The Moderator Always Gets the Last Word

[William LeFebvre]

This is in response to the previous article by Matt Goheen.

The comment I included in John Gilmore's article was a joke.  Get it?  Why
are so many people on the net so serious?  Lighten up a little.  Enjoy
life.  Relax!

As for your nine "errors", I think you are really stretching some of them
to try and say they are incorrect.

> 1) "Integer overflow is (I believe) not detectable in C"

The fact that a simple arithmetic operation caused the overflow bit to be
set is not detectable without standard compiler or run-time library
support.  Yes, you can check the values before or after and determine
algorithmically if the computation would cause an overflow, but you cannot
actually detect the overflow event.  What I'm saying is that there is
nothing like a PL/I "on error goto foo;" capability.  And there is no way
to convert an overflow into a Unix signal:  the 680x0 doesn't support that
sort of behavior.

> 2) The various problems with a suid uudecode program.  wnl doesn't mention
> the possible security hole opened when making uudecode non-suid (the
> "decode" alias).

There are many things that I don't mention, especially in a comment that
is intended to be brief.  First you tell me I put in too many comments,
then you fault me for not making the comments thorough enough?  You can't
have it both ways, fellah.

> 7) The gaffe about 8-bit characters having always been supported by the
> Unix kernel, which wasn't quite true (from what I can gleam from the
> responses, it wasn't properly supported until 4.3?  I'm still a little
> foggy on this.)

Yes, this was a genuine (and rather serious) mistake.  I know for an
absolute and definite fact that 8-bit names were legal under 4.1.  The
only byte values that were not allowed were 0, '/', and '/'+0200.  I cna't
speak authoritatively about previous versions of Bell and BSD Unix.  The
change happened with 4.2 BSD and was carried over into SunOS.

> 8) Not really an actual error, but mentioning the 's' vs. 'S' permissions
> on group access for directories and having no idea why they were there

As you said, "not really an actual error".  Am I also to be faulted for
admitting my ignorance?

	William LeFebvre
	<phil at Rice.edu>