Slashdot Mirror
Borking Outlook Express
Johannes writes: "Swedish Gnuheter has a story on Nick Moffitt arranging with his X-headers in way that makes it impossible to read his email with Microsoft WebTV or Outlook Express. Moffitt states: 'The folks using Outlook Express have locked themselves into a
limited subset of the information that can flow over the Internet, and
are blaming me personally for not limiting my transmissions to that
outlook-centric subset.'
See also original email (in English). Immoral? Or just right?" Looks like Moffit's "Who, me?" attitude is tongue in cheek, but the creative header changes here are hilarious.
I have the same problem with this as any pro-my-agenda-over-yours approach. If what we are seeking is equality/respect, resorting to the same tactics are unlikely to legitimately modify behavior. It's not through lynchings and beatings that the civil rights movement succeeded. It's not through imperial conquest that India became an independent state.
And it isn't going to be through holier-than-thou rhetoric couched in do-unto-others-as-they-do-unto-you that the open source/free software movements are going to make converts.
What was our reaction to MS disabling access to the MSN sites?
Blazing anger.
And this is different exactly how?
When a Linux person does it, it's 'funny' (+1).
This is immature and childish.
True that.
I hope he comes to his senses and refrains from this kind of petty vendettas.
When people start ignoring his email (message->block sender), maybe then he'll get the idea: being a jackass to other people might be funny for roughly two seconds, but no longer than that.
[o]_O
So he wants people to be able to use any kind of software to read email, and is annoyed that he gets documents from Windows users which are unreadable in his email program. So his response is to make sure that other people cannot necessarily read his email messages, and he expects others to adjust their computing environment to read what he sends. How is this any different from his adjusting his own computing environment to read what they send? Or is it that he just believes that the Internet should be mutually unintelligible (I mean, more than it already is)?
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
As he pointed out, Outlook users send people unreadable, non-standard attachments all the time. What's the difference? Why do non-Outlook users always have to be the ones to conform to what Outlook users do?
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
This post is in reply to your "exclude microsoft users" post, and the attitude in the article exemplified by this quote: ``It's true that I run a mailing list that does not allow posting from Windows users. Many people complain about this, but in my mind I see it as no different than a restaurant or dance hall having a dress code.''
When did we become such elitists? When users are arbitrarily excluded and abused in the name of "free software," I begin to think that pehaps these same people now toting the supremacy of their operating system might in another time promote the supremacy of their language, nationality, or race.
I see nothing productive in this article or the attitude of its creator. The point of our movement is to produce good, useful software, and to make it available to everyone. The point is not to force them to use it, or to punish those who don't. Where's the freedom in that?
and
I probably don't agree with what he is doing, but I can see that it is in some ways a good idea to punish people whose email programs do not follow the RFC's, because that may be the only way to get people to put pressure on the vendors to provide correct software.
Remember, part of MS strategy is to make life difficult for people who don't use MS software and want to interact with those who do. Selling clients that don't follow the RFC's is just a part of this. Maybe this will make a few users complain to microsoft that they can't read a properly formated email using their MS email clients and force MS to change its practices.
And this is different exactly how?
He is not a monopoly. Microsoft is. What he did (if intentional) was not illegal. What Microsoft did (if intentional) is.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
First of all he is not being a petulant child. He points out a perfectly valid way of making a PLAINTEXT email message illegigible to Outlook users: start a line with the word begin. I would be pretty miffed if the provider of my mail client of choice has made decisions that dictate the manner in which I compose the body of an email. I think most rational Windows users would regard this "innovative" feature to be a flagrant abuse of power on the part of my email client vendor. The other tricks he plays are less insightful but bring to light a common complaint of non-Microsoft software vendors: Microsoft blatantly disregards many standards an hijacks others for personal gain. The second point, exclusion of Outlook clients from his mailing list is also not without precedent. If I wish to create a locale where like minded people can gather I will definitely put up some simple barriers to entry for people who cannot share my opinions. In this case, he has made some decisions about how email clients should work and he only wishes to share his list with those with similar points of view. Since it is his list and not a general public utility it is his right.
