Re: POINTCAST - Could it be a Trojan Horse?
SCOTT SATTLER (sscott@postoffice.ptd.net)
Sun, 24 Mar 1996 19:51:42 -0500
Acutally it would be a great way for a large corporation to gather
information about prospective clients or competitors performing work on
another clients network.An agressive company may see that as a information
gathering tool.
If the point cast program say, gatherd how many, what type of systems where
running,what type of network, what nifty data warehousing projects were
running it may prove beneficial. Or say what would happen if your competitor
won a contract at a site that was running point cast and all of a sudden the
network was continously plagued by strange network outages.....and all of a
sudden your competitor was booted out and you were given the contract....
At 09:05 AM 3/22/96 -0500, Joshua Cole wrote:
>At 03:33 PM 3/18/96 -0600, Messages Roswell wrote:
>> What are you thoughts and comments? Do you have any concerns with
>> products like this? How do you or your company handle these products?
>
>DISCLAIMER: EDS (my company) is a sponsor of Pointcast. However, I have no
>association with Pointcast other than as a user.
>
>Here at EDS we have not blocked off access to Pointcast for obvious reasons.
>Given the people who work in our computer security section and the folks who
>manage our firewalls, I do not believe that they would let Pointcast through
>if they thought that it WOULD be used for malicious reasons.
>
>Sure, what you have presented COULD be done. But really, why WOULD a company
>whos existence depends on good PR and commercial advertising want to do
>something like that?
>
>If Pointcast was an operation that didn't have major companies as sponsors,
>I'd be a little leery. But given that Avis, EDS, Quarterdeck and the U.S.
>EPA are sponsors, I wouldn't worry too much.
>
>Heck, I'd be more worried about poor implementations of Java interpreters
>than Pointcast...
>
>--Joshua Cole
> EDS