Reliance on Microsoft called risk to U.S. security

[bear]

On Wed, 1 Oct 2003, Kevin T. Neely wrote:

>bear allegedly wrote...

>> "Can be relied on to _only_ deliver text" is a valuable and important
>> piece of functionality, and a capability that has been cut out of too
>> many protocols with no replacement in sight.

>Is delivery really the problem, though?  You can deliver all the code
>you want to an e-mail account which I check using pine and none of it
>will ever run.

Heh. You looked at my mail headers, didn't you?  Yes, I use pine -
primarily *because* of that property.  It treats all incoming messages
as text rather than live code.

A protocol for text (as opposed to live code) requires compliant
clients (ie, clients that don't do anything other than display the
recieved messages).  As such, it's at least somewhat a social issue.


> I think that the problem is that the mail clients in question have
> the ability to interpret the code.  HTML?  It's text-only, but
> contains a number of features that, when implemeted, produce what I
> think we'd all call undesirable results.

No, it is not.  You can make a hyperdocument that is completely
self-contained and therefore "text", but that is not how HTML is
normally made.  HTML can cause your machine to do things other than
display it, and to that extent it is "code", not text.

It can cause your machine, specifically, to make network connections
to get graphics, style sheets, etc, and will not display correctly
unless the network is available, making it impossible (or at least
difficult) to properly read mail offline and introducing dependencies
that you as reader may or may not be aware of.  Someone at a site a
thousand miles away can change out a graphic in their server, and
suddenly your "text" is different.  A machine you've never heard of in
a location you don't know can go down, and suddenly your "text"
becomes undisplayable.  You can't rely on "saving" an HTML document
and being able to read it years or decades later, because with
hypertext, maybe the part you're interested in (or need for evidence)
isn't even on the page you saved.  Hypertext creates the illusion of
being a single document; but hypertext documents are code directing
interaction with a network, not just text storing information.

The fact that sending HTML (and other code) through SMTP was not
considered a violation of SMTP has allowed a generation of mail
readers to become common that encourage mail viruses, macroviruses,
worms, and other malicious code.  If we are interested in security, we
need some kind of protocol where we as a group just draw a line and
say "nothing but text through this port."

				Bear

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