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Zip Bomb

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Re: Zip Bomb

#111

I found a similar file to this (a zip file that contains itself) and e-mailed it to a friend at work. He never received it, but I thought nothing of it (I assumed the email filters just destroyed it). A days later the mail server stops working and the sysadmin turns up at my desk. Turns out the anti-virus scanner had been unzipping and scanning repeatedly. It eventually filled up the entire disk and bad things happen…

That reminds me of an incident when I was in year 8: seeing how deeply nested I could get directories on Windows. H:\a\a\a\a\..., eventually it stopped working. (I played the game with my friend... he went for creating a new directory at each level, after a little I became sensible and went for copying and pasting, thus multiplying the depth by two each level which of course achieves the goal pretty quickly - so I wo…

I had a worse problem when I helped my parents recover their backups. The backup itself had a fair amount of folder nesting, but was within the 256 character limit. At some point, they moved the backup into another folder that had the date, and computer for the backups. When they tried to access it, Windows gave a cryptic error message about corrupted files.

Re: Zip Bomb

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to break something =/= IT not doing their job. Tossing a brick through a window doesn't mean that the window should have been thicker.

Except that this was not 'tossing a brick,' it was maybe knocking on a window to see what sound it makes, and the window then falling apart for no apparent reason. There is nobody to blame for this, actually. Neither could the kid have known that this was bad (and the child-like curiosity is hardly something worth a punishment,) nor could the sysadmin really do anything to prevent it, except hang up a memo: please do…

I agree that we should not punish kids for expermentation (I am outraged when schools do anything other than encourage it). However, if playing around with a computer causes notable damage, I do have to wonder what would happen with viruses or someone who is actually malicius.
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