[421] in bugtraq
Re: Virus's -- This is an Emacs bomb (fwd)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Michael Bresnahan)
Wed Dec 7 20:28:44 1994
Date: Wed, 7 Dec 94 17:13 CST
From: gudu@winternet.com (Michael Bresnahan)
To: friedman@gnu.ai.mit.edu
Cc: bugtraq@fc.net
> Emacs mail readers don't evaluate local variables when they read in a
> folder, because they are not visiting the file proper; they are reading in
> formatted data (i.e. messages) from a file. It doesn't make sense to
> evaluate variables that are part of a message.
>
> It's possible that very old versions of VM didn't protect against
> this, but it was fixed a long time ago; at any rate, VM 5.72 (the current
> version) is safe. Rmail never had the problem.
>
> In general, if you are paranoid about setting buffer-local variables when
> you visit arbitrary files, you can put the following in your .emacs:
>
> ;; for emacs 19
> (setq enable-local-eval nil)
> (setq enable-local-variables nil)
> ;; for emacs 18
> (setq inhibit-local-variables t)
>
>
> Too bad some people are so paranoid about security that they happily
> sacrifice useful functionality. After all, every other user on the system
> is clearly out to get them using any available opportunity...
Two questions:
1) Where is this documented? I have found nothing in the emacs 18
info files.
2) Where is it useful?
MikeB
