From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
Date: Tue, 24 Oct 95 15:00:42 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Netscape Logic Bomb detailed by IETF
In-Reply-To: <199510240734.AAA23451@jobe.shell.portal.com>
Message-ID: <199510242200.SAA06950@jekyll.piermont.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



anonymous-remailer@shell.portal.com writes:
> I see that Perry is as charming as ever?

And I see that you don't know what you are talking about.

> Perry, I just don't think that it is wise to stick your head in the sand
> and ignore a severe flaw in your algorithm, while actively misrepresenting
> matters to those people who are not intimately familiar with the IETF. 

I wonder if you even know what the IETF is, since you seem to be
waving around an organization I work in like it was a mass of chicken
entrails. 

> Postscript isn't like any other language around.  Operator names have no
> special significance to the interpreter.  You can't just "strip out" 
> dangerous commands.  They aren't "reserved" in the sense that operator
> names are in other languages, like COBOL or BASIC. 
> 
> In Postscript, operator names are simply keys into a LIFO dictionary. 

If, Mr. Anonymous, you can get a postscript interpreter to do I/O
after you have stripped all the system calls that do file I/O out of
the C code for the interpreter merely by invoking the names of the I/O
commands in the postscript books, you have managed a feat beyond mere
spoon bending and ought to be studied by the parapsychologists.

In any case, Netscape doesn't write the postscript interpreters and
doesn't have built in support for postscript and doesn't ship mailcap
files that deal with postscript, so I'd say you are a crank worth ignoring.

Perry