No Mac virii


Not for me anyway. I’m packing up to leave work and noticed that I had another call that I had missed (maybe I should check my ringer) and a corresponding voicemail. I check the message - it was the Network Operations Center (NOC) here at Dal and they said that my IP was blocked because I was spreading a virus. I am assuming (even now) that they are talking about Sobig.F or whatever it is called. I’m thinking that is really crappy because my laptop was having some trouble connecting from home as well. I might be network-less for the weekend and that wasn’t cool at all.

When I got home, I found that my PC was working fine. Now I was confused, where was the virus? If it wasn’t my desktop then it must be my laptop. However, Sobig doesn’t infect Macs. Nor can I get any of the other virii that ever make the news, because the reason that they make the news is because a lot of people are affected. A lot of people use Windows. Hence why virus authors target Windows. However that didn’t change the fact that my IP was blocked. So I called the help desk and told them my dilemna. They confirmed that it was my laptop that was the blocked IP and they even read me the MAC address. The guy on the phone was as confused as I was with the Mac issue. So I was put on Hold and he went to check. As it turns out, because we all had to re-register for ResNet yesterday and the way that the virus scanning runs, it was the last person who had my IP address who was the infected one. So that means that someone in this building (and there aren’t many here yet) has the virus. So that was my crazy adventure of the past 25 minutes. Moral: Buy Apple. OSX rules.

Written by Colin Bate