Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!mephisto!udel!ee.udel.edu From: new@ee.udel.edu (Darren New) Newsgroups: comp.mail.multi-media Subject: Re: Multi-media mail standards; Forw: Use of ODA in the Internet Message-ID: <27517@nigel.ee.udel.edu> Date: 15 Aug 90 13:12:03 GMT References: <9008142236.AA18311@nada.kth.se> Sender: usenet@ee.udel.edu Distribution: inet Organization: University of Delaware Lines: 19 Nntp-Posting-Host: estelle.ee.udel.edu In article <9008142236.AA18311@nada.kth.se> maguire@NADA.KTH.SE (Gerald Maguire) writes: >which could change the state of the system as "safe" operators - which >could trap to a handler, rather than perform the operation (for >example "rm" and write operations). I may be slow, but why would a mail message need to "rm" a file at all? If you are talking about things like what we use "shar"s for now, I would think it would be possible to make a format that would need to be interpreted by a user-trusted program (like unshar) to unpack such things. If you mean things to give arbitrary output (like Postscript does), I fail to see any need for `security' there either: the Postscript interpreter in my laser printer is totally incapable of deleteing any of my files. A simple solution to the problem would be to design the multi-mail format to contain no embedded filenames. Hence, any operation to be done to any file must prompt the user for a filename (at least). Or am I totally off-base? -- Darren -- --- Darren New --- Grad Student --- CIS --- Univ. of Delaware ---