--- begin forwarded text Resent-Date: Tue, 20 Jan 1998 17:19:45 -0500 X-Authentication-Warning: qnx.com: localhost [127.0.0.1] didn't use HELO protocol To: 0xdeadbeef@substance.abuse.blackdown.org Cc: bostic@bsdi.com Subject: CyberSitter to the rescue. Date: Tue, 20 Jan 1998 16:08:19 -0500 From: glen mccready <glen@qnx.com> Resent-From: 0xdeadbeef@substance.abuse.blackdown.org X-Mailing-List: <0xdeadbeef@substance.abuse.blackdown.org> archive/latest/2639 X-Loop: 0xdeadbeef@substance.abuse.blackdown.org Precedence: list Resent-Sender: 0xdeadbeef-request@substance.abuse.blackdown.org Status: U Forwarded-by: Faried Nawaz <fn@LISP-READER.Hungry.COM> Forwarded-by: acb@zikzak.net (Andrew C. Bulhak) Forwarded-by: Matt Curtis <mattc@beam.com.au> This is from the PerForce mailing list, PerForce is a source code control system that doesn't use mounted drives, but instead uses TCP/IP socket communications to check code in and out. ----- 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 :-). ---- +----------------------+---+ | Ross Johnson | | E-Mail: rpj@ise.canberra.edu.au | Info Sciences and Eng|___| | University of Canberra | FAX: +61 6 2015227 | PO Box 1 | | Belconnen ACT 2616 | WWW: http://willow.canberra.edu.au/~rpj/ | AUSTRALIA | +--------------------------+ --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/ Ask me about FC98 in Anguilla!: <http://www.fc98.ai/>