[1737] in bugtraq
Re: impossible vs. impractical
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Timothy Newsham)
Mon May 8 20:04:58 1995
From: newsham@aloha.net (Timothy Newsham)
To: fc@all.net (Dr. Frederick B. Cohen)
Date: Mon, 8 May 1995 09:51:24 -1000 (HST)
Cc: bugtraq@fc.net
In-Reply-To: <9505072157.AA20575@all.net> from "Dr. Frederick B. Cohen" at May 7, 95 05:57:28 pm
> The point I have been trying to make, which you bugtraqers seem to have
> missed, is that my comments had to do with the use of the term
> impossible with respect to detecting sniffers. If you had said
> infeasible or incredibly expensive, or some other such term, I probably
> would not have made my comments. When you say "impossible" in a
> scientific context, you had better mean traversing the speed of light or
> some such thing, and even then, it's based on some assumptions and
> observations and should be qualified (i.e., impossible under the most
> widely accepted current epistemology of physics).
This is not a scientific list. The context is not scientific. This
is a list about security in the real world.
> Now, if you could quit wasting your time arguing over this minor point
> and get back to tracking bugs, it would probably be more fruitful.
> Which brings me to the latest version of Microsoft's spreadsheet
> distrubuted with Windows. We were doing a very simple spread sheet by
> my standards, and it computed terribly wrong values. When we took the
> same spreadsheet and plugged it into 123, it did the right thing.
> Anyone have a bug fix?
This is not a bug report or bug fix list. This is a list about
security in the real world. It is also (mostly) unix and
inet-centric.
Tim N.
