so I'm not sure why they should or could be ashamed of their lectures.
Interesting point. I don't think professors in general are ashamed of their lectures; however, I can certainly imagine that bad notes will reflect bad on the professor - as the person reading the notes cannot know whether the lecture was bad, or the note taker.
More likely, a better question would be, which you allude to is, what law or laws prevents them from distributing their notes?
That depends on what kind of notes they are. If the notes for instance include parts of what a professor writes on a blackboard (or whiteboard), copyright laws.
The interesting case are notes that do not contain any verbatim copies; whether copied from the blackboard, or what the professor is saying, but are purely describing the lecture of the professor. Who owns the copyright on that?
I will now post this notice informing all journalists that I must be contacted first to be qouted outside of this Slashdot discussion.
Irrelevant to this discussion. The (fair) use of quoting with respect to copyright laws has been established quite some time ago.
it could be argued that XFree86 is part of the operating system
Sun doesn't share your opinion. They sell you Solaris, which includes SunOS, and some packages. As the name indicates, SunOS is the OS, and it doesn't include openwin (Sun's X package). However, I do not know what else besides the kernel makes SunOS. And AFAIK, you cannot get SunOS, without getting Solaris.
What I would want would be a rain of AKs and ammunition.
And what good would that be? Remember that of everything dropped, half, if not more, goes to "the enemy", in this the army. They are trained; the farmer is not. The farmer has a daughter to save, they don't. Most likely, the farmer doesn't have any interest in going to war.
Hmm, maybe air-dropping massive amounts of information is the right way to go. After all, to defeat the Oppressive Bastards you don't really need food or weapons, you need a collective will and the ability to organize. Both of these things can be done with the net, and you need _none_ of the advanced features listed at the start of the exam.
While this is true, it's not the point of the question. The question wasn't "how to use the devices to organize a revolution". It's very unlikely our farmer is interested in that.
The question is: your daughter is dying. You now have a device to connect to the net, even if you don't know what the net is yet. The clock is ticking. Can you save your daughter?
Saving the daughter is the goal - she will be dead before you can start your revolution.
The first thing I'd look for information on edible plants, catching fish, trapping birds, etc. North Korea (even in the middle of a war) is not a wasteland.
He's a farmer. In a low-tech society. Bets are he knows more about edible plants, catchable fish and trappable birds in his environment than any website outthere.
Information on how to keep the soldiers out
He's a farmer, In a low-tech society. He doesn't have the materials to keep soldiers out. He lives in a wooden shed, with some cloth as windows and the door.
how to prevent the child from getting sick
He's a farmer, In a low-tech society. He doesn't have the money to buy food with the appropriate vitamins, or to give his daughter food from all 5 food groups.
(or even conceived)
He's a farmer, In a low-tech society. Children are his only escape from his situation.
So, you read the instructions (in Korean) and fire up the box. You are immediately connected via ssl to the homepage for Free Korea(tm). They ask for your first name and if you are in any danger. You reply (speaking, of course, since you are illiterate) that your daughter is sick and that your family is starving. This is translated via voice recognition software into plain text (Uniocode), encrypted, and sent along with your exact coordinates (remember the GPS?) to Free Korea's site. The data is correlated, flight plans are made, and the next day another aircraft flys over. This time, it drops c-rats (icky, but they will get you by), medicine for your daughter, and instructions to call back in ASAP. So you eat the first real food you've had in days and your daughter's coughing lessens enough for her to sleep. When you call back in, you are told that you will have to move someplace and to start packing.
Nice story, but unlikely. Yeah, suppose the farmer really takes the time to figure out how the box works, and indeed believes it's useful, and makes the call. Your "Free Korea" gets the call, along with 100 others. Free Korea plots the points, and sends a plane the next day. Our farmer will be drop off point 37. Unfortunally, at drop off point 23, there isn't a farmer waiting for the plane, but some anti-aircraft missiles.
Our farmer waited all day. No rice, and his daughter just died.
Game over. You score 0 out of a possible 397 points. That ranks you as an utter novice. Play again?
Anyone ever see any successful revolutions helped by telecommunications?
Communications is essential. Both for staying in power, and taking over power, whether it's peaceful or not. Take your average banana republic, and wait for the next coup. What are the 2 things they go for first? The presidential palace, and the broadcasting stations.
remember that all power fundamentally comes from the barrel of a gun (Mao)
Real control isn't the barrel of a gun; real control is control over communications. Who's more powerful in the US: Bill Clinton, or Oprah Winfrey?
