🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1990Jul16.032446.15840@swbatl.sbc.com> george@swbatl.UUCP (George D. Nincehelser) writes:
>
>Yeesh!  I don't like the direction this is going.  John wrote a 
>wonderful and useful program and is giving it away free for the
>benefit off all, yet some folks are bitching about a measly 20K  
>of disk space!
>
>John, Disinfectant is great!  The about box is fine!  Keep up the
>good work!  I'm sure we all appreciate it!

I'd like to personally agree with all of the previous statements.

>Now, to anyone thinking of mucking up John's program to fit their
>personal taste: DON'T DO IT!!!!  There is no good reason to cut out
>20K of code.  If space is a problem, put Disinfectant on its own 
>disk.  A bootable floppy with Disinfectant alone is a good idea anyway!
>
>If people start changing Disinfectant, we *will* start to have problems.
>No longer could one be sure if they had the clean, original version.
>Kind of defeats the purpose of a virus protection program, doesn't it?

If somebody changes Disinfectant, they themselves will have a
problem.  Recall that Disinfectant does a checksum on itself
to verify that it has not been corrupted.  Any change to the
program will result in a wrong checksum computation.  Any
utility changing Disinfectant in such a way as to allow the
change (ie by changing the checksum routine) runs the risk
of allowing somebody to more easily decipher the checksum,
thereby defeating that mechanism in the first place.

---
chi@tybalt.caltech.edu		delta chi
Disclaimer: hey!  I don't know what I'm talking about!