After yesterday's third-hand report of an experienced Mac developer who claims to have had his hard disk corrupted by trying to run the InfiniteOS, that developer (an AtAT viewer!) wrote in to clarify. Joseph McConnell does not wish to imply that the InfiniteOS is necessarily an intentional Trojan Horse virus, but that it "should be considered as dangerous as one," whether the authors' intentions are malicious or not. Joseph states that "it's been more than ten years" since he's had a an application "trash a hard drive by just running it."

As it turns out, Joseph's not the only AtAT viewer who's had problems that seem to have arisen from running the InfiniteOS. Jeff Bloxham writes in to say that he "wishes to confirm the damaging effects" of the operating system. He's experienced the same problem with disk corruption, and in fact had his system booted off an emergency Zip disk when he wrote to us. Says he, "I'm not saying the OS is directly to blame, just that it contributed to the mess." And Jeff Raden contacted us to say that he ran the InfiniteOS demo a few days ago with no immediate problems, but about a day later, his system would freeze solid every time he tried to boot, whether from his hard disk or from the Mac OS 8 CD-ROM. He's able to boot from the Norton Utilities CD-ROM, but even after Norton repairs his hard drive, he's still unable to boot from it. And while this could all just be a coincidence, he says, "If InfiniteOS is a virus, I feel like a complete f*&^%ing idiot for trying it."

As for InfiniteOS developer Kevin Avila's claim that the OS is "write-disabled," so it can't cause hard disk corruption? Says Joseph McConnell, "A single rogue memory write in seemingly unrelated code can damage the VCB or related in memory structures, which is then flushed (written) to disk. This is how MicroSoft File and Photoshop 2.05 used to corrupt harddrives." Waaaay over our heads, but we'll take that info at face value. For now, the bottom line is, three AtAT viewers have had hard disk troubles following the use of the InfiniteOS which may or may not have caused or contributed to the problems. Hmm... A Joseph and two Jeffs. I guess the moral is this: Don't run the InfiniteOS without a full backup of your boot drive, especially if your first name starts with a "J."