Jargons of Info Tech industry

[Roedy Green]

On Sun, 09 Oct 2005 05:55:01 -0400, Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org> wrote
or quoted :

>Virus writers will love the ability to
>change peoples address books remotely.

Since this is just a broad brush view, I find it odd you can predict
just what bugs there will be in the early implementations.

You sound almost as if you were the author of the current system and
feel personally attacked by others looking for ways to improve it.

In my scheme, every message is digitally signed, even a change of
address message. 

Surely for a virus to send out a digitally signed change of address
message is more difficult than sending out an unsigned one, which they
can do today.

You have two problems you want to avoid:

1. the practical problem:  failure to inform your correspondents, not
just your address list, of your new address (at least the ones you
don't consider spam or pests).

2. the potential problem:  rogue software sending out fake change of
address notices.

In my scheme, The receiver of the change of address  message ignores
it unless it is properly signed.  Surely that is a more secure system
than we have today and that handles (1) without effort.  At worst, a
very clever virus could change the one address book entry, the one for
this computer, in other's machines.   It could not generally corrupt
other machines.

-- 
Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
http://mindprod.com Again taking new Java programming contracts.