When correct software meets illegal data (was: Ada The Best...)

[Kilgallen@eisner.decus.org.nospam (Larry Kilgallen)]

In article <z9t87.7345$Kd7.4146153@news1.rdc1.sfba.home.com>, tmoran@acm.org writes:
>> >   I'd be eager to test my statistics gatherer (written in Ada of course)
>> (Is the source to your gatherer available?)
>   Will be.  It's in a hard hat only state right now.  For instance,
> one of the sites you mentioned showed the need for bigger URL_Counts,
> and another has some URLs that I believe are not legally formed.

That is a general problem with programming that matches a correct
specification.  It could be that some other program does _not_
match the specification.

The latest email virus/worm (I forget the name, but it really does
not matter especially in an archival sense) for Microsoft machines
is reported to have skipped by several email-scanning security
programs from major vendors in that field.  In at least one case,
the issue was one of recognizing the MIME format and taking some
special action.  The malware was creating messages that were not
quite MIME, so they did not trip the alert in the security software.
But they were "close enough" to be accepted by email agents, and
wreak their havoc.