Slashdot Mirror
Trend Micro Quarantines Letter P
kkenedy writes "I thought this was the funniest thing I have read in a long time: CRN reports that a bug in an update to one of Trend Micro's security products inadvertently blocks all incoming e-mail containing the letter P." Makes me glad I don't use it, else I wouldn't get any mail, purely on the basis of my surname.
First ost, first ost!
Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
Emails telling me that I can enlarge my penis...
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
eter ier icked a eck of ickled eer :)
if eter ier icked a eck of ickled eer
wheres the ickled eer eter ier ecked
Kingdom of Loathing (www.kingdomofloathing.com) Addicted is me
Sources within the company say that the bug is not the result of an unfortunate typo, but rather the outcome of an anti-spam filter which was intended to remove all obscene references to urine from email. The National Association of Urologists and Endocrinologists is up in arms.
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
"In the United States, customers have been contacted directly via e-mail, and we've notified the reseller channel."
;P
Wonder if those mails had the letter
Would you like to have a larger qenis?
Men, are you sick and tired of women sighing with disaqqointment when you take
off your trousers?
Doesn't it really qiss you off?
Well now with new QENISGROW2000, (a unique herbal remedy) you can have them
GASQ when you UNSHEATH your manhood.
grasqee
Ummmm, like time to expand your horizons maybe?
Our corporation has incorporated some content inspection product for email. After doing so, a certain employee stopped receiving emails. It turned out that it was because he had "shit" in his name ;-)
From: suort@microsoft.com
Here's a link to our latest Service Ack for the Windows X Oerating system. lease download this 550MB Service Ack, and all your roblems will be solved.
Eole (figure this one!) with NT4 and below will not be suorted. The rice for this roduct under Subscrition Advantage will be $100 er year er license.
Issued in ublic interest by the Entagon.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
You mean their QA actually signed off a product that rejected p but accepted 25 other potentially dangerous alphabetical characters ? The mind boggles. The only way to be safe is to block all the evil characters and let the digits through
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Wachovia has been blocking ALL email with "hi" in the title for almost 2 years now with no notice of what the problem is, just "rejected due to policy". But they do NOT view it as a problem even though they have around 25,000-30,000 employees. If only 1% are entitled "hi" and each gets maybe 10 emails a day, that is 2500-3000 emails blocked per day with no notice.
Nice service from a BANK. Their tech department is pretty stupid.
maybe it was Cowboy from Nepal?
of a problem a the local government of Scunthorpe (UK) had recently. Their obscenity checker balked at a substring of the town name.....
Due to recent a recent bug, any emails containing the letter 'P' have been filtered by an update to our software.
You can recover your email from the 'Quarantine' folder.
We are sorry for any confusion this might have caused, and include the missing material below:
Please insert as required.
PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP
pppppppppppppppppppppp
A certain unnamed tester at Trend Micro was given the _ink sli_
Yet Socrates himself is particularly missed.
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.
you s_elled both _leasure and _erversion incorrectly
That was classic intercourse!
There is a broblem with our sbam filtering broduct.
:-)
You should install the latest batch #916 to ubdate your brogram
It's not s\0x71am, it's "unsolicited bulk email". Now we know the motivation behind this renaming... ;-)
is removed, I believe. Here's the effects on some of the mails:
...
1. Sent thru Microsoft Assport - your secure login to the e-world.
2. I assed my MCSE exams.
3. Laying with colleagues might land you in harassment charges.
4. All work and no Lay makes Jack
5. Boys and Girls, come out to lay
The moon does shine as bright as day!
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Kidna makes me wonder as to how much time they spend making that and if they even tested it before releasing it...
Candy-Coated Knowledge
I wonder if you can get around this by writing "P" in HTML code:
p=p
P=P
OK, so Trend issued a ruleset which blocks all mail containing the letter 'P' - one and a half hours later, they fixed the problem, which is pretty good going IMHO.
I've been using Trend's Desktop solution (OfficeScan) at work for just over a year now, with no problems at all. Trend have a very good reputation for updating their rulesets very very quickly when a new virus hits the wild - for example in the case of "Love Bug" a couple of years back, they had a new pattern file available in less than 45 minutes, where other vendors took 24 to 36 hours.
Since OfficeScan (and AFAIK, all the Trend Products) can be configured to automatically update their Pattern, Engine and Core files whenever a new version becomes available, that effectively means that all desktop PC's and Servers can be running with suitable pattern files before you even see any incidence of a new virus.
People need to get some perspective on this issue - Yes, there was a problem, but it's fixed. Trend's product base is very stable, very fast and very effective. One small problem like this is just that: small !
Disclaimer: No, I don't work for Trend - I'm just a very happy end user
Disclaimer: I meant what I thought, not what I wrote! What? You can't read my Mind? Oh dear!
Yes, the product has the potential for big-brother type thing (filtering mail, etc...) but we don't use it for any of that.
:)
;)
#1) We use it along with Viruswall to block incoming viruses (It's a proxy that sits in front of Sendmail for us....) Works really well; we haven't had a virus outbreak in 2+ years. (Lousy Outlook!)
#2) We use it to filter out Spam. I don't get _any_ Spam at my work address. At all. Very impressive if you ask me!
Viruswall & eManager are pretty ugly pieces of code, but they do the job. We don't get viruses and don't get Spam, and that's why we use it.
