Microsoft Virus

[Kelley Cook]

--- Trevor Smith <trevor@haligonian.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 25 Jul 2000 09:15:28 -0400 (EDT), Skip Huffman wrote:
> 
> >Why would anyone do that??  That would be like opening a box of
> >nails and finding an unknown power tool in the box and plugging
> >it in and turning it on.
> 
> Hey, I would turn it on!
> 
> >I really doubt any company other than MS would even conceive of
> >doing this.  In fact I am surprised that MS could be this dumb. 
> >I wonder whether this was sabotage.
> 
> But yes, I agree MS has programmed a piece of crap in terms of
> security. Who would have ever imagined 10 yrs ago that some day
> *email* would be such a huge security hole. :-(
>

Actually the Unix boys realized this 12 years ago when the first great
Internet Worm was created by Robert Morris using a hole in Sendmail. 
All of the buffer overrun holes have been plugged, since then.

> And no, I don't think that other emailers will have this same problem
> unless they do something ridiculous like Outlook does. Note the
> alleged reference on the site:

No they don't.  They also don't automatically execute Visual Basic
programs that are attached to email messages and don't allow those
programs to automagically access your address book.

There are obviously a bunch of moron managers at Microsoft.  No
self-respecting programmer would ever think that those were a good
idea.


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