Fun_People Archive
27 Jan
CyberSitter Zeal

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Tue, 27 Jan 98 19:01:25 -0800
To: Fun_People
Precedence: bulk
Subject: CyberSitter Zeal

Forwarded-by: "Andrew C. Bulhak" <acb@zikzak.net>
[headers deleted because of embedded naughty words]
Forwarded-by: Matt Curtis <mattc@beam.com.au>
[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.]

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From: Ross Johnson <rpj@ise.canberra.edu.au>

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.

It's so bad it's almost funny.  Hope this brightens your day as much as it
brighted mine :-).

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