attachments
Bob Hayden
I checked with a nerdy geek and was told that it is a waste of
bandwidth to broadcast attachments to an entire mailing list.
Although not every attachment is a virus, NO ASCII text is.
Dr. Knodt's suggestion is entirely consistent with email etiquette.
----- Forwarded message from Thomas Gatliffe -----
Dr. Knodt,
Perhaps you should make an appointment with some nerdy geek in the IR
department who can explain to you how viruses get promulgated. It is usually
through executables (.exe) files or microsoft macros. Otherwise you will
continue to be needlessly worried about non-existent threats. :-)
Tom G.
RCK...@aol.com wrote:
> This might be a great way to spread virus.
>
> With all the virus going around, please do not post e-mail with attachments
> to the mailing list.
>
> Send attachments only to those who request them.
>
> Thanks for your understanding
>
> Dr. Robert C. Knodt
> RCK...@aol.com
>
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_
| | Robert W. Hayden
| | Work: Department of Mathematics
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Robert J. MacG. Dawson
Bob Hayden wrote:
>
> I checked with a nerdy geek and was told that it is a waste of
> bandwidth to broadcast attachments to an entire mailing list.
This to some extend depends on the size of the attachment;
but the principle is sound UNLESS the list is a specialized one of
a nature that makes the use of attachments customary.
> Although not every attachment is a virus, NO ASCII text is.
I believe this is more or less true at the moment. However,
there was some speculation in the days of DOS that the "ANSI escape
sequences" that were used to do things like change color of text on
screen could be used to create a Trojan horse - although the writer
would need an IQ of 2n to write one that would fool a user with IQ n.
Here's the gimmick. The ANSI escape sequences did not just change text
and background color - they also moved the cursor. Once the programmers
were thinking about the keyboard, somebody had the idea of including a
(rarely-used) ANSI escape sequence to allow the keys to be remapped (to
facilitate international ckeyboard layouts, I supppose.) To make things
like dead accent keys work here, they allowed a key to be remapped to
more than one character. Being true programmers of the old school, they
did not limit this to the two or three characters that anybody actually
needed.
RESULT: You could in principle insert (undisplayed) ANSI escape
sequences into an arbitrary text string that would map the ENTER key to
"FORMAT C:", set several other keys to "Y", and make the display
black-on-black from the cursor point onwards. Somebody impetuous enough
to react to an apparently stuck display by hammering keys at random
might actually not only initiate the command to erase their hard drive
but also
"verify that this was what they wanted". This sort of thing was
actually tested, according to a 1990-vintage virus protection book I
used to have. The solution was a modified ANSI.SYS file that did not
support key remapping, or limited the length of the remapped string. I
used to have one of these on my machine.
It has been conjectured that a truly brilliant writer of short
assembler code might have been able to load and run a .com executable in
this fashion, from a text string. Remember, a program is just a string
of
characters - especially a .com which has very little "rubric" at the
head.
In principle you can create a program with a word processor if it does
not use one of a few truly unprintable characters. However, AFAIK this
was never successfully done.
The moral is that anything can be a virus if there is something to run
it. Code doesn't just run itself. Of course, this is true of
executables as well - an executable only runs when the OS puts it into
the CPU.
-Robert Dawson
dennis roberts
the pragmatic of the situation is:
DO NOT SEND ANY ATTACHMENTS TO ANY LIST
this has PARTLY to do with virus spreading potential but ... partly to
courtesy ... and partly due to the fact that when downloading your messages
say at home ... on a modem ... you can't get to the NEXT message without
taking time to have the attachment downloaded too ... whether you opt to
look at it or not
Robert J. MacG. Dawson
dennis roberts wrote:
>
> the pragmatic of the situation is:
>
> DO NOT SEND ANY ATTACHMENTS TO ANY LIST
More accurately - do not send any attachments to any list that does not
have a specific policy or tradition permitting this.
But, by the same token, a 10K attachment is no more pernicious than the
same 10K included as text, and less so than a 1K HTML file that
immediately downloads 50K of images from another site without checking
for permission.
-Robert Dawson
Drake R. Bradley
> the pragmatic of the situation is:
>
> DO NOT SEND ANY ATTACHMENTS TO ANY LIST
>
> this has PARTLY to do with virus spreading potential but ... partly to
> courtesy ... and partly due to the fact that when downloading your messages
> say at home ... on a modem ... you can't get to the NEXT message without
> taking time to have the attachment downloaded too ... whether you opt to
> look at it or not
While I agree with the sentiments expressed by others that attachments should
not be sent to email lists, I take exception that this should apply to small
(only a few KB or so) gif or jpeg images. Pictures *are* often worth a
thousand words, and certainly it makes sense that the subscribers to a stat
list would occasionally want to post a graph or figure so as to illustrate a
particular statistical point. (David Howell posted a graph of a sampling
distribution.) It is more than a little ironic that this would be against the
rules for this list!