Not all revolutions were based on violence. Witness what happened 10 years ago in the countries in Eastern Europe. Revolutions, but not fought with guns. Helped by telecommunications? You bet. Why do you think the people in those countries thought they would be better off without their government, and why didn't it happen 20 years before? Because 20 years earlier, their government could control the communications much more than it did 10 years ago.
Someone was apparently charitably giving away computers, and they're willing to fly their airplanes into North Korean airspace. I presume they have a desire to help.
Yeah, but I bet their idea of "help" isn't "let's give weapons to anyone who asks for them". Even in the unlikely event the organization that dropped those devices also was willing to drop weapons, how would they know they the request came from someone willing to overthrow their goverment, and not from the army (who certainly got its share from the dropped devices as well), willing to shoot down an enemy plane?
the next time the 3 soldiers come into your hut, instead of finding one scared farmer, they find 20 angry ones.
Oh, really? I think that if I were a poor farmer with a starving daughter, I would rather work all day tending my crops instead of sitting in a neighbours hut ready to defend his daughters food. Besides, you assume a lack of abilities to communicate between local farmers; if there something preventing communication, how are you going to find your neighbour on the net? And if you stumble upon a person claiming to be your neighbour, how would you know?
lack of information. This includes both lack of knowledge about the laws of physics, and the inability to gather the necessary physical data
This experiment is there to increase our knowledge of the laws of physics. With your reasoning, all experiments would be pointless. Either we already know what the experiment could possible tell us, or we don't, in which case we can't do the experiment.
you run into problems with the fact that the process of measurement affects the measurement
Yes, and if I stand on a scale, that will influence my mass as well. That doesn't mean that the measurement is pointless. The conclusion of the Heisenburg principle isn't "all measurements are pointless". The conclusion is "there is a limit on what you can measure simultaneously".
you run into problems of chaos theory and spontaneous order. The problem is that a small error in measurement can lead to an enourmous change in the outcome.
Yes, and that's true for a lot of problems. But you can also calculate how much errors in your measurement influence the final result. Weather forecasting is a perfect example. There's a limit, but todays limit is further than yesterdays, due to the ability to use more data, and better precision. Nowadays, you see 5 day forecasts. I certainly remember the times you got only 3 days, and the forecast for the third day was much less detailed than you get nowadays for 5 days.
Limits are nothing more than limits. As long as you know what your limits are, you can still do a lot. Limits don't mean "all measurements are pointless". Limits also chance over time.
Whether or not wiretapping will happen doesn't depend on the IETF making a standard or not. If there is enough demand for wiretapping, vendors will create wiretapping abilities. If there's no standard, each vendor will make their own; leading to different ways of wiretapping, each with different security holes.
Just like not all phonetapping is done by the goverment, not all wiretapping has to be done by the government either. Companies can choose to tap the phones of their employees; they might also want to be able to wiretap their routers. And before you say "Well, they shouldn't", I say "Yes, they shouldn't, and wouldn't it be nice if they had no reason for it?".
Client:Is the password '0'? Server:No Client:Is it '1'? Server:No Client:Is it '2'? Server:No
Well, if it was like that, the server could do it all by itself. It's more like this:
Slave: Master, oh, master, give me something to do. Master: hands over box with stuff Here, go through this, and when you are done, report if there's something interesting. Slave shuffles off to a corner, goes over the box, comes back to the Master sometime later. Slave: Master, oh, master, I didn't find anything interesting! Master: oh, you didn't? Well, well, well, what a surprise. Master turns around, fetches a new box. Here, try this box instead. Slave shuffles off to his corner.
For example, say Boeing wanted to design the Next Generation spaceship using genetic algorithms. They certainly could distribute the work for that type of application.
They could, but I highly doubt it will be worthwhile for them. The big problem is trust. With RC5, and other cracking contests, trust isn't a major issue. A client saying "I found the key" is easily falsified. A client saying "Nope, the key isn't in this block", while the key is, is a problem, but you'll find out eventually; and you have to "just" retest the blocks. And with the assumption that the number of people not playing fair is low, chances that the winning key is given to an unfair person is low.
But it is more of a problem where all the results are actually used. What if a malicious person starts feeding false results? Sometimes, it doesn't matter. The first large scale internet cooperated crack of a code was RSA-129 by Lenstra et al. That wasn't brute force, but used computing power to initially populate a huge, sparse matrix (it's been years ago, I might misremember some details). The final algorithm was robust enough to cope with some percentage of bogus data.
