JPEGs Will Destroy All Life As We Know It
From the SANS Internet Stormcenter Diary:
As the panic over yesterday’s MS04-028 patch (mentioned in the previous diary) begins spiraling wildly out of control, I’d like to offer myself up as a calm, reasonable head in this tumult of madness. Some may suggest disabling or stripping JPEG images to prevent slow patchers from being annihilated by a JPEG of Doom. I, for one, say this is folly, as it leaves end users open to attack from TIFFs & GIFs, PNGs & MNGs, not to mention the near DoS-level bandwidth consumption of BMPs!!!
I’d like to propose a return to a simpler time. A time when ANSI graphics reigned supreme. Have we really become so shallow since the days of Tradewars on a 9600 baud Renegade BBS that we demand our images be made up of *tiny* colored blocks instead of *giant* colored blocks? Advanced graphics have brought us nothing but trouble in the form of expensive graphics cards and vulnerabilities! Sure, none of these vulnerabilities have generated a decent exploit (yet?), but I’m not about to shut the barn door after the horse has already owned my box.
http://isc.sans.org//diary.php?date=2004-09-15
Tradewars… I loved tradewars… I think I need to set up a server of it when I get an internet connection at my new place 