That's not a virus, it's a simple command. The windows equivalent would be throwing the contents of your hard drive root into the trash while holding shift. Having the power to do stupid shit isn't a failing of the operating system, it's a failing of the user if they choose to do so.

As a Windows user you are more likely to have consensual sex with another person without money being exchanged.

This is exactly what is driving me away from GOG.com.

Ok, cool, I guess? :)

I am pretty sure I have heard about Hackintosh before, and it sounds pretty logical as well as before M1 the Macs were pretty much x86 PCs for their hardware.

So,yeah, maybe I will try it out when I am completely bored out of my mind and can't think of anything more interesting to do, like picking my nose... Maybe it is as I consider MacOS too much like Windows to begin with, which is why I don't see the point of even trying it out. Ok so the GUI is probably somewhat different and the icons look different, yawn...

Yeah I read about that when the Linux hater whatshername asked in the Apple M1 discussion thread whether Apple M1 can run any other OSes besides MacOS, and I googled M1 Linux article for her.

I've run this instead once in awhile:

sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sda bs=16M conv=fsync status=progress

(replace "sda" with the actual hard drive that you want to operate)

You know what sinister things that does behind your back?!? It goes through your whole hard disk, refreshing all the data in it. Good for e.g. HDD archives that you store offline for a long time, just to fight bitrot due to magnetic decay (demagnetization) on magnetic media.

For Windows, this a similar "virus":

http://www.puransoftware.com/DiskFresh.html

More info:

https://io.bikegremlin.com/13914/disk-data-refresh/

(albeit I think there is an error in that article, where it claims you HAVE TO rewrite everything on a HDD to refresh all the magnetic data; my understanding is that for any relatively modern HDD, it is enough to read all the data, and it gets refreshed... but then I guess it doesn't hurt to write it too while you are there.)

how can reading the data refresh is? makes no sense

What happens if there's an I/O error during this operation?

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-warns-of-more-printing-issues-caused-by-march-updates/

March 21 is old?

I don't think Windows would have become the dominant OS on the desktop marked if MS focused more on security and freedom from the beginning.

While Linux isn't immune, and by going by the definition of viruses, it just isn't feasible (WINE excluded). One word; propagation (as in spreading to many more). Outside of having fun with hacking and in laboratories, no one is going to create a virus just to infect one computer, and the amount of viruses created for Linux are like a drop in the water compared to Windows viruses.

* A Linux user doesn't run with root all the time, and the user needs to explicitly give root permission (normally).
* There are more sandboxing mechanisms on Linux.
* The local repositories are signed.
* Like I wrote earlier, since there are so many users of Linux, holes/attacks will more likely and faster be detected, reported, and subsequently fixed.
* A Linux user tends to be more knowledgeable.

https://www.neowin.net/news/a-history-of-viruses-on-linux/
(I know it's old, but it shows the biggest ones while viruses ran rampant on Windows in the same period.)

The age-old myth that amount of viruses is directly linked to (and alone) amount of marked share is laughable to say the least. :D

And then we have the "three stooges" who "tried" to infect the Linux kernel (attack via hypocrite commits) as part of their research without anyone knowing about it. Let's just say they're shunned by any and every tech communities now because of their lack of morals/ethics:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/greg-kroah-hartman-bans-university-of-minnesota-from-linux-development-for-deliberately-buggy-patches
https://news.itsfoss.com/hypocrite-commits/
https://github.com/QiushiWu/QiushiWu.github.io/blob/main/papers/OpenSourceInsecurity.pdf

The entitled response from them after they got caught is just hair-raising...

Then you take the backup into use.

What do you mean you don't have one? I do.

If you are unsure, you can always just read the whole disk and skip the writing part, that should perform the refresh as well.

You're missing one important point. Linux may not be dominant in the desktop space, but it *is* dominant in the server space, and there are enough servers out there connected to the internet with access to sensitive data that it's wirth the hacker's time to try and hack them. Don't forget about the Morris worm, which infected Unix systems back in 1988, which spread between Unix servers by the use of security vulnerabilties (including one in the simple fingerd program that can be blaimed on its use of a function that should have never made it into the C standard).

