Virus Checkers
Buy
virus checkers. Buy anti-malware programs. Buy spam catchers. Don’t forget your
firewall. So what do these programs do? Firstly they slow your application
down. They can have devastating effects when running games. The game may crash,
your operating system may crash, occasionally it’s unrecoverable. Your hard
drive chatters away incessantly. Information you need can be blocked by
firewalls. Some protection allows you time to go to the pub for a pint while
your system is booting, not a bad thing if you’re not in a rush. Right, I will
go to the good things…………Now, let me see………..They can stop old viruses that
they know about, sometimes. They can eliminate tracking cookies; in fact if you
use two different programs to find these cookies they will find completely
different ones. How reassuring is that? They also do something else but I can’t
think of it at the moment? No, I’m not being cynical.
I
always remember my very first virus with fondness; it was on the Commodore
Amiga. A message popped up on the screen, which said ‘Viruses are Dangerous’
and that of course was that. A few seconds later my entire hard drive was
completely full of empty directories (folders). The virus was beautiful in it’s
simplicity. For old basic programmers it went something like:
10 Makedir
20
Goto10
The
first executable line makes an empty folder and the second line sends it back
to the first to do it all over again and again and again.