On 4 Jan 2007 at 12:38, Noel Stoutenburg wrote: > David W. Fenton wrote: > > On 3 Jan 2007 at 17:11, I wrote: > > > > One possibility is that they do not intend to make money, but are > > using the site as a means of slipping in adware, spyware, or malware > > past the defenses of otherwise savvy users. Personally, I'd rather > > get large files as email, or from the webspace of an individual > > user, than through a third party. > > > To which David responded > > That's only a possibility for people using IE6 or before. It's not > > even remotely plausible for anyone using any non-IE browser, or IE7. > > But I'm not so sure. If the large file were placed into a self > extracting wrapper once posted to the site, so that when one > downloaded what one thought was the file, it came in the wrapper?
Sorry for the confusion -- I was only addressing the malware issue. Malware can't infect a browser except if it's designed to make it possible. But in re-reading, I guess you're not really talking about infection via the browser, but via downloaded files. > Maybe not, but I am too much of a skeptic to not think that something > of this type is happening. I understand that some say anyone who has > downloaded a music file has probably picked up some form of adware , > spyware, or malware in the process. Not from the music files, but from the free software that many people download to work with their MP3s. I downloaded some MP3 software once that installed a bunch of adware, and have since vowed to never do it again. But I don't see that it's possible to infect an MP3 file with anything or a zip file (there's no purpose in zipping an MP3 file -- it won't ever be significantly smaller and just might be larger, because the file is already as efficiently encoded as it can possibly be). It's only executables or scripts that can infect a machine, and I can't see how you could zip those up without it being obvious (unless, of course, you're running with file extensions hidden, and I thought everyone had stopped doing that since the ILOVEYOU worm showed up). -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
