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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Attachments
From: hellos
Date: 2006 Jun 13, 10:24 -0400
From: hellos
Date: 2006 Jun 13, 10:24 -0400
Guy, AFAIK there have been no "PDF malware" programs, nor even a proof-of-concept showing that would be possible. Yesterday Yahoo! was flooded with a graphic exploit attack to many of their user groups. Users assumed Yahoo! scanned these things, and it did. They just didn't know this one could happen, so it went out wide scale. PDF? Might be the exception to the rule, but potentially *any* executable code is unsafe. PDF files still execute, and the newest versions of PDF can do far more than just display on screen. (They call that progress.) And then of course, PDF is still going to kill bandwidth. Typical text message, 1k in size. Small single page PDF? Often 50x-100x that size. I'd suggest the idea of placing *all* images on a free image server, so list members can fetch them if/as they deem appropriate, might still be the best way to deal with them. Text is text, nothing is executed so it simply *can't* have a malware payload. Anything else that involves 'executing' ? Is a potential attack. Call me a curmudgeon--who just doesn't want to risk his computer.
