Voices count

Posted by Jake Good
on Oct 18, 04

No, this is not going to be a political rant about how one should vote for anyone butBush ;) But... it does have some relevance

So I started reviewing software products the last month or so... and somehow they gotthe attention of their authors...

Resharper(Jetbrains)
DotNetToolPack
CopySourceAsHTML
to name a few... each one having the author comment and/or contact me to discuss myreview further (which is awesome!)

But just recently,I posted about the GoogleFS Drive andbrought up a possible concern, the best part.. is that my little voice has been heardonce again...

Here's an excerpt from the email to which my email addressed. I wanted to clear upthings that I thought were vulnerabilities, but actually aren't.

************************************************************************************************

Subject:
Svar: question
From:
"Bjarke Viksøe"
Date:
Mon, 18 Oct 2004 09:42:44 +0200
To:
<jake@whoisjake.com>

Hi,

The same thing that stops you from doing this using a regular mail -Google's spam filters & virus checks.
My software doesn't do anything that you can't do with the web-interface.
Also note that you cannot directly launch an application from my tool, you must make aconsious choice
to copy'n'paste the program to the desktop and launch it there - incidently the samerestrictions that
apply for most e-mail virus-threads.

bjarke


>>>>>> Jake Good <jake@whoisjake.com> 16-10-2004 01:06:28>>>

What stops me from sending an EXE with a correctly formatted subject to
another person's gmail account.. have it put into archive and then
showing up in their drive? I tested it and it worked perfectly. Kind of
scary

Jake
http://www.whoisjake.com/blog

************************************************************************************************

I still think there is an ethics decision here that might trigger a feature update tothe tool:

What if I sent child pornography to someone's gmail account, having it automaticallyplaced on an unsuspectful innocent person's hard drive?

Feature:
You could implement a client generated key andinclude that in the body of the email. It's not a complete fix, but if its generated bythe client tool, the attacker would have to figure out the algorithm or intercept theemail. This feature would help reduce the risk... IMHO.


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