FW: over-protective parents

Dan Kohn (dan@teledesic.com)
Wed, 21 Jan 1998 10:31:05 -0800


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dave Crocker [SMTP:dcrocker@brandenburg.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 1998 9:16 AM
> Subject: over-protective parents
>
> Folks, this mailing list has pretty steadfastly tried to stay away
> from
> meaningful content, but this time, the humor is strictly derivative
> from
> reality...
>
> Via: Patrice McDermott:
>
> Date: 20 Jan 1998 18:46:02 -0500
> From: Jered J Floyd <jered@mit.edu>
> To: fight-censorship@vorlon.mit.edu
> Subject: glen mccready: CyberSitter to the rescue.
> Subject: CyberSitter to the rescue.
> Date: Tue, 20 Jan 1998 16:08:19 -0500
> From: glen mccready <glen@qnx.com>
>
> This is from the PerForce mailing list, PerForce is a source code
> control system that doesn't use mounted drives, but instead uses
> TCP/IP socket communications to check code in and out.
> - -----
> Well, I just spent several hours tracking something down that I
> think is SO braindead that it must be called evil. I hope this
> will save someone else some hassle.
>
> There's an NT box on my desk that someone else uses every now and
> then. This machine is otherwise used as my programming box and
> backup server.
>
> All of a sudden, my programming files were being corrupted in odd
> places. I thought "hmm, my copy must be corrupt". So I
> refreshed the files. No change. "hmm, the code depot copy must
> be corrupt".. Checked from other machines. No problem there.
> Viewed the file from a web based change browser in Internet
> Explorer. Same corruption in the file. Telnet'd to the server
> machine and just cat'd the file to the terminal. Same problem.
>
> What's going on?
>
> The lines that were corrupted were of the form
>
> #define one 1 /* foo menu */
> #define two 2 /* bar baz */
>
> What I always saw ON THIS MACHINE ONLY was:
>
> #define one 1 /* foo */
> # fine two 2 /* bar baz */
>
> Can you guess what was happening?
>
> Turns out, someone had inadvertly installed this piece of garbage
> called CyberSitter, which purports to protect you from nasty
> internet content. Turns out that it does this by patching the
> TCP drivers and watching the data flow over EVERY TCP STREAM.
> Can you spot the offense word in my example? It's "NUDE". Seems
> that cybersitter doesn't care if there are other characters in
> between. So it blanks out "nu */ #de" without blanking out the
> punctuation and line breaks. Very strange and stupid.
> It also didn't like the method name "RefreshItems" in another
> file, since there is obviously a swear word embedded in there.
>
> Sheesh.