Cybersitter censors code

[David Honig]

>--------------- Forwarded Message --------------
>From: rpj at ise.canberra.edu.au (Ross Johnson)
>
>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 :-).

------------------------------------------------------------
      David Honig                   Orbit Technology
     honig at otc.net                  Intaanetto Jigyoubu

""The tragedy of Galois is that he could have contributed so much
more to mathematics if he'd only spent more time on his marksmanship."