I see nothing productive in this article or the attitude of its creator. The point of our movement is to produce good, useful software, and to make it available to everyone. The point is not to force them to use it, or to punish those who don't. Where's the freedom in that?
Well spoken. But the bottom line is... it's his choice. If you don't like it, too bad, don't participate. This in essence is what freedom is all about. How free is it if you make him conform to your idea of what is normal? It may feel free to you, but what about to him? I run a restaurant that has a dress code and we also do not allow smoking crack on the premises. My restaurant, my rules. You don't like how it impinges on your freedom... too bad, go somewhere else.
In this particular case, you are free to participate, simply by conforming to his rules. Too much work for you?? Don't understand how to do it?? These are the criteria, deal with it.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
I recieve a LOT of mail. Much of it is from Windows users.
Those users expect me to be able to read their Word format files without complaint. (Like I am going to pay almost $400 for a word processor for 1-2 documents a week.)
They expect that I read their html formatted mail with bizzare IE-only extensions.
These are the same people who become totally baffled if I send them a ASCII document with Unix line wraps.
At some point you get tired of dealing with people who expect the world to conform to their expectations and platform while making *no* effort to adapt to anything outside of their narrow world-view.
My method of dealing with people who send Word documents is to return the favor by sending them Star Office format. It is amazing how much they complain about it. They expect me to install a very expensive package, but are totally unwilling to install something that costs them next to nothing. ($50 if they buy the boxed version.)
What I find even more interesting are the people who seem to be backing the Outlook user in this "fight". The Outlook bug that is being exploited is quite old. Not only has Microsoft refused to fix it, it appears that they have removed the work-around. (I still do not see why people continue to use Outlook. The only reason that I hear from people is because they need the calendaring support and shared folders. There are other programs that do similar things. They are just being lazy.)
Part of the "PC" movement in this country is the unwillingness (in fact that absolute abhorence) to tell someone when they are being stupid. Error-correction is no longer tolerated because someone's feelings might get hurt. Since when did the most sensitive and stupid gain control of what should or should not be done?
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
Come on. Get over yourself. Equating OS/software "religious" wars to real-world racism and intolerance is a bit of a stretch. They are completely different issues. I don't hear you crying "elitism" about all the websites out there that are unusable with any browser except IE, or that require Flash.
Actually, I see this kind of strategy as a Good Thing -- it's a good way to raise people's awareness of the general Suckiness of M$ and their products. Broken software, free or propriatary, needs to be rooted out and destroyed.
The dress code analogy is a good one -- it's his list to do with as he pleases. If he wants to exclude M$ users, that is his perogative. For a technical mailing list, it's not that bad an idea at all to force prospective users to have enough clue to have to exersize their craniums a little to be able to join. Just think of how many idiots we could get rid of here on
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Facts:
k b; en-us;Q260822
The actual exploit he is abusing is described here:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=
and is triggered by the text:
"begin " at the beginning of a line, followed by some text. Outlook renders from the begin onwards as an attachment, even without a matching "end".
The headers actually do different stuff, as described here:
http://www.rodos.net/outlook/
Now the headers by themselves are of minor amusement, the begin exploit is extremely discourteous on public mailing lists, as for digest members, it destroys the rest of the disgest - ie. it affects the posts of others.
Opinion:
Nick seems to think he's being terribly clever, by putting this "begin " in his attribution, so that his every mail is deliberately disruptive to public mailing lists. The whole thing is just a "look how clever I am" stunt and his actions justifications are purile in the extreme.
Don't condone this behaviour if you object when people send you unreadable html mail, or when script kiddies attack your box "to make you aware of a security problem", or when people take the words "freedom", "open source", and "linux" to support such idiotic, antisocial and deliberately disruptive behaviour.
How free is it if you make him conform to your idea of what is normal?
We aren't "forcing him to conform", we're forcing him to write in a format usable by all (you know, free means free across all boards, including proprietary).
Didn't RMS recently write an article about convincing people to not use Word attachments in email??