Having said that, this stop-the-P thing is a mess. I just checked our rulefiles, and we jumped from rulefile 914 to 920..... glad to see that
--DM
"We wanted to be as open as possible about this," he said. "In the United States, customers have been contacted directly via e-mail, and we've notified the reseller channel."
I can see the email now -
"Due to an error in our most recent update, e-mails containing a certain letter are now blocked. We can't tell you which one. Really. But make sure you u . . . reset your security setting ASA . . err really quickly.
Listen - just do it right now - this is embarrassing.
Thank you - Trend Micro"
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
me thnks wld b btr 2 rmv th vwls.
The only emails with vowels are spam... I work at a school. Damn mobile phones.
Anything that provides cheap and easy acccess to millions of 'potential customers' will always attract morons prepared to abuse the system regardless of the consequences for others. To replace email at this point would be a staggering endeavour with no guarantee the same abuse will not take place with the new system.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
...when the funniest thing you have read in a while is about a software update causing random e-mail loss...
This show brought to you by the letter P and a large trout.
Mr. Burns: Okay, let's make this sporting, Leonard. If you can tell me why I shouldn't fire you without using the letter "E", you can keep your job. Lenny: Ah... okay...um... I'm a good work... guy... Mr. Burns: You're fired. Lenny: But I didn't say--! Mr. Burn: You will... (OPENS TRAP DOOR) Lenny: Eieeeee-e-e-e-e-e-eee!
I fall into one of those "low double digit customers".... and even blank emails were getting stripped. As the filter also checks embedded code (RTF, HTML, etc)... even a blank email's gonna have a P in it somewhere... Only exception here was OWA and some Mac users where messages seemingly used plain text for the most part. 2 hour window of all mail gone into the ether. Fun
They had to retract the use of the letter P due to pending legal action by SCO who claim that they orginally came up with most of the letter P and the number 3 and the semicolon... but the Spelling Community thinks that with proper replacements for the copywrited characters, the whole desperate affair can be largely ignored.
Windows XP SP2 told me to install third-party software that prevents viruses and protects stability... I chose Ubuntu
Nobody had bothered to teach us about debuggers at that stage, so we tried our best inserting diagnostic printf's everywhere, but despite days of searching we could never find what was causing it. In the end, we inserted some code to count to where the end of the string should have been and replace the "p" with a null character.
We got marked down anyway. I still have the source code somewhere, but I haven't dared to look at it for fear of provoking the code gods ... :/
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I remember last year that their mail filtering system (I think it's the Interscan antivirus) that would block all messages with "!!!" claiming that it was spam. I knew a lot of people who complained about this because sometimes for informal discussion, to emphasize something you might use "!!!" in your message.
;)
I just hope Interscan doesn't block slashdot because of this comment.
Take-off every
Hmmm...
:p
Ya think the folks at Sesame Street would be upset by this??
Brought to you by the folks calling for the release of the letter P
I have a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old. I would like a filter like that for my swimming pool.
I'd also like to point out that Trend Micro offers a great free online virus scanner that comes in very handy when you get a call from a friend/relative who's having computer problems. No need to haul over and install your own virus scanner (which is undoubtedly against said virus scanner's EULA anyway) just to find out if they're infected. I can't remember if it actually CLEANS the viruses it finds, but manually removing most viruses isn't all that tough once you know what you're looking for.
The HouseCall product has also spotted viruses that Norton did not.
It took them an hour and a half to compose a warning EMail to their customers that didn't have the letter P in in anywhere.
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
Dear Trend Micro:
.
You guys are oo heads for ushing out this stu id screwed u u date.
Your develo ment team is a cra y bunch of oor rogrammers and your
roduct is is ile of cra
lease iss off.
Signed
U set customer
Sure, it's a minor bug, but how could they possibly have missed it while testing? It's not so much that the bug is a problem as that it indicates that they didn't check whether the patch worked before releasing it.
eople need to get some perspective on this issue - Yes, there was a problem, but it's fixed. Trend's product base is very stable, very fast and very effective. One small problem like this is just that: small !
Agreed, it is a small problem - but it's a very funny one.
Most of us don't have that much going for us in our lives, especially after the bubble burst - can we just have some fun with this please?
I can't believe they didn't send the classic "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". Back when I was doing QA, if there was a text field, I'd fill it to the gunnels with stuff like that.
The programming error was stupid, but things happen - that's why you have a QA Team.
It's also an example why it's important to have QA do something other than run matrices and automated test scripts. Those only get what they're scripted to catch, and that's not where the "critical fumbles" occur.
It's gonna take a while for them to live THIS one down.
Ralphie
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
We used Trend Micros product on Exchange and suddenly noticed that it was dumping a lot of resumes into the trash as they came in. And it was only the best resumes that it was trashing.
Want to guess what was offensive?
"Magna Cum Laude"
Umm, how funny is that?
what? what I thought we were in the trust tree in the nest, were we not?
From the article : In the United States, customers have been contacted directly via e-mail
Does the email sent to customers contain the letter P? How can one describe the problem without using the letter P?
"There is a problem^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hissue with emails containing the 16th letter of the alp^Hfabet. You are advised to update^H^H^H^H^H^Hdownload the latest patch^H^H^H^H^Hfix from our website at http://w^Hoh damn!"
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.