[TUHS] attachments: MIME and uuencode

Dave Horsfall dave at horsfall.org
Mon Mar 13 15:58:30 AEST 2017


On Sun, 12 Mar 2017, Paul Winalski wrote:

> Back in the day plain ASCII wasn't really secure, either.  There were 
> bugs in the firmware of the VT100 and other smartish terminals that 
> would cause strange behavior if certain malformed control sequences were 
> received.  For example, causing the bell (actually a loud beep) to sound 
> continuously until the terminal was power-cycled.  There was one 
> sequence that stored bad data into the user preferences area of the 
> EPROM.  That bricked the terminal by causing it to go into a reset/crash 
> loop.  DEC ended up modifying VMS Mail to filter out ASCII control 
> characters by default when it displayed email messages.  You could still 
> display the unfiltered text, but you had to explicitly ask for that to 
> be done.

Giggle...

Back when "packet radio" was popular in the Amateur ("ham") radio world, 
we used to send each other ASCII bombs.  Just program say F1 (the "help" 
key under Messy-Dog) to do a "FORMAT /Y C:" and wait...

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."



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