Isn't this the OPPOSITE?
Funny how you view things on the other side, isn't it?
If someone sends you a word doc, and you can't read it, its a big issue and everyone is serious.
If someone sends something that only linux users can read, its funny, and lets all shout "hurray!"
Think about it. And if you still think the second point, then you are, in fact, elitest.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I dislike HTML format mail, despite using clients that can read it. I dislike it for the following reasons:
1) It adds little or no value. Okay, so you feel that you can format the mail more readably using HTML. I find that I can make mails perfectly readable without it, so for me, it adds no value.
2) It wastes bandwidth. So what? I have a 10Mbps connection at work internally, with a 100Mbps connection to the outside world. At home, I have a 0.5Mbps ADSL conneciton, so what do I care? Well, email is the single biggest cause of traffic on the internet, beating web browsing, P2P apps, ftp, etc. If everyone sent all their mails in HTML, that amount of traffic would double or triple - HTML format mails tend to be two or three times the size of the equivalent plain text. That's simply a waste of bandwidth (given 1 above, which I know you disagree with)
3) Not all mail readers cope with HTML properly. This is a bigger concern for me - I'm afraid some of my friends use mail clients such as mutt, and so HTML mail is a hassle for them.
4) HTML spam is much worse than plain text spam. I always set my mail client to prefer plain text, because you can't embed cookies in URLs to images in plain text. Doing so in an HTML mail gives a clear indication that the mail address is valid (as the image has been requested, the mail has been recieved and read). I don't reply to spam for the same reason; let them think that there's no-one at the address, that the mail was just swallowed silently by a server somewhere.
5) I have a big, fast connection now, but I didn't two weeks ago. Until two weeks ago, i had a 33.6 dial up connection with 'phone charges per minute. HTML mails sucked then because they're bigger, and they almost invariably come with img tags. Unless you can set your client to download the images too *and* cache them sensibly, you have to go online to read the mail properly everytime you want to read it.
I could probably go on, but they're the 5 biggest reasons why I dislike HTML mail. That said, I do think that everyone should feel free to send mail in whatever format they want. Of course, everyone also has the right to request that people communicate with them in a different format. Kind of like if I started speaking Japanese to you - I'd expect you to ask me to speak English. (I don't speak Japanese, but you get my point)
Oh, and his mails don't croak Outlook Express, it just doesn't display them properly. For what it's worth, though, I just tried the "begin bug" in OE 5.5 and the mail displayed correctly, so it looks like it's been fixed.
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
It may be hypocrisy to you. However, for me at least, motives make a difference in life. Most people make IE only web sites out of ignorance or lazyness. The thought that there are other browsers available may not even occur to them or, if it does, they are too lazy to try and make their web sites work on other browsers. In my opinion, neither laziness nor ignorance are defensible and I am perfectly happy to condem a site that doesn't look right under Opera.
In this case, Moffit is not lazy or ignorant. You might not agree with his motives but you have to admit that with his knowledge and with a full understanding of the consequences he made a -- pretty funny -- decision to limit the applications that can view his email.
I am willing to applaud him for it (even though at work I also have to use Outlook and therefor could be negatively affected by his choice.)
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
This is immature and childish
He even states that in his mail. But maybe making a point often is. His point is, that outlook only displays a limited subset of mails, and to demonstrate that he tweaked some mails. That was apparently necessary, since seeing is believing (and now Microsoft can't go on saying "But noone would ever do that"), and we know the users of Outlook to be mostly ignorant of theoretical possibilities until one of them happens to actually manifest and destroy their harddisk.
Microsoft gets its hands dirty in undermining and muddying standards, the result is, that a lot of people wonder what to do with that 'word' document, why they get sent web-Pages in their e-mail, or how to avoid being diverted by nazi webservers, that refuse to serve pages to non-microsoft browsers, even if their client could render them perfectly well.
