Jimmy Montesinos wrote: > I'm currently working on computer viruses history, and I remember > that I had > met some viruses on Apple II, C64, and Amiga but I don't remember if > there > was some on QL.. > > So is there any viruses on QL ? I would appreciate any screenshots > or > details in order to add a small paragraph in my french presentation? I have a little experience with this!
I did look at the possibility of a QL virus style of program a few years ago (as Geoff Wicks knows to his QXL's cost!), by adding direct commands to the end of a boot program. The idea was to simply LRUN another program called " " (a single space, which was not too easily seen in a DIR listing) which in turn looked for any other BASIC programs and tacked it onto the end. It wasn't malicious, it only replicated itself and announced its presence - it wasn't intended to be malicious, just testing if it could be done. Sadly, it was badly written and trashed Geoff's QXL by mistake, so realising I'd been a very naughty boy (not to mention embarrassment and visions of Just Words retribution) I immediately erased all copies of it and never tried again. Although not a virus, there was a Pointer Pranks routines which was a harmless April Fool joke (which did not copy itself) which simply did annoying things like randomly zap a pointer driven program into the button frame or picking random jobs to the top (one moment you'd be happily typing away in Quill then all of a sudden a QPAC2 files menu appears out of nowhere). Another harmless piece of fun was what Ron Dunnett, Joe Haftke and I did at a Quanta workshop years ago. Our QLs were networked together and we played pranks on each other by opening windows on each other's screens and either typing naughty messages or simply clearing the screen, something like this: OPEN#3,n1_SCR_512x256a0x0:CLS #3:INPUT#3,'Your QL has a virus, press ENTER';z$:CLOSE#3 Except that Joe Haftke responded with the same commands, but instead the INPUT string was: INPUT #3,'Press ENTER to completely erase your hard disk';z$ (from memory, might not work, but you'll see what I mean). Having managed to annoy Ron with this type of thing, his revenge was swift. I noticed my QL slowing right down until it was unusable. I guessed it might be Ron, but didn't know what he'd done until he explained that he used WCOPY to transfer hundreds of files over the network to fill up ramdisks on my QL, which slowed it right down and made it run out of memory. There never was AFAIK a finished virus for the QL, but in priciple it could probably be done. QL jobs have a JMP.L job_start_address instruction in the first few bytes, to jump past the $4AFB flag and job name. This could in theory (never tried this part) be hacked to jump to an extra bit of code tacked onto the end of a program to run a 'virus', which ends with the original JMP.L job_start_address to run the program from its original execution address. I *HOPE* I am wrong and this cannot be done. But I'm also optimistic that nobody on the QL scene would even dream of trying to write a working virus! The above "pranks" were bad enough without getting as far as a real virus. -- Dilwyn Jones _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