But do you think Boeing will take that risk? Would *you* want to fly an airplane if it was designed using numbers returned by some random script kiddie?
Since distributed processing forms a virtually limitless computer system, will all our personal computers of the future be simply devices that share processing power?
No. Sidestepping the fact that distributed processing doesn't form a limitless computer system (let's take the current RC5-64 contest; there are about 40,000 participants. Let's be pessimistic and say every participant only uses one computer. Let's also assume there are 1 billion computers in the world, 1 computer for every 6 people. That would mean you could do about 25000 contests simultanuously. With the current speed, it takes about 6 years to crack a single message, so, throw a lot more computers together than there are, and you're looking at cracking 4000 messages a year. That's far away from limitless...) sharing processing power isn't that easy.
RC5-64, and other brute force cracking attempts are easy to do distributed. It takes the most trivial distributed setup (one master, and a bunch of slaves that all work indenpendently - all the master needs to do is bookkeeping, there's no other communication or synchronization needed). Many other problems aren't easily turned into a distributed equivalent. Other problems only work well in specialized distributed environments, parallel computers, where processors are synchronized and you know in advance when which processor is going to write where in memory. Simulations of fluid flows for instance.
Some problems are impossible to solve. Take for instance the classical election problem. You have two identical processors, with identical software. Elect a leader.
Even harder is the problem of how to split up arbitrary tasks in a distributed environment - and deciding which problems can be solved distributed, and which don't.
Then of course, there are things like nodes and links going down, unknown latency, nodes that cannot be trusted, not knowing your topology, etc, etc. Distributed computing in general is a science - and not an easy one.
Well, I guess in one way it's nice, but wouldn't it be better if hotmail customers can decide for themselves what to filter? OTOH, hotmail accounts are free, so people get what they pay for.
It isn't making me removing hotmail.com from my procmailrc file though...
Sure it can. (BTW, it's virusses). The character set is irrelevant. It's what you do with it that counts. If it contains code, and you execute it, and your sandbox contains a flaw, you are in danger. Regardless whether the code is in ASCII, ISO-LATIN-1, Unicode or something else.
Sure, you'll probably delete/home/fredf, but unless you login as root, you'll most likely do no damage to anything else.
Well, yes, but/home/abigail is were the interesting files are. I can restore the system in a few hours; just pop in the CD and reinstall. Everything else needs to come from backup - whenever that was made the last time. And the backup might contain the dormant virus.
Is it possible for a virus to execute on a unix machine and do any damage?
Most certainly, Unix machines aren't magically protected against virusses. The best known example is Morris' worm in the late '80s. While classified as worm, there was nothing in particular that wouldn't make it a virus. Morris just had no intention to destroy things.
Here (well, that should have been a link, but slashdot decided to filter it out.... Try http://www.foad.org/%7Eabigail/Perl/virus.pl, and blame someone for not being able to click on a link.) is a little "virus" I hacked together in 5 minutes, using Perl. It won't do any harm, and it will only infect files ending in ".pl" in the current directory, but it will replicate - even if you just "compile" the code.
There are a few reasons why virusses on Windows are more common than on Unix. First is the permission system. A windows user or process typically has access to all files, so it's much easier to do damage once you are running. On Unix, you either have to hack root, or you can only do "limited" damage (although quite severe for a user). Secondly, there are many more Windows machines out there then Unix machines - besides, Unix is a twisty little maze of incompatible systems anyway. Third, there are more applications that will execute code without the using being aware. Fourth, "sneakernet" with cracked binaries of dubious source is more common. It might take a bit more effort, it's certainly not impossible to write virusses for Unix.
whatever would have to have the ability to obtain root privileges
Unix has almost 30 years of history of security holes that give you root access. Ever heard of scriptkiddies with "root kits"?
It seems reasonably likely that the only way to make "executable email" safe is the implementation of some sort of capabilities-based system that can strictly lock down what particular programs are permitted to do.
Yes, and I got the impression that was the case now. The problem are bugs in the implementation; this time wrongly marked modules. Next time, it's a buffer overflow in sendmail or an HTTP daemon...
Um, how about ASKING the user if they REALLY want to send all of those emails???
That doesn't help the receiver, does it? Or do you think a virus writer will answer "no" when being asked whether he/she really wants to send the email?
