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To: Swordmaker
Can I say this is vary familiar?

Yes.

The next version is always going to be immune to viruses.

I won't take anything Microsoft says about securing their operating system seriously until they get rid of the concept of things being executable based on their name.

39 posted on 04/23/2015 6:44:58 AM PDT by zeugma ( The Clintons Could Find a Loophole in a Stop Sign)
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To: zeugma; Swordmaker
> I won't take anything Microsoft says about securing their operating system seriously until they get rid of the concept of things being executable based on their name.

Well... in MSDOS days the file extension meant something about how to execute it, but not so much under Windows. Any file with an executable extension (exe/com/bat/scr/msc/...) is executed based on what the first few bytes look like, and no significance is placed on the extension with regard to HOW it is executed. You can rename FOO.EXE to FOO.BAT or FOO.SCR or any other executable extension and as long as it's got a given signature in the first few bytes, it'll get executed correctly.

Microsoft borrowed this feature from Unix/Linux, where executables have the 'x' perm set but typically do not have any extension, so the system figures out how to execute it using a variety of tricks including "magic" (/usr/share/misc/magic) values at the front of the file data. In Windows if you name a plain text file with one of the executable extensions, it generally won't execute (the system might try to read it as a script, depending).

But the real shame is that NTFS has plenty of execute permission control, and it's finer resolution than Unix/Linux. But the default for backward compatibility is to let any damn thing execute, so the control feature is usually wasted, at least on typical user systems.

*sigh*

42 posted on 04/23/2015 10:02:47 AM PDT by dayglored (Listen, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is...sounding pretty good about now.)
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