This behaviour of microsoft, adopted by web-masters, businessmen and Windows-users all over the planet, who refuse to let you join their club until you've got Windows+IE+Word installed (and don't even think about it) is widely accepted and good standing business practice. Now someone dares to raise awareness of that fact and it's childish. Maybe Microsoft should do some more lobbying to get it into the DMCA that any e-mail has to be outlook-compliant. Or maybe the folks over in Redmond should have taken it upon them to read some RFCs.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
What would you say, if I said use a program that can read Word docs??
I'd ask which RFC that's specified in so I could verify compliance. Email, unlike Word documents, is a real standard that was written specifically for ease of implementation and interoperability (even between machines with different ideas of character set).
The world welcomes MS to inspect the relevant RFCs and implement a compatable product. MS doesn't seem to have published a description of Word format anywhere.
Word is a proprietary format (not at all standard) that shifts like sand in the desert with no consideration of interoperability or safe interchange of data.
He's not shutting out all Windows email clients. Only Outlook Express.
Poeple not Lookout Express can still read his email, even if they are using Windows.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Outlook internally is one of the most poorly-engineered systems ever created. Its security model is a complete crock of shit that has several times nearly brought down the Internet. Microsoft's "programmers" wrote the attachment parsing code several times, each time being different and broken. (Proof: certain attachments aren't shown to the user because that broken code doesn't properly parse them, but if the user does "File->SaveAttachment" they *can* be saved because the saving code *does* properly parse them.)
You're free to bathe in a sewer if you want, but that doesn't mean people have to let you into their clubs.-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
This "attack" is nothing more than starting a line with the word
begin. Nothing more.
As the guy pointed out in his comments, they discovered it because someone on a mailing list happened to
begin a line with the magic word and *bam* every Outlook user who wasn't connected to an Exchange server (which sounds like a typical MS bug "fix") found the message to be garbled.
When MTAs and NNTP server had a from bug (where any line starting with
From was capitalized by the transport software, everyone agreed it was a bug. A nasty one, since it there were reasons it couldn't easily be fixed, but the message was still readable.
But suddenly we're "elitists" for saying that it's a bug - a critical bug - when MS Outlook interprets *any* line beginning with "begin" as the start of a UUENCODED block? Even though this produces unreadable garbage? And the latest versions of Outlook apparently don't even have an option that will allow the user to view the original message?
I agree there are some bloody annoying elitist attitudes on full parade here, but it seems to me that the elitists are the people who think every person on the planet should check their messages for any text that triggers Outlook bugs (e.g., lines beginning with "begin", any HTML keyword which will trigger the mandatory interpretation of the message as HTML, etc.) instead of MS admitting that they screwed the pooch on this one and issuing a quick patch.
They don't even have to use the same standards I demand of my own code - simply checking for a pattern where the "begin" is followed by an octal number would eliminate most of these false hits.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Check these:
Group blasts Internet Explorer 5.5 for lack of Web standards
Review of Netscape6... see paragraph 2 damning IE W3C compliance
IE 5.5 criticized for lack of Web standards
Microsoft claims conformance to CSS level 1 and DOM level 1 in IE6, so maybe they have done an about face on this issue (much like suddenly deciding security is more important than idiot-friendliness). Unfortunately, 95% of the current Windows user base is using IE5 because it comes with the OS (through Win2K at least).
As a developer who has to provide web interfaces from time to time, I can promise you that it is a lot of work to make a site compatible with both IE and Netscape. Each one drops the ball when it comes to W3C conformance. I guess it's encouraging that MS is attempting to implement standards compliance into one of their products.
And this is sharp contrast to IE 4? If you are going to compare the browsers, at least compare current browsers, don't compare the current IE to the 2 year old Netscape.
Enigma
If you can get your high horse to slow down long enough to step off it for a minute or two, you could install any of a zillion open source tools to modify your headers as messages pass in/out of your network, solving the problem and allowing you to use any MUA you please.
His point was that he wanted people to have to do a little work before they could be a part of the list. Ways of assessing that are imperfect, and his is just one. You can demonstrate you've done it by installing a non-default OS and/or MUA on your machine, or you can do as I've suggested above. Either way, you then pass, and are free to play.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS