[109695] in Cypherpunks
Re: Virus, Media and Open systems
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Stewart)
Thu Apr 1 22:29:51 1999
Date: Thu, 01 Apr 1999 08:14:59 -0800
To: chatski carl <chatski@gl.umbc.edu>, cypherpunks@toad.com
From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.3.96A.990331150957.19135B-100000@linuxbeta.gl.umb
c.edu>
Reply-To: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
At 03:17 PM 3/31/99 -0500, chatski carl wrote:
>What do people think about the fact that virtually no media reports on
>melissa mentioned that only Microsoft products were susceptable to this
>virus??
They've mentioned that only Outlook and Word spread it, and that
it can spread through Word as a "conventional" Word virus
even if you don't use Outlook as your mailer. They haven't
called for wholesale corporate replacement of this dangerous stuff yet, though.
>What about the point of view that in the interconnected world, one should
>not use proprietary software, only open source software :)
That's not the problem here. The problem is that you shouldn't
use software that executes arbitrary programs without asking the user.
You could build equally stupid things into Emacs if you wanted,
and we had problems with the vi modelines feature when vi was semi-new.
Can TeX / LaTeX import files or scripts from the local operating system?
The advantages of open source are that it's often easier to get
fixes developed and distributed, depending on how much ownership
the authors/managers of the product take over their product and
how much they mind having the precious features they worked so hard
to add in to it ripped back out again by the unappreciative public :-)
The obvious thing to replace Word with is a full-featured HTML editor,
where full-featured _doesn't_ include executing Jabbascript.
I prefer the purist approach to HTML/SGML that says that it's a
content description language, not a page layout language,
though there _are_ times that you do want to do page layout.
One feature I haven't seen in HTML, though, is the ability to
package IMG files inline with the HTML file rather than
needing to bundle HTML and pictures together into a ZIP file
if you want to send somebody a document.
Thanks!
Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
