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If Windows viruses are increasing at the rate of 11,500 a year, someone needs to sound an alarm. I don't hear one going off.
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Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983
T h e R o a d L e s s T r a v e l e d
11,500 new viruses a year, and all for Windows. Then how could anyone 'require' a Windows PC?
June 16, 2004
By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, The Post-Standard
Apple's OS X computers lead a charmed life. Sophos, a company that tracks "malware" -- software designed to hurt personal computers -- says it found 959 new viruses in May. Not a single one affected OS X. They were all Windows viruses.
Most Windows users don't get the point. The only argument offered on the Windows side is that there aren't enough Mac OS X computers out there to worry about, so that's why virus writers ignore Mac OS X.. According to this oddball logic, 27 million Mac OS X computers don't count.
Humbug. That's a lot of computers. Companies that sell legitimate software for Mac OS X are doing quite well, thank you. The market for Mac OS X software is strong, and Apple gets an inordinate amount of publicity from its design and engineering. Not even a moron who writes viruses could claim that he didn't know about Apple's OS X.
Reality is a sad story. Virus writers target Windows PCs because Windows has no security. Microsoft has had month after month of opportunities to fix the security lapses in Windows but has failed to do so. The company's so-called Windows Update has tuned out to be a nightmare for many Windows users. Before I switched full-time to OS X, I spent weeks trying to get the Windows Update system to work reliably enough to install what Microsoft said were critical patches for Windows 2000. It simply refused to work half the time.
We don't need calculators to see the problem here. When Sophos reports finding 959 new viruses in a single month -- all affecting only one kind of computer, the Windows PC -- it's not telling us that there were 959 new viruses for Windows; it's only saying that it located that many. How many more Windows viruses went unreported? No one knows.
This is scary. If Windows viruses are increasing at the rate of 11,500 a year, someone needs to sound an alarm. I don't hear one going off.
The crazy part about all this is that it's a Windows problem. And Windows is just one operating system out of many. There are a zillion varieties of Linux -- maybe two or three dozen important ones -- and there are Unix operating systems, too. (The main branches of Unix are like the aunts and uncles of the many cousins that make up the Linux families. They're so interrelated that you could run Unix while assuming you're running Linux. Or vice versa.)
And, of course, there are the Macintosh operating systems. One of them, called Mac OS, is the solid, safe and old-fashioned operating system Steve Jobs and his small team of programmers came up with in the early 1980s. The other one, based on a version of Unix, is dramatically new; it's Mac OS X. Steve Jobs and his crew developed that version, too, adding unique Apple graphics abilities and other features to its solid Unix underpinnings.
The many versions of Linux ignore Windows viruses. Unix, the operating system that built the Internet, is unaffected, too. And both Mac OS, the old Apple operating system, and Mac OS X, the new one, are immune.
Despite these choices, most people who shop for computers end up with the one with a magnetic attraction to viruses. Despite abundant software for the two main consumer alternatives, Linux and OS X -- including, on OS X, Microsoft Office itself, and on Linux, the completely free OpenOffice competitor for Microsoft Office -- the standard argument for Windows, dangers and all, is that the buyer uses Windows at school or at the office. And that, of course, nearly always means one thing, Microsoft Office.
If our schools used pickup trucks with exploding gas tanks, we'd hardly make an argument that we all had to buy the same kind of vehicle. If the corner store was found to be selling spoiled meat, we'd need our heads examined if we decided to shop there for steaks.
I don't get it. There are at least 11,500 new Windows viruses each year. The total has been rising for a long time. And just this week I heard about yet another university that is "requiring" incoming students to have Windows PCs.
I don't get it. But more importantly, I'm afraid the people who are making decisions don't get it either.
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