13 Mar
2017
13 Mar
'17
11:58 a.m.
On Sun, 12 Mar 2017, Paul Winalski wrote:
Back in the day plain ASCII wasn't really secure,
either. There were
bugs in the firmware of the VT100 and other smartish terminals that
would cause strange behavior if certain malformed control sequences were
received. For example, causing the bell (actually a loud beep) to sound
continuously until the terminal was power-cycled. There was one
sequence that stored bad data into the user preferences area of the
EPROM. That bricked the terminal by causing it to go into a reset/crash
loop. DEC ended up modifying VMS Mail to filter out ASCII control
characters by default when it displayed email messages. You could still
display the unfiltered text, but you had to explicitly ask for that to
be done.
Giggle...
Back when "packet radio" was popular in the Amateur ("ham") radio
world,
we used to send each other ASCII bombs. Just program say F1 (the "help"
key under Messy-Dog) to do a "FORMAT /Y C:" and wait...
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will
suffer."