[107969] in Cypherpunks
Re: unexpected browser behavior
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Stewart)
Sat Jan 30 14:01:43 1999
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 23:21:45 -0800
To: Greg Broiles <gbroiles@netbox.com>, cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.02.9901291813140.3790-100000@ideath.parrhesia.c
om>
Reply-To: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
At 06:44 PM 1/29/99 -0800, Greg Broiles wrote:
>A friend at work got a spam which exposes a peculiar behavior which is
>common to at least both Netscape Navigator 4.05 and MSIE 3.0; you can
>replace the host portion of a URL (normally specified as a domain name or
>dotted quad IP address) with the IP address of the host represented as a
>32-bit number; for example, my machine, normally found at [...]
><http://209.133.38.21>, can also be reached at <http://3515164181>. ....
>I don't know if this is more accurately characterized as a bug or as a
>feature - it's not a standard URL per RFC 1738
It certainly is annoying - checking the address requires
translating the decimal number into base-256 dotted-decimal
before feeding it to lookup programs if you want to track the spam.
On the other hand, if your email filter program actually supports
regular expressions (sigh...), http://[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9] is always spam...
Thanks!
Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
