[CrackMonkey] Re: Nick, I'd like to hear your side.

[Magnus Bodin]

On Sun, Jan 27, 2002 at 05:33:54PM -0800, Seth David Schoen wrote:
> 
> Anyway, maybe the solution should be not to automatically uudecode
> things just because they look as though they have been uuencoded.
> (It's hard to explain exactly why we should expect Internet users to
> parse and interpret MIME automatically as MIME, though, and not to
> part and interpret uuencoded files automatically that way.)

That is along the paths MS are moving anyway.
They try to GIF-decode things THAT LOOKS LIKE GIF:s. There is a
misconception that they look at extensions in URL:s, but they are in fact
doing the magic-cookie-thingie, overriding the MIME-type in the
"Content-type"-header.

For a test of this, see: http://x42.com/test/mime/

You cannot for example serve any html or textfile that begins with the
string 'GIF89a'. Nor can you expect to see a broken gif when you just
rename an ordinary textfile to .gif and your webserver serves it with
'image/gif'. No no. MSIE will show it as text. 

Programmers writing programs that "knows better" like that should lose
their license.

/magnus

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