>- Speaking of Hoax virus warnings,, Todd Copeland said this to Scott Hoffman 
on 03 Apr 97  07:19 -<
Hi Todd and Scott,
 TC> In that case it would become apparent that you have not followed this
 TC> thread from the beginning or you would know that you are had gone full
 TC> circle, back to the beginning. E-Mail means "electronic mail". For the
 TC> purpose of this discussion it's text based messages. The topic that's
 TC> been banned from this echo is stating that a virus can become active
 TC> by READING it. The reason why it's off-topic is that some people don't
 TC> seem to be able to comprehend that READING E-Mail is something
 TC> different then "running" or "launching" the message using another
 TC> program. Sound familar? No matter how cyrstal clear the point is made
 TC> someone always seems to come along and say "Yea, but what about
 TC> "reading" the E-mail with a program that launches it"? These people
 TC> only continue the farce and confusion. Again, for the record: That is
 TC> *** NOT *** READING E-mail! It's running code, period! I can READ that
 TC> SAME code and *NOTHING* will happen!
 TC> Then it's still apparent that you don't know the differance between
 TC> compiling and reading.
Ok, I think we have a communications break down here, which perhaps I can
rectify (possibly not though :-).  Seems there is yet confusion on the
term "reading".  Todd is going for the "looking with the eyes at the text"
and Scott is using the term to mean "using an e-mail program to view the
message".
Well, sure, no code's going to run just by looking at it, but how are you
going to look at the message without a viewer?  Some program somewhere is
required to translate modem signals etc into a message.  As Scott points
out, this program could read the message and do nasties with it.  But once
you get the message, you can read it safely, without danger of it being
run.  So, to sum up, viruses can not execute by just readiing them, but
the e-mail program can execute them, by "reading" the message before you do.
Not that any reputable e-mail program would of course...:-)
I wonder if I actually made this any clearer?
Steve
... Just what WAS Timon's problem, anyway?
--- FMailX 1.22a+ / RA2.50+
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