Michael K. Sanders writes:
Has anyone actually seen this 'Good Times' thing? I highly doubt it. And seriously, an e-mail virus? Get real.
and Ian Farquhar writes:
And pigs fly too.
Laugh if you want, but this has been possible for years under NeXTSTEP. With it's Display PostScript system and rich text mail reader, it's easy to send a PostScript trojan horse via e-mail. As soon as the message is read, the Mail app tries to display the text and any images inside, which is probably what it should do. However, because EPS images are really just PostScript code, you can do write a PostScript program that does all sorts of nasty things, which includes reading and writing files, stick an EPS header on it, and drop it into a mail message. The recipient's mail reader will cheerfully run the received EPS image through the PS interpreter... All of the EPS trojan horses I have seen do cute, but harmless, things like melt your screen, make windows fly around, rearrange your dock, or display animation before returning things to normal, but they could just as easily erase your home directory or just about anything else. After this major security hole became public knowledge, NeXT provided for 'secure' postscript contexts (safe-DPS if you will) where some of the nastier postscript operators were disabled. Anyway, it's more than possible, even when the designers didn't originally bargain for any type of 'enabled mail.' And with the proliferation of Display PostScript based X servers and MIME mail tools, and other more advanced mail systems on other platforms, we will probably see much more of this type of thing. andrew