A. Padgett "0sirius" Peterson


(maintained by Rob Slade)

Padgett Peterson has arguably provided the most useful antiviral software to the computing community, free of charge. John Norstad's Disinfectant program may have a larger functional scope than DISKSECURE, but Disinfectant is for Macs, which do not have the numbers of Intel based machines that DISKSECURE can protect. In addition, Padgett has now produced a Word Macro virus detection macro. Thus he has produced antiviral software for the two most common virus problems: Intel based boot record infectors, and the ubiquitous Word Macro viruses.

DISKSECURE, and its slightly smaller cousins FixMBR and SafeMBR, detect and protect against changes to the master boot record and boot sector. Viruses are automatically detected, and can usually be automatically removed. If the suggested installation procedure is followed, any damage or change to the boot records can be manually corrected. The protection is not limited to viruses: I'm rather partial to DISKSECURE since it once saved my computer while I was testing a different, and very poorly designed, security package. DISKSECURE is a security program in its own right, and provides basic password access restriction to the hard drive that is the equal of any I've tested. All of this is contained in an elegant, extremely small, and widely compatible package.

Padgett is, to some extent, the prototypical southern US "good ol' boy" (although prefering the term "Southern Gentlemen and Eccentric"). He drives a car called "The Judge", has participated in both dirt track and high speed track car racing, and is proficient in the use and handling of large caliber hand guns. (A less common hobby is the collecting of Zenith TransOceanic radios.) However, he is also one of the most skillful low level programmers in the Intel world, as DISKSECURE demonstrates. As only one example of his skill, two weeks after first hearing that it was possible to code machine language programs for Intel CPUs using only printable characters he had thoroughly mastered the art, and produced an executable Christmas card that could be sent via email.

You can find out more at his antivirus page.


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