CompuServe Messages

Doug, Although I agree *100%* with everything you've said, I'd like to make an observation: The PAK program has no bearing on Trojan Horses. Consider: your PAKed program eats disks, you aren't told, you run it, it eats your disk, you complain that PAK was the culprit since you couldn't see it first. Okay, so you get an ARChive with a bunch of files in it. You deARC it, and there's a file that's supposed to do something interesting. If you run it, it eats your disk. What's the difference? UNLESS YOU'RE WILLING TO DISASSEMBLE THE PROGRAM BEFORE RUNNING, OR RUN A SPECIAL CHECKER PROGRAM AGAINST IT, THERE IS NO WAY TO VERIFY THE PROGRAM SAVE RUNNING IT. PAKed or ARCed makes no difference. YOU, sir, are doing a service to the Amiga community by spreading the news about that dangerous file. And THAT is what it takes. The sysops here (heck, the sysops on any reputable system) perform a deARC and cursory test run on EVERY file submitted before it is merged — this is why the delay before they appear sometimes. We'd do the same thing for PAKed files. It takes human intervention to prevent the spread of Trojans… the library method used is inconsequential. Rick