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[LUG] mod_age and academic list hit by virus in race period



We established a while ago that there is a race condition between virus 
generation and antivirus acquisition and deployment that renders the widely 
advocated daily or the less widely practices three hourly or the hardly at 
all practiced just before every mail collection ... update of the antivirus 
identity files unreliable as a protection.

IE unreliable in th sense that if you do it for a sufficient number o trials, 
you guarantee a virus will gain entrance to your machine and if you have a 
list server or a central post office thence to other machines at user level.

We specified and developed an antidote to this - mod_age - such that if the 
attachments are always separated from messages, and are then placed in a 
directory under the web server, for a configurable period the user requesting 
this attachment will get a text rendering of it, believed to be incapable of 
infecting their own machine, and after the safety period will get the file 
delivered in its native form.

Thus a Word .doc attachment may be peeped at if you need to _now_ , and then 
picked up in full tomorrow when you need to complete your detailed reply or 
add comments to it.

Time we pushed it to jiscmail the academic list server www.jiscmail.ac.uk




-- 
From one of the Linux desktops of Dr Adrian Midgley 
http://www.defoam.net/             

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