[MUD-Dev] Re: Ansii color, needing some specs and or pointer

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On 12:25 AM 8/3/98 +00-05, I personally witnessed Jon A. Lambert jumping up
to say:
>
>I recall that under ANSI (perhaps this was more DOS specific) 

It was indeed DOS specific, and just another example of Bad Ideas coming
out of Microsoft. There were a lot of those. 

>there 
>was a way to stuff "format C:\rY\r" into the keyboard buffer.  

You are referring to the 'p' command, which allowed the redefinition of a
key. The usual method of using this feature was to redefine the 'enter' key
to an enter followed by a nasty command -- usually 'echo y | format c:', as
you mention. The process of doing this was called "ANSI Bombing", and it
was considered just as rude and evil as a virus... but not as difficult.
Smart evil people wrote virii, dumb evil people wrote ANSI bombs. 

These days, nobody writes much of anything. They just get the VCL and TPE,
read some back-issues of 2600, and think they're hackeriffic. Personally, I
think they're losers. If you didn't FIND the bug or WRITE the virus, using
it is a violation of hacker ethics unless you have devised a particularly
interesting method of exploitation. Of course, even if you DID write a
virus, the interesting parts (and the difficult parts) are the encryption,
reproduction, and scan-evasion portions -- any moron can write unlink()
calls into a program. So a virus that actually damages the system it
infects is what I consider a BAD virus. What self-respecting parasite kills
the host? Duhhhh.

CdC forever.

>It had 
>interesting repercussions in typing ansi messages at a DOS shell or 
>reading ANSI mail under certain mailers that had shell support.  

Most reputable ANSI driver authors either removed this feature entirely or
provided command line switches to disable it. PC Magazine's ANSI.COM was
probably the best driver; you could specify the size of the macro buffer
and turn the redefinition command on or off at will. Furthermore, since it
came with source code, you could redefine the command line switches that
disabled and enabled it, which was a very secure option for BBS SysOps. :)