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From: beser@mcs.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Trojan horses
Message-ID: <10@mcs.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 3-Apr-87 10:03:50 EST
Article-I.D.: mcs.10
Posted: Fri Apr  3 10:03:50 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 12-Apr-87 04:40:38 EST
References: <324@vax1.ccs.cornell.edu>
Organization: MicroCALL Services, Laruel, MD
Lines: 36
Summary: bravo

In article <324@vax1.ccs.cornell.edu>, jsm@vax1.ccs.cornell.edu (Jon Meltzer)
writes:

> The April issue of 'Computer Language' gives a rave review , by one Tim
> Parker, of a public-domain program called NOTROJ.COM. The program is
> alleged to be a protection against trojan horses; Parker says that
> "this superb little package should be used by anyone working with software
> for the first time ".
> 
> The catch is that NOTROJ is well known in the BBS community as being ITSELF
> a trojan horse; it will perform a low-level format on ones hard disk if and
> only if the hard disk is over 50% full!
> 
Not only is this documented by the BBS community, It was written about
in ACM's SIGSOFT (Journal of Software Engineering). They weren't sure
if this software had some legitimate bugs, or was deliberatly destructive.

I'm not a lawyer, but I think that if someone rushes out to obtain this
delightful ditty on the basis of recomendations from a reputable 
national magazine, and NOTROJ does its thing, isn't the magazine
liable for contributory neglegence? It's like the New England
Journal of Medicine raving about Arsenic as a cure for the cold.

I think that if this was the April Fool's article, it was very
subtle and should be take as such. If not, the author is quite
naive, and somewhat dangerous. That makes anything he says as 
suspect. 

===========================================================

Eric Beser
seismo!aplcen!cp1!sarin!eric
ebeser @ ada20 (arpanet)

The opinions expressed are Mine...Mine!!...MINE!!!!! I will kill
anyone who tells me different!