Alan Olsen writes:
This is the clueless kind of crap I expect pitched to AOL users and upperlevel management.
GIF and JPEGs contain *NO* executable code. You cannot get viruses from them. You obviously have no clue as to what the hell you are talking about.
The only way that you could obtain the effects described above is with Black Magic and/or Voodoo. (And not even then.)
I don't want to restart the jpg-virus flame war again, and this particular story is likely completely bogus, but I should point out that most complicated software, including jpeg viewers, has undiscovered bugs lurking about. It is also not particularly difficult to find a garbage input file for most sloppily written programs which bombs the program into branching into one of its data buffers. Indeed, it wasn't so long ago that you could get httpd to put crap on its own stack by feeding it an excessively long URL. So I would certainly not be surprised if someone managed to construct a .jpg file which would do nasty things to ones machine if loaded with a specific viewer, and give an error message when loaded by other software. If the viewer was a widely used one, and the .jpg was posted on Usenet with an alluring title, one could probably do quite a bit of damage before people got wise. Not a virus in the traditional sense, but a fairly common way to attack complicated operating systems and applications. -- Mike Duvos $ PGP 2.6 Public Key available $ mpd@netcom.com $ via Finger. $