Re: impossible vs. impractical

[newsham () aloha net (Timothy Newsham)]

> The point I have been trying to make, which you bugtraqers seem to have
> missed, is that my comments had to do with the use of the term
> impossible with respect to detecting sniffers.  If you had said
> infeasible or incredibly expensive, or some other such term, I probably
> would not have made my comments.  When you say "impossible" in a
> scientific context, you had better mean traversing the speed of light or
> some such thing, and even then, it's based on some assumptions and
> observations and should be qualified (i.e., impossible under the most
> widely accepted current epistemology of physics). 

This is not a scientific list.  The context is not scientific.  This
is a list about security in the real world.

> Now, if you could quit wasting your time arguing over this minor point
> and get back to tracking bugs, it would probably be more fruitful. 
> Which brings me to the latest version of Microsoft's spreadsheet
> distrubuted with Windows.  We were doing a very simple spread sheet by
> my standards, and it computed terribly wrong values.  When we took the
> same spreadsheet and plugged it into 123, it did the right thing. 
> Anyone have a bug fix?

This is not a bug report or bug fix list.  This is a list about 
security in the real world.  It is also (mostly) unix and
inet-centric.

                                       Tim N.