So if I slip a simple command in a build process that does something the user wasn't expected, it is "not a virus"... That makes as little sense as Mac OS users claiming that all the viruses in the Apple store aren't viruses because like... uhh... The cool Apple Guy said that only windows computers get viruses so these aren't viruses they're... uhh... like... malware (a type of virus).

The problem with fanatics is that they want to live in ignorance rather than admit facts, malicious code can be executed on any system. The overwhelming majority of windows viruses require the user to download something, execute it, and then infect themselves.

The old style worms which spread through checking open ports have been pushed back by use of software firewalls. The worms that spread through use of automatic emails have also been pushed back. The stuff that fanatics want to claim is the only definition of a virus just doesn't exist anymore, and where it does exist it's usually targeted directly at a corporation by a hacker who wrote it specifically for them.
A data refresh is simply when you read a bit which exists as an analog value between lets say 10 Gauss and 0 Gauss, and then if the value is say 2.6 Gauss, after reading the HDD controller writes a hard 0 Gauss, or if it was 7.6 Gauss it'd write a hard 10 Gauss.

The actual decay on HDDs is extremely low and it's unlikely you'd ever need to manually refresh the data. SSDs have their own refresh process


Now what you really have to be worried about is Rotational velocidensity ./sarcasm

Rotational velocidensity affects all audio files encoded with lossy compression. These include mp3, aac, and ogg.

The most notable effect of rotational velocidensity is the loss of bitrate in files. A lossy audio file will lose an average of 12kbps a year. But, this can vary greatly depending on the type of storage media used.

Much of this "pushing back" is due to increased hardening of systems at a lower level, and the use of less vulnerable programming languages and techniques. For example, that gets() issue in fingerd uses a function that's been removed in C11 (how did it get into C89 in the first place?), and that many toolchains will warn you about if you try to use it; furthermore, ASLR and non-executable stacks would have also made that bug much harder to exploit. Also, you have priviledge separation, so that the normal user can't accidentally ruin things, and more recently there's sandboxing, which makes it harder for a malicious e-mail or web site to affect the rest of the system.

There's the new technology of SMR hard drives, where the data is stored in shingles, allowing it to be more dense (so you get more storage for less money). The downside, however, is that writing to such a drive requires the entire block to be erased and re-written, so such drives are not good for smaller writes. In fact, such drives have many of the drawbacks of flash memory.

One way to tell if your hard drive is an SMR drive is to check if it supports TRIM. The more common CMR drives do not support TRIM, but many SMR drives do, since they act more like flash memory in some ways.

(I learned about this when, out of curiosity, I searched for something like "hard drive trim".)

No... the "push back" is that we've stopped trusting the user to be intelligent enough to handle his own machine. Anyone who has any basic level of education knows that hacking is still rampant today, and that Linux is a constant target. Unfortunately, most linux desktop users are as stupid as windows users or macintosh OS users. The weakest link in security is the user.

I mean, there are people who actually think 1qaz2wsx3edc is a secure password. It's a simple keyboard walk. Tons of linux users are out there with weak root passwords yet still have ssh capabilities.


Do you even know about the libssh bug? Where someone could gain root access just by sending a packet saying that they've logged in? You clearly have no clue how bad the programming is, the many eyes fallacy has been debunked millions of times over. Just take a look at LibreSSL and OpenSSL's feud, where, after Heartbleed, LibreSSL identified hundreds of other vulnerabilities in OpenSSL and started their own fork because OpenSSL thought security came second.

You're living in a fantasy world where using linux magically makes you more secure because you have no clue what the actual threats are.

One advantage of open source, however, is that once the bug is known, *anyone* with suitable programming knowledge can provide a fix. With proprietary software, this is not an option (or, more precisely, it's *much* harder); there won't be a fix until the vendor provides one.

See, for example, this article the Free Software Foundation published after the ShellShock vulnerability was discovered:
https://www.fsf.org/news/free-software-foundation-statement-on-the-gnu-bash-shellshock-vulnerability

Quote from the article: Or another good quote: