Re: "help" URLs
Re: "help" URLs
- Subject: Re: "help" URLs
- From: Andreas Monitzer <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 4 Aug 2001 12:32:22 +0200
On Saturday, August 4, 2001, at 04:26 , R. Tony Goold wrote:
If you want to trash someone's system with your freeware, why leave it up
to your help-related scripts? You can do it directly from your freeware
app! I've never seen an authentication dialog pop up while viewing help,
so I know Help Viewer isn't sudo-ing to gain more privileges than are
granted to the rest of the stuff I run, including whatever freeware app
in question.
If that guy wants to trash your disk (or your home), you're correct. But I'
ll give you another example:
About ten years ago, I bought a magazine with a (5 1/4"-)disk containing
shareware games for DOS. After inserting the disk, I found a .bat-file on
the root (It was called A:\ at that time). I executed it - and guess what
it did: del *.*
The idea behind this was that one would copy the disk to the hard drive
and execute the batch file. It would then decompress all files and delete
the archives. However that disk didn't have enough space for the
decompressed files, so it just deleted the archives (no write protection
of course). If I wouldn't have had the undelete feature (just had got a
new version of DOS supported that) I would have got *very* angry.
However, the gist is: The creator of that batch file didn't want to trash
my files, even though he did. Same could happen with some AppleScript (not
exactly the same thing lacking a floppy disk drive, but something similar)
.
(btw, Netscape 4.x still does the same thing. It launches the downloaded
files with Stuffit Expander and deletes them afterwards - no matter if
unstuffing was successful or not)
andy
--
"He was addicted to life. But we cured him"