From: David Honig <honig@otc.net>
Date: Fri, 23 Jan 1998 01:34:12 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Cybersitter censors code
Message-ID: <3.0.5.32.19980122092119.007e9310@206.40.207.40>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



>--------------- Forwarded Message --------------
>From: rpj@ise.canberra.edu.au (Ross Johnson)
>
>Well, I just spent several hours tracking something down that I think
>is SO braindead that it must be called evil. I hope this will save
>someone else some hassle.
>
>There's an NT box on my desk that someone else uses every now and then.
>This machine is otherwise used as my programming box and backup server.
>
>All of a sudden, my programming files were being corrupted in odd
>places. I thought "hmm, my copy must be corrupt". So I refreshed the
>files. No change. "hmm, the code depot copy must be corrupt".. Checked
>from other machines. No problem there. Viewed the file from a web based
>change browser in Internet Explorer. Same corruption in the file.
>Telnet'd to the server machine and just cat'd the file to the terminal.
>Same problem.
>
>What's going on?
>
>The lines that were corrupted were of the form
>#define one 1 /* foo menu */
>#define two 2 /* bar baz */
>
>What I always saw ON THIS MACHINE ONLY was:
>#define one 1 /* foo     */
>#  fine two 2 /* bar baz */
>
>Can you guess what was happening?
>
>Turns out, someone had inadvertly installed this piece of garbage
>called CyberSitter, which purports to protect you from nasty internet
>content. Turns out that it does this by patching the TCP drivers and
>watching the data flow over EVERY TCP STREAM. Can you spot the offense
>word in my example? It's "NUDE". Seems that cybersitter doesn't care if
>there are other characters in between. So it blanks out "nu */ #de"
>without blanking out the punctuation and line breaks. Very strange and
>stupid.
>
>It also didn't like the method name "RefreshItems" in another file,
>since there is obviously a swear word embedded in there. Sheesh.
>
>It's so bad it's almost funny. Hope this brightens your day as much as
>it brighted mine :-).

------------------------------------------------------------
      David Honig                   Orbit Technology
     honig@otc.net                  Intaanetto Jigyoubu

""The tragedy of Galois is that he could have contributed so much
more to mathematics if he'd only spent more time on his marksmanship."