On Thu, 08 Dec 94 16:09:00 PST, Doore, Daniel [MIS] said: > I would just like to say that we here in the office have just > cobbled together a mail message that will format you hard disc > when you try to open the Word document that you think is in it.
Well that's different. It is equally possible to write a file that does nasty things when you edit it with emacs. But it is not possible to write a piece of mail that does somthing nasty when you just read it, unless you have an insecure mail reader (such as emacs or Word, neither of which I would like to have anything to do with). As for sending controls to remap your keyboard, well... I personally do not believe it. You can remap my keyboard by connecting to my X server (which you can't without access to my .Xauthority file), but not by writing characters on my screen. Even if there is such a thing as a keyboard that you can remap, then in all likelyhood your control characters would be filtered out long before they reached my screen. And if someone can remap your keyboard just by writing some control characters to your display then you have big problems aside from receiving strange mail messages. Someone could put them there directly with a write or a talk message, and you don't even get a warning about that. It reminds me of a very early version of VM/CMS, where you could use MSG to give someone a modified, invisible input field containing a command. They press Enter and zap! This was fixed rather quickly... imc
