Q: I know someone who is going to be participating in acquiring pirated software for the mac OS. I know that viruses on the mac are extreemly rare in comparison to the pc/windows platforms. How would you go about protecting yourself and your mac when engaging in these activities? Is there some sort of mac os x emulator that you could run on your pc to test the software before installing it on your mac? Or would it be easier to pirate/acquire some virus software for the mac. Please, do not respond to this question by saying that you shouldn't download pirated software in order to prevent infection. You are a guppy and any anti-pirating/pro-copyright arguments will be fully ignored and/or deleted so don't even bother. Only productive responses please.
A: If the person you know was to download a PC virus onto their Mac the only way they would be able to get it to run would be to run it on Windows on their Mac via Bootcamp, VMware or Parallels. If the person you know was to download a virus written for OS X and run it - YES it would cause file corruption on files or parts of the system. You might want to "suggest" to your "friend" that they aquire and run legit software for their Mac and stop stuffing around with really annoying and destructive PC viruses which only serve to waste peoples time and frustrate users.