[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

I was going to post this here ===>>> https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...=326848&page=3, but decided here would be a better place

I've had one malware infestation since I first installed a beta copy of Windows 2.0 from a couple of boxes of diskettes 30+ years ago on a corporate PC.

I've had zero malware infestations at home. I did have one at the office, decades back. It came with a copy of the WRQ Reflections package I was installing from a WRQ CD to implement communications with a server. There were other ways to do the same thing, so I uninstalled Reflections and deloused the PC. (And, IIRC, I sent WRQ a nastygram about the quality control on their installation CDs.)

It arrived in the early '90s when a PC support techie installed a 3270 terminal emulation package on my corporate PS2 model 90. It was detected by me when 'stuff' started to go awry, but not by the PC Support recommended AV. The source of the malware was the PC Support server. Not only did they screw up my almost new PS/2 80, they also screwed the bank's COO and his PA's new laptops. Heads rolled, out the door, toot sweet - next day.

I've used 3270 compatible terminals to access a mainframe at a bank. One had me mumbling to myself. It failed. The support tech replaced everything that could be replaced - internal circuit boards, CRT, keyboard - the only remaining original part was the metal housing. It still failed. He gave me a new one and took away the old one. I said "What are you going to do with the old one?" He said "I'm going to stick it in the parts closet in the basement, and whenever I have to come back for a service call I'm going to pull it out and beat it with a stick!" I didn't blame him a bit.

The last time I dealt with a 3270 emulation package, it was for a Unix machine. The Unix systems house I worked for sold a Unix workstation to a shop that made jewelry, and needed to communicate with an IBM mainframe on the site of the vendor who was their principal customer.

Unfortunately, the owner of the systems house who sold them the system didn't find out enough about their needs. What they actually needed was 5741 RJE emulation to talk to the customer's MRP system. That did exist for Unix, but would cost more than the system we sold them and everything in it. I prompted one of several conversations with the owner about "Run the contract by me before you get the customer to sign it, so I can tell you whether we can do it and whether we can actually make money on what you want to charge?"

The systems house went belly up, and stuff like that was a reason why. (I bailed before they technically folded.)

A few years ago I was installing a new version of CCleaner when Defender popped up to announce - "Oi, that proggie your trying to install is crap - it's infested with Trojan ????." So I ran the install.exe through VT, only one scanner reported anything, but it wasn't Trojan ????, Defender wasn't in the VT scanner list. So, mused I: It must be a false positive. But before telling Defender to ignore it, I did some searches and discovered that CCleaner was known to have been infested with Trojan ???? at source. I also found apologia from the company that had just bought CCleaner's parent company - AVG or Avast, I forget which.

I still have a previous version of CCleaner installed from before the infestation, but it's likely to go away. I haven't used it in some time. It was a convenient way to remove all junk in one operation, but not all that needed.

FWIW Microsoft has 99 pages of open source projects at GitHub (which it owns), Apple has 9.

Microsoft has become increasingly open source friendly in recent years. Most recently, they decided to open source the .NET framework, and MS engineers are major contributors to the Linux Mono project which was founded to provide an compatible open source alternative to .NET.

Another effort of MS is the open source Visual Studio Code editor. It's based on the Electron framework also use by the Atom Editor, but MS's involvement means their fork gets more attention. Cross platform and behaves identically on Windows and Linux. What's not to like?

Microsoft has figured out that it's a wide world with lots of people using lots of different kit, and it has to play well with others. I can't just stuff things tdown people's throats because it's Microsoft.

Buying Github was part of that strategy. So was acquiring LinkedIn. they need to cater to developers writing code for all sorts of platforms, and know it.

I do still know folks who are afraid of getting cooties from anything MS has a hand in who are looking at alternatives like GitLab, so Microsoft still has fence mending to do.
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Dennis