On Thu, 31 Jul 2014, Asheesh Laroia wrote:
Hi Eduardo,
Here's another Debian bug that I wanted to get your input on
-- https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=532380 .
Do you think it makes sense for future Alpine editions to allow people
to "V"iew application/octet-stream attachments? It seems harmless, and
clearly desired in some cases.
(I myself have desired this!)
I wish that it was easy to implement that all programs can figure out
automatically what you want to do when you want to open an attachment.
Application/octet-stream means "a bunch of bytes in a file", not a
specific format. It could be an executable program, or a poem. Can't say a
priori.
The bottom line is that when choosing between security and convenience, I
side for security, and it might not be a good idea to view the attachment
if this means that some characters will be passed directly to the screen
without processing.
So my advise is that if you want to view an octet-stream and live
dangerously, that you use the mailcap file to define an application that
will open such attachment (for example, one can define the viewer for an
octet-stream file to be a script that renames the attachment to be an html
file, and then opens it with your favorite browser) and that this should
be done on a per-user basis, instead of a for-all users basis.
--
Eduardo
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