[filmscanners] RE: keeping the 16bit scans

["Frank Paris" <frankparis@comcast.net>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: filmscanners_owner@halftone.co.uk
> [mailto:filmscanners_owner@halftone.co.uk] On Behalf Of LAURIE SOLOMON
> Sent: Saturday, March 29, 2003 9:01 AM
> To: frankparis@comcast.net
> Subject: [filmscanners] RE: keeping the 16bit scans
>
>
> Frank,
> I agree with your point two, although I suspect that Robert
> would not. However, regarding your first point, you are
> wrong.  Viruses can be an issue whenever you are dealing with
> media connected to an operating system - particularly if that
> system is connected to the internet.  There are all kinds of
> viruses and worms which can attack the sectors of hard drives
> which contain all the information about what folders and
> files are loccated where on the physical hard drive so that
> they can be located and retrieved by the system when they are
> called for.  Viruses are not merely restricted to effecting
> textual materials and files.

I guess I was restricting my thinking to the fact that only executable
files can be infected. (Word and Excel files, which civilians think of
as textual only -- are actually executable -- I'll get to that in a
minute) JPG and TIFF files themselves cannot be infected with a virus.
But that's not to say a virus infecting an executable can't erase your
entire hard drive. Fortunately, those viruses are extremely rare.

> Many - if not most - may be
> carried by or within textual files,

No, not pure text files (files that only contain ASCII or UNICODE data).
But Microsoft Word, Excel, and Outlook email are not pure text files.
They can have Visual Basic programs attached to them, and you can write
viruses in Visual Basic just like any other programming language. But
this is impossible with JPEG and TIFF files. I'm not saying that you
couldn't physically append the binary data of a virus written in C++ to
a JPEG file, but it wouldn't do the would-be hacker any "good", because
JPEG interpreters would see the tack-on as invalid data and would simply
refuse to display the file, or display it corrupted, and no harm would
be done.

It would be possible to write a virus in a Postscript or PDF file, but
I've never heard of that (yet).

Frank Paris
frankparis@comcast.net


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