I've been rather quiet on the list lately because shortly after my last
post my PC crapped out and I've been too lazy to spend time trying to
fix it. I've used the town library's PCs to read the posts every
once in awhile.
Thank you all for the many good posts on Prufrock and Dante.
And thank you Tom for spending the time and money to give us your
MP3 file. I'm still a modem user and with all the email still
loaded on my ISP I'm going to one hell of a time getting them and
your large file downloaded at home. Normally I would be cussing
at a friend who emails me large jpegs which clog the pipe so to
speak (purposely done to force me onto broadband.) I've tried to
think of a better way to have handled things but with the copyright
restraint and the ability to get things from the archives all I could
think of was giving us a heads-up first.
The rest of this post is off topic but covers some questions and other
items that were posted to the list. It covers mainly technical stuff.
Usually email attachments get translated as text when sent and
so a 5 MB file attachment could possibly add 6 MB to the download.
I figure on 10 minutes to download a 1 MB file.
The pictures that CR send us are not attachments and take no time to
download when retrieving mail nor do they take up any storage space on
the archive server or on members' computers. CR sends HTML encoded mail
that has embedded text *LIKE*
[IMG SRC="hffp://www.example.com/picture.jpg"/]
When your mail reader displays the text as HTML it then retrieves the
file to display as a picture. I have my mail reader set to display
messages as text only and so with my reader I see a clickable URL that I
can use to get the picture displayed. The advantage to sending pictures
this way is that no space is used but if the picture is ever deleted at
the host site then you won't see it. Another disadvantage: The image
could change. An example was displayed at the John McCain campaign
website which had a link to a generic type image served up at another
site. When that site's owner noticed a lot of hits he changed the
picture to a picture of text that had McCain running for things he
really wasn't for.
If you look at a piece of junk mail with images displayed the images
that get served up can be logged. That way the spammer knows that
there is still someone at your email address and your name can be sold
at a better price. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webbug
As for MP3 files carrying virii: Technically no but they can be used to
trick the program playing them into doing things they shouldn't if
the program was badly coded. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mp3#Security_issues
See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffer_overflow
As for attachments to TSE list mail I think that in general they are a
bad idea but I haven't seen any abuse. LSOFT makes the software,
Greg is the list administrator. Here are the manuals:
http://www.lsoft.com/resources/manuals.asp#1
http://www.lsoft.com/manuals/16.0/htmlhelp/list%20owners/coverpage.html
http://www.lsoft.com/manuals/16.0/htmlhelp/list%20owners/ListandSubscriberManagement.html#2359928
Torrent is for file sharing and can be loaded with nasty files. Warning
messages may be for the site in general and not for the particular file
wanted. Still, I have no experience with Torrent. What may be useful
though is to download the mp3 file and then transfer the file to a
cheap MP3 player that you won't mind being destroyed. Delete the copy
of the MP3 on your PC and listen to it only on the player. You might
even be able to download it directly to the player.
Regards,
Rick Parker
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