From: "Rod Gasson" 


"John Tserkezis"  wrote in message
news:mailman.9.1080305004.2830.fidoavtech{at}videocam.net.au...
> Rod Gasson wrote:



> > It *could* be argued that the difference between text and data/binary is
> > that text only uses 7bits, where as data/binary uses 8bits, and in fact
this
> > was quite a valid arguement 30 years ago.  These days, many 'text'
documents
> > contain 8bit data so that distinction no longer holds water.
>
>   If you want to get pedantic about it (and this being AVTech, I'm sure
you do)
> your statement of "text only uses 7bits" is not strictly true.

Me.. pedantic?  Nah, never ;-)

>   "Text, in the traditional sense, uses only a limited subset of the full
ASCII
> character set.  All of it is contained within the lower 7 bits, but there
are
> indeed some control characters in that lower 7bits that are definately NOT
> classed as "text".

No, they are classed as control characters :-)

>   Even so, it is still possible to transport a trojan (notably absent in
this
> virus discussion) via plain text.
>   Good 'ole DOS batch files.

True, but even then they are totally harmless, unless you actually *run*
them.

I still don't know what mechanism could actually be used to *run* a cookie
file though, and that is where this part of the discussion originates from.

>   Used to be popular to do a format c: | yes.txt back in those days.
>   Even some of the more modern "viruses" are no more
ingeinous than that
too.
>   And people are STILL stupid enough to run them.

Yeah, sad isn't it.
The one that really gets me though is the jdbmgr.exe hoax - I'm sure you are
familiar with it - There must be 10000's of people out that that have
recieved this hoax email, and BLINDLY proceeded to delete the file as per
the instructions. The hoax is years old now, and I still get people emailing
me to say they found the 'virus' on their system and as a result I may have
been infected with it too.

>   Whoops, that's it, I've just made Bob even more paranoid.

Is that possible?  ;-)

> > OK, so now all we have to do is convince Bob of this fact.
>
>   Last time I spoke to him about it, he spoke of going to extraordinary
lengths
> to isolate himself if he ever was connected to the 'net.

Don't forget that Bob always wears a condom when he wanks too - just so he
doesn't give himself some nasty disease (or get himself pregnant).



> All you need is a firewall and half a brain.

Sadly, most people seem to have neither.  It's a really bad mix.

> And even then, you only really need the firewall if
> you're going to stay connected 24/7.

For the first few years that we were on the net 24/7 we didn't even bother
with a firewall. I only decided that it was a good idea when we moved up to
broadband.  Even now I don't consider them as being an essential thing to
have, because other than the microsoft bugs, if you don't have any
servers/services running then there is nothing to really exploit anyway.
The major benefit of running our firewall isn't so much as to STOP
unauthorised accesses, but mainly to monitor and log the ATTEMPTS.
Prior to setting up the firewall I was blissfully unaware of the several
thousand hacking attempts per day.

I must however add that having the firewall has warned us (and stopped) some
of our dialup customers from further spreading a virus that they've had on
their machine.

>   Heck, even my win2000 machine doesn't have a firewall (and it's online
> whenever it's turned on).  Just patch up and turn off everything except
TCP/IP.

See comments above..   No services running = nothing to exploit. :-)

Cheers
Rod


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