Web pages can't do any real damage by themselves (except by replicating), unless of course they use java to do something nasty.
Or javascript, or anything else that allows execution of code in combination with implementations that have security holes; even an inline PostScript image can potentially lead to a security hole - PostScript after all is code. And before you start pointing to M$, take a look at the CERT archives and look at all the security holes in Unix applications over the past. At least this virus doesn't become active until someone reads the mail, while for attacks on sendmail all that needs to happen is delivery of "mail"...
The bottom line is that you are putting yourself at risk when you execute code that is driven by a third party; be it an embedded scripting language, or just data.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting point. I don't think professors in general are ashamed of their lectures; however, I can certainly imagine that bad notes will reflect bad on the professor - as the person reading the notes cannot know whether the lecture was bad, or the note taker.
More likely, a better question would be, which you allude to is, what law or laws prevents them from distributing their notes?
That depends on what kind of notes they are. If the notes for instance include parts of what a professor writes on a blackboard (or whiteboard), copyright laws.
The interesting case are notes that do not contain any verbatim copies; whether copied from the blackboard, or what the professor is saying, but are purely describing the lecture of the professor. Who owns the copyright on that?
I will now post this notice informing all journalists that I must be contacted first to be qouted outside of this Slashdot discussion.
Irrelevant to this discussion. The (fair) use of quoting with respect to copyright laws has been established quite some time ago.
-- Abigail
Perhaps, but that's beside the point. The goal is to save the farmers daughter, not the farmers grandchildren.
-- Abigail
Given that I can replace everything on my Linux box with something else, including the kernel, does that mean, there is no Linux operating system?
-- Abigail
Sun doesn't share your opinion. They sell you Solaris, which includes SunOS, and some packages. As the name indicates, SunOS is the OS, and it doesn't include openwin (Sun's X package). However, I do not know what else besides the kernel makes SunOS. And AFAIK, you cannot get SunOS, without getting Solaris.
-- Abigail
Maybe not in the OS you make. But since OS is a vaguely defined term, shouldn't the creator of the OS decide what's part of the OS, and what isn't?
Does it really matter?
-- Abigail
And what good would that be? Remember that of everything dropped, half, if not more, goes to "the enemy", in this the army. They are trained; the farmer is not. The farmer has a daughter to save, they don't. Most likely, the farmer doesn't have any interest in going to war.
-- Abigail
While this is true, it's not the point of the question. The question wasn't "how to use the devices to organize a revolution". It's very unlikely our farmer is interested in that.
The question is: your daughter is dying. You now have a device to connect to the net, even if you don't know what the net is yet. The clock is ticking. Can you save your daughter?
Saving the daughter is the goal - she will be dead before you can start your revolution.
-- Abigail
He's a farmer. In a low-tech society. Bets are he knows more about edible plants, catchable fish and trappable birds in his environment than any website outthere.
Information on how to keep the soldiers out
He's a farmer, In a low-tech society. He doesn't have the materials to keep soldiers out. He lives in a wooden shed, with some cloth as windows and the door.
how to prevent the child from getting sick
He's a farmer, In a low-tech society. He doesn't have the money to buy food with the appropriate vitamins, or to give his daughter food from all 5 food groups.
(or even conceived)
He's a farmer, In a low-tech society. Children are his only escape from his situation.
-- Abigail
Nice story, but unlikely. Yeah, suppose the farmer really takes the time to figure out how the box works, and indeed believes it's useful, and makes the call. Your "Free Korea" gets the call, along with 100 others. Free Korea plots the points, and sends a plane the next day. Our farmer will be drop off point 37. Unfortunally, at drop off point 23, there isn't a farmer waiting for the plane, but some anti-aircraft missiles.
Our farmer waited all day. No rice, and his daughter just died.
Game over. You score 0 out of a possible 397 points. That ranks you as an utter novice. Play again?
-- Abigail
Communications is essential. Both for staying in power, and taking over power, whether it's peaceful or not. Take your average banana republic, and wait for the next coup. What are the 2 things they go for first? The presidential palace, and the broadcasting stations.
remember that all power fundamentally comes from the barrel of a gun (Mao)
Real control isn't the barrel of a gun; real control is control over communications. Who's more powerful in the US: Bill Clinton, or Oprah Winfrey?
Not all revolutions were based on violence. Witness what happened 10 years ago in the countries in Eastern Europe. Revolutions, but not fought with guns. Helped by telecommunications? You bet. Why do you think the people in those countries thought they would be better off without their government, and why didn't it happen 20 years before? Because 20 years earlier, their government could control the communications much more than it did 10 years ago.
