On Tue, 6 Jun 2023 at 22:34, Travis Burtrum <[email protected]> wrote:

>
> Jun 6, 2023 4:31:54 PM Dave Cridland <[email protected]>:
>
> >
> > On Thu, 4 May 2023 at 15:06, <[email protected]> wrote:
> >> Version 0.1.0 of XEP-0481 (Content Types in Messages) has been
> >> released.
> >
> > This is weirdly horrible.
>
> Me too, but it's not council's job to police the protocol, what gets
> widely used is decided by running code and consensus.
>

Oh, I'm not saying it shouldn't have been published, I don't think this has
any potential to damage the interoperability of the network, and it seems
free of IPR concerns.

It *is* the Council's job to police what gets through to Stable, I think,
but that's irrelevant here, and will likely remain so in this case I'd have
thought.


>
>
> > * First and foremost, it falls into a general trap that's open to abuse
> by malicious actors, by having a message whose content will be interpreted
> differently by different clients. This has been used by spammers and as a
> malware vector for decades.
>
> So... Same as xml:lang in the RFC ? I don't like that either. :)
>

I think worse. xml:lang I'm not keen on for use as a way to send
multilingual messages, indeed, but if I send you a message such as:

<message>
  <body>Innocuous message!</body>
  <content type='text/plain'>Evil annoying spam blockchain AI</content>
</message>

Then the anti-spam (AI driven using Blockchain of course) might evaluate
only the innocuous message and your client might only display the evil
annoying spam. The anti-spam can't easily know which your client will
display, so it needs to evaluate both, and with something like
text/markdown in the mix, it forces the anti-spam to understand all the
content-types. (Maybe it does by AI, or blockchain, but still).

The same is possible with xml:lang, by sending 'en-gb' and 'en-us'
messages, for example, as you note, but those are at least the same basic
syntax so a little easier to manage.

Critical problem? Not really. But I'd want this pointed out in the Security
Considerations.

Dave.
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