get around. It doesn't take a particularly brilliant hack to write a program to trash a disk when there is nothing to stop a program from reading or writing the disk directly. Another reason is that UNIX systems vary so much that you just can't be sure of the type of hardware you're dealing with. You can't be sure what kind of removable storage a UNIX system uses. Floppy? Tape? Removable hard drive? Optical drive? Videotape? Try to write a virus program that 1) doesn't need to be superuser to have an effect and 2) understands enough different forms of hardware to be effective. It's somewhat tougher than writing a program to stomp on an unprotected hard drive. Also, the odds are very poor that anything written on removable storage on your system will find its way to another. It does happen, but not often enough to get good contamination. Would I use a binary off the net on my own UNIX system? Sure. Would I ever run it as root? Not in your lifetime. jim frost madd@bu-it.bu.edu