Viruses and the QL By Tim Swenson Now that more and more QLers are getting online, be it the Internet or BBS's, a few of them are starting to worry about what has plagued their "real" computer friends for years, viruses. Many have heard of the horror stories of people loosing hard disks and floppies to viruses. Ads for anti-virus products don't help. The chance of getting a virus infecting your QL is very very low. Most of your data loss problems will come from either bad disks or the idiot behind the keyboard (hey, I have zapped a few of my own files). There are a few points to know about why the QL is very safe against viruses. The QL is a Different Beast Viruses are written for a specific operating system and will not work on other operating systems. An MS-DOS virus will not infect a Macinotsh computer and vice versa. The virus code exploits certain operating system calls to infect disks. If the calls are not there, the virus goes nowhere. Plus, the MacOS does not know how to run an MS-DOS program, so the virus never gets executed. The same goes for the QL. For a virus to affect a QL is has to be written specifically for the QL. Any file you download off a BBS or the Internet that does have a virus will be safe to use on a QL. The virus is in a totally alien environment and is just data to the QL. QDOS is ROM Based Some of the most deadly viruses are Boot sector viruses. These viruses infect the boot sector of hard drive or floppy disk. Any time you try to boot off an infected disk, you are loading the virus. Now the problem comes in finding a non-infected disk to boot off of so that you can start with a clean computer and get rid of the virus. If you choose the wrong disk, you will still be infected. With the QL, its operating system in ROM, all you have to do is turn it on and not put a boot disk in. Now you know you are clean and can start to fix the problem. Viruses Only Work When Executed The key thing to remember with any computer platform, viruses must be executed for them to work. If you download a data file that has a virus in it, you are safe until you actually try to execute that data file. Viruses can not autoexecute. Now once a virus gets executed and gets in memory, it may be tough getting it out, but had to have been executed at one point. So, if you don't know about a file or program that you've downloaded, run a virus scanner before you execute it. No Known Viruses Written for the QL Of course, one of the safest things to do to avoid viruses, is to have a computer so obscure that no virus writer would write a virus for it. It is this obscurity that helps keep the QL safe from viruses. Before you worry too much about viruses when you download data to the QL, realize how safe you are and worry more about data loss from other means. Spend your time backing up files to other disks instead of worrying about viruses.