WP7 impervious to virus?

[Rich Edmonds]

Right now, I think a few factors play a role in the security. First, it's a fairly new OS. Secondly, the ecosystem is too closed for any thing to really cause any major issues, if any. Last, the Market Place policies and review seem to be too strict.

If I'm not mistaken, this is the reason the MS never tried to have flash developed for the OS. They felt that it posed a security issue. Besides, as of right now, even with the new development tools available, you still don't have access to the core OS of WP7. It only allows you access to certain functions. The developers tool kits are registered, I assume, considering you have to purchase it on a yearly basis. So, it actually makes more sense for a person to try and make money from it, then being malicious. But, the issues we do have are, people who develop crap apps and charge for them, without being able to try them out. So, there are scam apps but, you have to mindful what you download and not purchase anything you can't try out fully.

Pretty much agree with every letter you typed here, sir. While every OS is prone to viruses (still enjoy seeing the anti-virus products being advertised on television including support for Windows and Android), a closed eco-system is a solid barrier to help protect consumers. It'll take odd occurrences such as the SMS bug.

 

[Vmac39]

A lot of viruses have a lot to do with user habits and the sites they go to, from my experience. I've notice that most viruses that I've cleared of my computer or others, have been because of sites that people like to frequent or rely on IM or email links and now it seems social sites, too. With that said, WP7 doesn't access most sites that have them and others would rely on people clicking on links. Most of these sites are very Flash based and since WP7 doesn't use it, the links that allow viruses on your computer or phone, don't open. I'm not saying it can't be done, just not as likely as Android. An open OS has it's benefits but, it comes with some issues, too.

Popularity probably does play a role but, I will have to go with the fact the WP7 is more secure, at this point. If popularity was the main issue, the iPhone should be plagued with them.

 

[Pronk]

Those links explained battery life too... But please, tell me how Flash works and why it has this negative effect of battery life, that HTML5 doesn't have!

Your posts are funny. Like talking points from a BGR comment section.

Yeah flash is so great, that's why Adobe continue to support it on mobile. Oh, wait.

Why Flash didn’t work out on mobile devices — Tech News and Analysis
Adobe Flash Meets Its End | News & Opinion | PCMag.com
Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right
Mobile Flash Is Officially Dead, Neither Users nor Adobe Will Miss It - Softpedia
A Humbled Adobe Sees Beyond The Browser | TechCrunch
(and a whole heap more articles, all citing poor performance, battery life issues stemming from hardware acceleration/h.264 decoding problems in versions pre 10.1 etc. - or is everyone just deluded?)

By the way, your first link is 2 years old and your second link was nothing to do with mobile flash. Anyway, argue with all the guys in the links above - I'm not fussed. Adobe have made it quite clear what they think about Flash on mobiles, so I'm going with them

 

[Eirenarch]

It is not possible to write a virus for WP7 because you don't have access to native APIs but only what Silverlight for the phone has to provide. It doesn't give you access to files and the storage is isolated so you don't get to write to other programs storage. Theoretically there may be exploits in programs written in native code by Microsoft or by their partners that can accept input without proper validation and use buffer overruns to call some native OS APIs that will allow them to replicate. This kind of exploit will be quite hard to find and pull off though. Note that both Android and iOS allow different levels of native access to the OS which makes it easier to pull off these exploits because devs have more direct access to the system.

The whole Mac discussion is bull****. The main reason Windows gets more viruses than Mac (and viruses for Macs do exist) is that Windows users tend to run their systems as admins so programs can replicate without asking for permissions. Windows Vista's UAC does something quite similar to what a *nix based machine would do (i.e. explicitly asks for permissions when a program wants to access something) however because of Windows history many programs are written to expect these permissions by default while in the Mac world this is not the case. If you are able to find a mac user that runs as root all the time and every program he starts gets root access Mac (or any other *nix) machines will be as vulnerable to viruses as Windows. On the other hand if you run Windows with non-admin account the likelyhood of getting a virus is as low as on a Mac (except that there are more viruses for Windows). Sadly running Windows as a user with reduced privilleges is something far more annoying than what Mac users get when they run as non-root, but that's life (also one of the main reasons Vista was hated so much).

 

[Blacklac]

Yeah flash is so great, that's why Adobe continue to support it on mobile. Oh, wait.

Why Flash didn?t work out on mobile devices — Tech News and Analysis
Adobe Flash Meets Its End | News & Opinion | PCMag.com
Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right
Mobile Flash Is Officially Dead, Neither Users nor Adobe Will Miss It - Softpedia
A Humbled Adobe Sees Beyond The Browser | TechCrunch
(and a whole heap more articles, all citing poor performance, battery life issues stemming from hardware acceleration/h.264 decoding problems in versions pre 10.1 etc. - or is everyone just deluded?)

By the way, your first link is 2 years old and your second link was nothing to do with mobile flash. Anyway, argue with all the guys in the links above - I'm not fussed. Adobe have made it quite clear what they think about Flash on mobiles, so I'm going with them

The only part of that response that was even close to answering my question was about pre 10.1 performance. Flash is on 11.1 now. If your original comment about Flash's poor mobile performance was based on pre 10.1, you should have said that. I never said Flash was "great" and I never denied Adobe was no longer creating the Mobile variant.

10.1 was also the first version optimized for Mobile, btw. Older version may have worked, but they werent specifically meant to perform well on Mobile Devices.

 

[Pronk]

Ok, well I went away and did some reading, and it looks like from 10.1 onwards things were a lot better in general. Some people still had performance issues (googling "flash android performance issues" brings up a lot of stuff, like this for instance: Flash 10.2 beta reaches Android, performance still mixed | Electronista), so there were/are clearly still issues, but there's also enough evidence to show a well-optimised flash instance running on a phone set up correctly will work fine and the battery life will be more or less the same.

So sorry - looks like I was wrong, and coming at it with outdated info.

 

[Blacklac]

Cheers, Pronk. You don't see those kinds of responses much on Internet forums.

 

[Pronk]

No worries - does seem odd that Adobe gave up right when they seemed to be getting it working right though!