🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991May2.133936.3595@cs.dal.ca>, gauthier@ug.cs.dal.ca (Paul
Gauthier) says:

>In article <3145@s5.Morgan.COM> joec@Morgan.COM (Joe Collins) writes:
>>
>>Interesting reading- at a minimum, lets send lots of email to Prodigy,
>>alerting them to our concern.
>>
>I say leave them alone. I'm sure the bad press they've gotten will get them
>to fix this (like initializing the sectors to 0s when they allocate them).

I agree.  Leave them alone.  Large scale complaining didn't help
with the 'email list' affair, it won't help now.

>I'm not sure if it still does, but doesn't Prodigy's software have the
>ability to download updates of itself automatically from Prodigy? I'd be
>much more worried about that, for 2 reasons:
>        a] While Prodigy is downloading new copies of itself you're
>                probably still getting billed for online time. Especially
>                if it does it in the background; it's using up your
>                bandwidth and you're getting billed by the minute.

Where to you get this?  Prodigy is not billed by the minute!!!!!
It's a flat-fee service!  Don't complain about 'using up bandwidth,'
I've been a memeber of Prodigy for years, and it used to be M U C H
worse.  There was no intellegence to the downloading scheme for pages
and screens of information, it was all on-demand.  Now Prodigy tries
to anticipate what screen you are going to read and download it in the
background while you are reading one page.  I don't use Prodigy much
anymore, except for email, but their services are vastly improved since
I first joined.

>        b] This seems like a very nifty way for some crafty person to
>                sneak in all sorts of fun software onto your system.
>                Virus program, programs which are much more effective at
>                looking for sensitive personal data, etc, etc.

This is paranoia.  First, the software they download is used only by the
Prodigy software itself.  It is loaded as segments in the cache file.
I doubt they could manage to put a very effective virus on your computer
with this limiting factor.  I don't think they can even download trojans,
since they would have to be their own executable files.

---
 David Barr - Penn State CAC Student Consultant, Student Programmer
 DSB100@psuvm.psu.edu     | dsbarr@endor.cs.psu.edu
 barr@barrstl.scol.pa.us  |...psuvax1!hogbbs!barrstl!barr