Porn Surprise

[Allen M.]

Porn Surprise

From time-to-time I scan my PC to verify other users of the household do not go where they are not supposed to go. I have no problems with them in that department.

Today I ran a super-scan, in the email system, checking every single byte. Users of this PC are still are clean. Hey! Dad’s got to know what is going on. Youse guys out there who care about your children should keep a vigilant check on the PC. So what if you have internet filters. The ancient Greeks found a way into the gates of Troy too.

BUT! What I found troubled me much. I receive word documents through email from a number of sources. Two documents I received from two trusted people about one year ago revealed some interesting words this morning. The scary part, was these words are imbedded inside the document DOC file, which is a binary file, therefore can never be seen or discovered by reading the text.

I have a program I use to manipulate text across many files and modules in large software products. It does binary too. For the heck of it to see what my curiosity could reveal, I ran it across the entire gigabite of email files.

I used one word, only one word, and it picked up a stream of words and sentences which are not good. Porn activity was imbedded and hidden in two word document! Did they do this on purpose? My gut feel says they may not even know it is in there because I have faith in them…

But it doesn’t matter and is not part of the discussion at hand.

What this discussion is all about is you have to know what is on your PC if others use it AND if you put material from others on your PC. This was in the email section for over a year before I found out about it.

The program I used to make the discovery is called “Search and Replace.” By Funduc Software and is simple to use . They also have a shareware version for free to try. The only? Thing the shareware version can’t do is replace text. They also have a lot of other interesting data manipulation tools. This is where those tools can be found:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/funduc/




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Allen, Home: http://www.ury2k.com/pulse mirror: http://home.ici.net/~uechi/