Clarence Verge wrote: > Arachne's Insight is FAR from perfect. > There is a sensitivity to HTML in the header. How does html give access to the drive? I can possibly see it call an executable that ostensibly was made to run a wav or mpg, but first.. you'd havta have that, downloaded and saved it, and wouldnt arachne ask if you want to run it?
One thing Microsoft did trying to eliminate piracy, was to embed routines that would dial into their servers, and provide the user name and net address that was being used on a certain copy of their operating system. Since they wont say, we dont know what else is sent out, nor do we know what sabotage code might be crafted which takes advantage of this functionality ... which is totally absent in dos. And besides what it did to your own desktop, there are lots of people who park lots of their personal business on web hosts, and this piracy protection could be used to export usernames, passwords, net addresses, and who knows what else. Providing the hacker with inside information that he can either sell or make use of himself. That functionality is totally absent in dos, so there is no cash payback to the hacker. Any hacker competent enough to mess with dos would do a whole lot better for himself messing with Microsoft software. I'd be more likely to be hit with lightning than a dos hacker. The future of Arachne lies in this simplicity of an open source operating system where weaknesses such as the html thing, can be seen and dealt with. With proprietary code, anything a hacker can crack out of it is to his economic advantage. But more likely, is not something deliberate, but something odd in the way software runs that comes to attention of a geek. And in looking into solving that problem, discovers what we call 'undocumented features'. There are lots of undocumented features that even Microsoft does not know about. We already see where they stole the TCP/IP stack, and given their notorious lack of ethics, it begs the question of what else it is that they stole. And then- what trojans they stole with it. Some of us recall years ago, the first, and largest software bomb, the Michael Angelo virus, was not in fact, downloaded off the BBS network, but came on the floppy in the shrinkwrap. And later we learned that the author of that code had left it in a piece of software he was working on which he thought would be stolen. He was correct, and all charges were quietly dropped. Had he not done that, he was aware that the corporation could screw him, and had enough lawyers to keep him in court forever. As we have seen many times with many other inventions. Follow the money. There is none that leads to dos sabotageware.