-- Abigail
Really? Hmmm. Oh well, I guess those are the ones that get moderated down, because I seldomly see them.
-- Abigail
Yeah, but I bet their idea of "help" isn't "let's give weapons to anyone who asks for them". Even in the unlikely event the organization that dropped those devices also was willing to drop weapons, how would they know they the request came from someone willing to overthrow their goverment, and not from the army (who certainly got its share from the dropped devices as well), willing to shoot down an enemy plane?
the next time the 3 soldiers come into your hut, instead of finding one scared farmer, they find 20 angry ones.
Oh, really? I think that if I were a poor farmer with a starving daughter, I would rather work all day tending my crops instead of sitting in a neighbours hut ready to defend his daughters food. Besides, you assume a lack of abilities to communicate between local farmers; if there something preventing communication, how are you going to find your neighbour on the net? And if you stumble upon a person claiming to be your neighbour, how would you know?
-- Abigail
This experiment is there to increase our knowledge of the laws of physics. With your reasoning, all experiments would be pointless. Either we already know what the experiment could possible tell us, or we don't, in which case we can't do the experiment.
you run into problems with the fact that the process of measurement affects the measurement
Yes, and if I stand on a scale, that will influence my mass as well. That doesn't mean that the measurement is pointless. The conclusion of the Heisenburg principle isn't "all measurements are pointless". The conclusion is "there is a limit on what you can measure simultaneously".
you run into problems of chaos theory and spontaneous order. The problem is that a small error in measurement can lead to an enourmous change in the outcome.
Yes, and that's true for a lot of problems. But you can also calculate how much errors in your measurement influence the final result. Weather forecasting is a perfect example. There's a limit, but todays limit is further than yesterdays, due to the ability to use more data, and better precision. Nowadays, you see 5 day forecasts. I certainly remember the times you got only 3 days, and the forecast for the third day was much less detailed than you get nowadays for 5 days.
Limits are nothing more than limits. As long as you know what your limits are, you can still do a lot. Limits don't mean "all measurements are pointless". Limits also chance over time.
-- Abigail
Just like not all phonetapping is done by the goverment, not all wiretapping has to be done by the government either. Companies can choose to tap the phones of their employees; they might also want to be able to wiretap their routers. And before you say "Well, they shouldn't", I say "Yes, they shouldn't, and wouldn't it be nice if they had no reason for it?".
-- Abigail
Server:No
Client:Is it '1'?
Server:No
Client:Is it '2'?
Server:No
Well, if it was like that, the server could do it all by itself. It's more like this:
Slave: Master, oh, master, give me something to do.
Master: hands over box with stuff Here, go through this, and when you are done, report if there's something interesting.
Slave shuffles off to a corner, goes over the box, comes back to the Master sometime later.
Slave: Master, oh, master, I didn't find anything interesting!
Master: oh, you didn't? Well, well, well, what a surprise. Master turns around, fetches a new box. Here, try this box instead.
Slave shuffles off to his corner.
Etc, etc,...
-- Abigail
They could, but I highly doubt it will be worthwhile for them. The big problem is trust. With RC5, and other cracking contests, trust isn't a major issue. A client saying "I found the key" is easily falsified. A client saying "Nope, the key isn't in this block", while the key is, is a problem, but you'll find out eventually; and you have to "just" retest the blocks. And with the assumption that the number of people not playing fair is low, chances that the winning key is given to an unfair person is low.
But it is more of a problem where all the results are actually used. What if a malicious person starts feeding false results? Sometimes, it doesn't matter. The first large scale internet cooperated crack of a code was RSA-129 by Lenstra et al. That wasn't brute force, but used computing power to initially populate a huge, sparse matrix (it's been years ago, I might misremember some details). The final algorithm was robust enough to cope with some percentage of bogus data.
But do you think Boeing will take that risk? Would *you* want to fly an airplane if it was designed using numbers returned by some random script kiddie?
-- Abigail
No. Sidestepping the fact that distributed processing doesn't form a limitless computer system (let's take the current RC5-64 contest; there are about 40,000 participants. Let's be pessimistic and say every participant only uses one computer. Let's also assume there are 1 billion computers in the world, 1 computer for every 6 people. That would mean you could do about 25000 contests simultanuously. With the current speed, it takes about 6 years to crack a single message, so, throw a lot more computers together than there are, and you're looking at cracking 4000 messages a year. That's far away from limitless...) sharing processing power isn't that easy.