Drake Bradley
Bates College
dennis roberts
>While I agree with the sentiments expressed by others that attachments should
>not be sent to email lists, I take exception that this should apply to small
>(only a few KB or so) gif or jpeg images. Pictures *are* often worth a
>thousand words, and certainly it makes sense that the subscribers to a stat
>list would occasionally want to post a graph or figure so as to illustrate a
>particular statistical point. (David Howell posted a graph of a sampling
>distribution.) It is more than a little ironic that this would be against the
>rules for this list!
though more of a pain ... what i tend to do is to make graphs and post to
my webspace ... then tell folks of the url ... then it is their choice to
go and see
in eudora, we can insert an image to the text space ... and this can be
neat ... but, some may be able to see it in the text ... or, get it as an
attachment ... but, i have had some feedback that doing this CAN goof
things up too ... at their end (the technicalities of why i don't know)
i can certainly just attach stuff and send ...
it is all i can do on some occasions ... NOT to add to the message or as an
attachment ... someTHING ... perhaps a pic ...
but, i just resist sending any attachments to any list ... for a variety of
reasons ...
i use http://www.copernic.com ... a nice desktop search tool ... and one
nice thing about it is you can save your search results as a browser
webfile ... and then send AS AN ATTACHMENT to a person, list, etc. ... and
when they open the attachment ... it IS already in an opened ie or netscape
... so you get the benefits of the short url descriptions and workable
links ... BUT, even there, i hesitate to send this attachment to a list
(who knows what evil might parasite itself along with it?)
i know that sometimes ... one might have something to share ... and it
would be MUCH easier to share it once ... rather than say ... "i have a pic
i can send to anyone who wants it ... send me a note" ... and this makes
FAR more work for the sender (so, they opt for NOT doing anything with
it) AND, invariably, one then gets posts to the entire list rather than to
the specific person who has the 'thing' to share
sure is a tangled web we live in
Thom Baguley
> though more of a pain ... what i tend to do is to make graphs and post to
> my webspace ... then tell folks of the url ... then it is their choice to
> go and see
This is the best way IMO. The alternative is to offer to send the
attachment by private email.
Thom
Jerry Dallal
> While I agree with the sentiments expressed by others that attachments should
> not be sent to email lists, I take exception that this should apply to small
> (only a few KB or so) gif or jpeg images. Pictures *are* often worth a
> thousand words, and certainly it makes sense that the subscribers to a stat
It's worth noting that some lists have gateways to Usenet groups.
Usenet does not support attachments, so they will be lost to Usenet
readers. Also, even in the anything-goes early 21-st Century climate
of the Internet, one big no-no remains the posting of binaries to
non-binary groups.
Rich Ulrich
<gda...@hnrc.tufts.edu> wrote:
> "Drake R. Bradley" wrote:
>
> > While I agree with the sentiments expressed by others that attachments should
> > not be sent to email lists, I take exception that this should apply to small
> > (only a few KB or so) gif or jpeg images. Pictures *are* often worth a
> > thousand words, and certainly it makes sense that the subscribers to a stat
>
> It's worth noting that some lists have gateways to Usenet groups.
> Usenet does not support attachments, so they will be lost to Usenet
> readers. [ break ]
- my Usenet connection seems to give me all the attachments.
But if I depended on a modem and a 7-bit protocol, I would be
pleased if my ISP filtered out the occasional, 100 kilobyte 8-bit
attachment. (Some folk still use 7-bit protocols, don't they?)
> Also, even in the anything-goes early 21-st Century climate
> of the Internet, one big no-no remains the posting of binaries to
> non-binary groups.
Right; that's partly because of size. My vendor has the practice,
these days, of saving ordinary groups for a week, binary groups
(which are the BULK of their internet feed) for 24 hours. Binary
strings may be treated as screen-commands, if your Reader doesn't
know to package them as an 'attachment' or otherwise ignore them.
Some attachments are binary, some are not.
Standard HTML files are ASCII, with the added 'risk'
(I sometimes look at it that way) of invoking an
immediate internet connection.
--
Rich Ulrich, wpi...@pitt.edu
http://www.pitt.edu/~wpilib/index.html
Jerry Dallal
>
> On Fri, 06 Apr 2001 13:34:03 GMT, Jerry Dallal
> <gda...@hnrc.tufts.edu> wrote:
> > It's worth noting that some lists have gateways to Usenet groups.
> > Usenet does not support attachments, so they will be lost to Usenet
> > readers. [ break ]
>
> - my Usenet connection seems to give me all the attachments.
> But if I depended on a modem and a 7-bit protocol, I would be
> pleased if my ISP filtered out the occasional, 100 kilobyte 8-bit
> attachment. (Some folk still use 7-bit protocols, don't they?)
I sit corrected. Better had I said that because of its history, many
Usenet readers access newsgroups in a way that attachments are lost
on them.
>> Also, even in the anything-goes early 21-st Century climate
>> of the Internet, one big no-no remains the posting of binaries to
>> non-binary groups.
>Right; that's partly because of size. My vendor has the practice,
>these days, of saving ordinary groups for a week, binary groups
>(which are the BULK of their internet feed) for 24 hours. Binary
>strings may be treated as screen-commands, if your Reader doesn't
>know to package them as an 'attachment' or otherwise ignore them.
No better way to get an ISP to change a group's status than by
routinely sending binaries through.