Know When To Quit

Today’s NewsFactor Network showed up in my inbox, and the lead story was:



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1. E-Mail Authentication: Holy Grail or Lost Cause?


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Originally, e-mail was never designed to do anything more than deliver text messages. But added-on features eventually opened gaps that hackers quickly exploited.


See the Full Story:


http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=37643


I’m cool with the second sentence.  How many viruses propogate via e-mail in some form or another.  Not to mention web bugs tracking live addresses, etc.  This was followed by one of their “most popular articles”:



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4. Novell Aims To Push E-Mail Further


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Novell’s open source Hula Project will bring new applications to e- mail, predicted David Patrick, vice president of open source platforms at Novell.


See the Full Story:


http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=37743


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So, Novell wants to add more features to something already rendered a little insecure by extending it?  Anyone else see a problem with that?  Which begs the question, “how long until something evil propogates via podcast”?  Let’s face it, there are all sorts of known holes in WMP.  RSS started out as a text-only information transmission system, and it’s been extended with enclosures to include images (couple trojans already hide in malformed JPGs) as well as MP3 or WMA.  I’m guessing it’s only a matter of time.