RC5-64, and other brute force cracking attempts are easy to do distributed. It takes the most trivial distributed setup (one master, and a bunch of slaves that all work indenpendently - all the master needs to do is bookkeeping, there's no other communication or synchronization needed). Many other problems aren't easily turned into a distributed equivalent. Other problems only work well in specialized distributed environments, parallel computers, where processors are synchronized and you know in advance when which processor is going to write where in memory. Simulations of fluid flows for instance.
Some problems are impossible to solve. Take for instance the classical election problem. You have two identical processors, with identical software. Elect a leader.
Even harder is the problem of how to split up arbitrary tasks in a distributed environment - and deciding which problems can be solved distributed, and which don't.
Then of course, there are things like nodes and links going down, unknown latency, nodes that cannot be trusted, not knowing your topology, etc, etc. Distributed computing in general is a science - and not an easy one.
-- Abigail
"Data that is not backed up is worthless"
Configuration is data.
-- Abigail
Well, I guess in one way it's nice, but wouldn't it be better if hotmail customers can decide for themselves what to filter? OTOH, hotmail accounts are free, so people get what they pay for.
It isn't making me removing hotmail.com from my procmailrc file though...
-- Abigail
Sure it can. (BTW, it's virusses). The character set is irrelevant. It's what you do with it that counts. If it contains code, and you execute it, and your sandbox contains a flaw, you are in danger. Regardless whether the code is in ASCII, ISO-LATIN-1, Unicode or something else.
-- Abigail
Sure, you'll probably delete /home/fredf, but unless you login as root, you'll most likely do no damage to anything else.
Well, yes, but /home/abigail is were the interesting files are. I can restore the system in a few hours; just pop in the CD and reinstall. Everything else needs to come from backup - whenever that was made the last time. And the backup might contain the dormant virus.
-- Abigail
Most certainly, Unix machines aren't magically protected against virusses. The best known example is Morris' worm in the late '80s. While classified as worm, there was nothing in particular that wouldn't make it a virus. Morris just had no intention to destroy things.
Here (well, that should have been a link, but slashdot decided to filter it out.... Try http://www.foad.org/%7Eabigail/Perl/virus.pl, and blame someone for not being able to click on a link.) is a little "virus" I hacked together in 5 minutes, using Perl. It won't do any harm, and it will only infect files ending in ".pl" in the current directory, but it will replicate - even if you just "compile" the code.
There are a few reasons why virusses on Windows are more common than on Unix. First is the permission system. A windows user or process typically has access to all files, so it's much easier to do damage once you are running. On Unix, you either have to hack root, or you can only do "limited" damage (although quite severe for a user). Secondly, there are many more Windows machines out there then Unix machines - besides, Unix is a twisty little maze of incompatible systems anyway. Third, there are more applications that will execute code without the using being aware. Fourth, "sneakernet" with cracked binaries of dubious source is more common. It might take a bit more effort, it's certainly not impossible to write virusses for Unix.
whatever would have to have the ability to obtain root privileges
Unix has almost 30 years of history of security holes that give you root access. Ever heard of scriptkiddies with "root kits"?
Virii
The correct plural is virusses.
-- Abigail
Yes, and I got the impression that was the case now. The problem are bugs in the implementation; this time wrongly marked modules. Next time, it's a buffer overflow in sendmail or an HTTP daemon...
-- Abigail
That doesn't help the receiver, does it? Or do you think a virus writer will answer "no" when being asked whether he/she really wants to send the email?
Web pages can't do any real damage by themselves (except by replicating), unless of course they use java to do something nasty.
Or javascript, or anything else that allows execution of code in combination with implementations that have security holes; even an inline PostScript image can potentially lead to a security hole - PostScript after all is code. And before you start pointing to M$, take a look at the CERT archives and look at all the security holes in Unix applications over the past. At least this virus doesn't become active until someone reads the mail, while for attacks on sendmail all that needs to happen is delivery of "mail"...
The bottom line is that you are putting yourself at risk when you execute code that is driven by a third party; be it an embedded scripting language, or just data.
-- Abigail
Then do tell, what is according to you its intended purpose?
We are spending our money on something else cuz were using mp3's for entertainment instead of giving into paying for overpriced music.
Spending it on something else doesn't mean you should break the law.
-- Abigail