[tex-live] tlmgr update

Reinhard Kotucha reinhard.kotucha at web.de
Thu Aug 13 00:39:56 CEST 2009


On 12 August 2009 Zdenek Wagner wrote:

 > 2009/8/12 T T <t34www at googlemail.com>:
 > > 2009/8/12 Zdenek Wagner <zdenek.wagner at gmail.com>:
 > >> .zip are filtered by gmail if they contain any executable.
 > >
 > > Not only .zip:
 > >
 > > http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/12/cheat-gmail-antivirus-scanner-attach.html
 > >
 > > "Thanks to the new GMail Anti Virus Scanner, you cannot send or
 > > receive emails with exe, dll, ocx, com or bat attachments even if they
 > > are sent in a zipped (.zip, .tar, .tgz, .taz, .z, .gz) format (The
 > > .rar format is still allowed)"
 > >
 > AFAIK rar is shareware but there are free unrar sources that can be
 > easily compiled on Linux. Probably they do not know about it. From
 > time to time I receive .rar containing .bat.

I don't think that rar is a solution because one cannot be sure that
virus scanners will not remove .rar files in the future.  I'm even
sure that this will happen soon, when more people are using rar (in
order to distribute viruses).

BTW, removing mail attachments only because the files have a
particular extension is extremely stupid and annoying.

I recently tried to attach a ZIP archive to a PDF file.  No problem
with pdftex.  But Adobe Reader refused to extract it because ZIP files
are so dangerous.  Perl scripts are obviously regarded to be less
dangerous.

I finally wrote a program which creates a Perl script containing the
content of the ZIP file as a so-called "here document" as well as the
code which extracts it.  Quite nice if people have Perl already
installed, but annoying to others.  

I always thought that a file containing static data only is less
harmful than a script which can execute arbitrary code.  I always
recommend to avoid self-extracting archives because a .exe file can
contain arbitrary code, a .zip file can't.  But Adobe forces me to do
exatly what I want to avoid.

And isn't the famous "GMail Anti Virus Scanner" completely useless if
it doesn't make the slightest attempt to detect viruses?  It obviously
only cares about filename extensions, which is absolutely braindead,
unsecure, and useless.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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