Humour VIII

There's a cat in them, maybe alive...maybe not.

Here's how I would always handle attachments and how it led me to two disturbing discoveries.Having been a DOS-er for years, I never took to double-clicking a file but rather only application icons on the desktop. Even now in File Explorer I'll do a right-click "Open With ... " on a file rather than double-clicking on it (but then some of the filetype-to-app mapping is a bit wonky so I'd have to do it most of the time anyway).So when I'd receive an email with an attachment, I would save the attachment to a directory by opening the content menu with a right-click and selecting the save attachment menu item and then open the associated app and open the file within the app. No, I wasn't born paranoid, but rather an attached file was something that I would want to save for future use so saving it was the logical first step.One day I received an email with an attached Word document file (or Excel -- it's been decades) which seemed pertinent to things that I was involved in at the time (it had something to do with Scouting). So I saved it and opened it in Word, which refused to open it as being an invalid file format. I took a closer look at that file in Windows Explorer and the icon and stated file type didn't match. I went to DOS to look at the file's hex dump and that's when I saw its actual file extension for the first time: it wasn't a .doc file, but rather some kind of executable file.So the two disturbing things that I learned from that:

1. I had encountered my first Trojan attachment. The file's name wasn't campgrounds.doc, but rather something like campgrounds.doc.exe, an executable! Double-clicking on it would run it and it would perform its nefarious function. But why didn't my computer warn me by displaying the actual file extension?
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2. That was the second far more disturbing thing that I learned: Windows was set up by default to hide that vital information from us! In Windows Explorer's View there's an option to hide known filetype extensions and it's turned on by default!
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   So I turned that stupid thing off! But then after a while (triggered perhaps by a patch) it would be turned back on again, whereupon I would immediately turn it off again. Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!, but they have never fixed it! Stupid!
   

But now my emails no longer offer the choice of right-clicking on an attachment. The only way I can save an attachment is by clicking on it. Which means that I have to have a very good feeling about the authenticity of that email.Similarly, when I would get a spam email on my phone I used to be able mark it as spam and get rid of it. Now on my new phone the email reader requires me to first open that email before it gives me the option to declare it spam. So I have to go to my computer where I still can declare them to be spam and get rid of them there. 
Another story about Windows hiding file extensions by default. My Java class was held in an auditorium with the instructor using a school Windows box with a large-screen projection of the monitor. He would create a .java source file and compile it to create a .class file. But the computer wouldn't tell you which was which! Sure, they had slightly different icons, but nobody had any clue what a .java or a .class file icon was supposed to look like. So I would have to raise my hand and walk him through turning off that damned hide file extensions option so we could see the file extensions. Unfortunately, that box being a school computer meant that any setting changes you would make would go away when you logged off. So we had to go through that same evolution every single lecture. What a pain!

Amusement, if not humor.Moose

Have you tried drag/drop?--Percy

Just tried drag-and-drop. HTML doesn't seem to work that way.

I use Outlook for email, so I tried forwarding the email with the suspicious attachment to my Google email account so I could drag/drop from an HTML context, but the forward never arrived, so I assumed it was blocked.So I forwarded an email with an innocent attachment to my Google email account, and that email arrived successfully. Upon opening it I was able to drag/drop the attachment into a folder. This was on my Mac, but I don't see why you shouldn't be able to do this on Windows, too.I later received a message from Gmail saying that the attempted forwarding of that email with the suspicious attachment had been blocked:

quote

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host gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[172.253.63.26] said:
552-5.7.0 This message was blocked because its content presents a potential
552-5.7.0 security issue. Please visit 552-5.7.0
File types blocked in Gmail - Gmail Help to review our 552 5.7.0
message content and attachment content guidelines.

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On my Mac I was able to drag/drop that suspicious attachment from the Outlook email into a file folder where I was able to open it using Emacs. I'm not familiar with internal file formats, but it included a filename with a .exe extension, so it would make sense if it were actually an executable.--Percy

Edited by Percy, : Grammar.

Giving the attachment a .exe file extension shouldn't mean anything to a Mac, which, as I understand, uses metadata attached to a file to figure out what to do with it when you double-click on it. Windows uses the file extension, which you can associate to whatever application you want to.It appears to depend on how the HTML was written. I used to be able to right-click on the attachment and save it. Now they've "improved" the page so that I have to click on it; when I try to use the attachment's context menu to "Save As ... " it only allows it to be saved as an HTML file (I suspect that the context file is for the entire page).Though clicking on the attachment pulls down a menu which shows the progress of downloading the file and then offers options (including opening it). But that still doesn't feel right, kind of like having to provide your SSN for access to services (eg, Medicare before they issued us new numbers). Or being expected to walk around with an RFID credit/ATM card in your pocket.

Live performance - somewhat different from the also worthy original, below.Moose

Peter Schickele would say that he taught musicology at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople. However, Hoople (pop. 242) is in the north-eastern part of the state, north of Grand Forks.About 20 years ago Schickele had a radio show on public radio, which I would listen to on San Diego's KPBS late Sunday afternoon once a month on my drive home from reserve duty. One of the things he said was:

quote

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Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach become musicologists.

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The instructor for my music appreciation class in 1972 had attended school with Peter Schickele, as I recall. My first exposure to him was when she played the sports coverage of Beethoven's Fifth for the class.Most of the jokes are based on musicology lore. For example, Bach's music being rediscovered because a fish monger was using it to wrap fish in became PDQ Bach's music being used as the filter in the coffee pot -- that turned out to be the "Sanka Sonata", a play on Bach's Coffee Cantata, a miniature comic opera which he had written for the grand opening of a friend's coffee shop in c. 1734 and which used caffeine addiction as a plot device ("If I couldn't, three times a day, be allowed to drink my little cup of coffee, in my anguish I will turn into a shriveled-up roast goat.").And Concerto for Piano versus Orchestra (Schickele 88) is a play on the concerto form in which a solo instrument plays contra an orchestra.