BIG BUG YOU [nice sophisticated gentlemen (moderator edit)]

[Lord_Ephialtes]

BIG BUG!! What is stopping me from just simply making one of my models into a backdoor trojan? When people come on the island, CABUUM! They have a backdoor and im deleting their C: Drive! Whats gunna stop that?

[zaroba]

well, woulden't a trojen have to be an executable? not just a model?
if its not an actual model, the game wont even load it.
and woulden't all the people with firewalls and virus scanners be able to prevent it?

and, with all that said. i'll be sure not to go on any islands you host seeing how angry you seem to be on the forums lately.

[Andy]

zar is right, for a virus or trojan to be hidden within an application and run on execute it has to be hidden with in an executable (.EXE, .PIF, .SCR and a few others) .x is not an executable so its impossible to get a virus from .x or .atm or .bmp, atm i aint sure about seeing its mits own invention but ill bet my life it wont be an exectuable

so ASSHOLE . get it right before you come here flapping your gums over shinola you know nothing about.. please

p.s .scr is a screen saver and can contain trojans , bit of useless info there but oh well

[hedgehog]

technically he's not entirely entirely in the wrong conceptually, since really any binary file can house viral code, whereas plain text is the only truely safe sort of file transferable (yeah i know you guys already know this, just playin' devil's/jerk's/alarmist's advocate here, heh).... but zar and andy are absolutely right - the bmps and atms aren't anything to worry about - displayed, not executed.

radio however could easily pass an infected mp3 from server to client. that's a little nastier.

best solution? get a virus scanner. post that you're a responsible island owner who scans all files before posting them. and if we're assholes, then the entire internet must be one big, giant asshole.


...actually you might be on to something there...

[Andy]

coding virus into binary is extremely hard (not even i can do it and viiri/trojans used to be my fav subject ) id doubt anyone who plays trac would even want to do such a thing unless they are complete moron with +advanced pc user/programmer

and from who ive seen the only thing most people know how to do is infect an exe.
so why worrie

but yes island radio is a bit of a worrie when you think of infection
solution: play trusted/old user islands

[Mit]

http://www.f-secure.com/hoaxes/mp3.shtml

Even if it wasnt a hoax, the actual .exe of the music player needs to be 'infected' not the mp3 alone.
There was a thing i heard of a while back where napster or something didnt notice the difference between a file that was called ".mp3" and one called ".mp3.exe" and therefore allowed you to download infected executable files that could then potentially be run - but only if u actually chose to.

Id be much more worried about what any old website you visit could be doin inside your PC with scripts without your knowledge..

[hedgehog]

that's kind of what i'm largely concerned about. you can use radio as a generic file trans simply by renaming any file mp3. the game will make a best effort in trying to open the file irregardless.

at least around 03.94 or so that was the way of it.

[Mit]

The game only lets you transfer files ending with .mp3 or .ogg via radio, and when downloaded calls a 'music play' function to decode the mp3 file - it doesnt jus try to open it regardless. If it was an exe renamed .mp3 it jus wouldnt play. To get infected by that, you'd have to manually rename the downloaded file to a .exe then run it.
Theres nothing to stop you doin that.. but if thats considered a 'risk' then we'd have to say that a website full of .gifs and .jpgs would be equally insecure.

[hedgehog]

i'm tryin' to think back on when i'd transferred some images to karyn and i think it was fooli or devi a long ways back, and then we'd just rename them, as you'd mentioned, to bmp or jpg or whatever once we got them on that end. i guess what made me nervous was that the buffering progress bar seemed to show up on top if i remember that bit right, so i figured it was doing the equivalent of opening first and asking questions later, if that makes any sense.

more than likely it's fine and i'm just being chimpy

[Mit]

its fine, trust me :]

[hedgehog]

maybe you should reactivate the full file transfer widget so we can have a little more drama....

[zaroba]

on the other hand, if somebody did try it via the above methods of file renaming, with the next version stuff, it woulden't be that hard to make that island completly invisable to the game and that player banned from the whole game.

[Tom]

lol love wot you did to the name... whicheva of you mods it was... me suspects hedge

[Mattizme]

Does that mean that the interweb is one big nice sophisticated gentleman?

Anyways, to redirect the topic back, some fecker at Nullsoft managed to send out an extremely dodgy version of Winamp 3 at one point, which would do something to MP3s (Bit hazy on the details) and you would listen to your fave song then realise half your hard drive data is missing.

Ah well, such is life.

[Lord_Ephialtes]

Dont change the name, it spoils the urgency and public appeal of the whole post!

[brad_sk88]

heh, I made a trojan in VB in comp science at school, got in a wee bitto trouble