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Bug

Trend Micro Quarantines Letter P 207

Posted by CowboyNeal from the unintended-behaviors dept.
kkenedy writes "I thought this was the funniest thing I have read in a long time: CRN reports that a bug in an update to one of Trend Micro's security products inadvertently blocks all incoming e-mail containing the letter P." Makes me glad I don't use it, else I wouldn't get any mail, purely on the basis of my surname.
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Trend Micro Quarantines Letter P More

Trend Micro Quarantines Letter P

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  • Obligatory joke (Score:5, Funny)

    by leomekenkamp ( 566309 ) on Friday May 23, 2003 @06:15AM (#6022367)
    First ost, first ost!

  • S(P)AM - if they would only advertise the unsolicited mail as such. :-)

    z
  • Emails telling me that I can enlarge my penis...

  • say fast.. (Score:3, Funny)

    by boogy nightmare ( 207669 ) on Friday May 23, 2003 @06:18AM (#6022379) Homepage
    eter ier icked a eck of ickled eer
    if eter ier icked a eck of ickled eer
    wheres the ickled eer eter ier ecked :)

  • Rules are always made to be broken. It just seems odd to take so much learsure in someone else's ain. Maybe they were aranoid about 'golden showers' or some other ervision. Well, someone at Trend Macro has come up with a roject lan to ass through a new change.

  • Another obligatory joke (Score:4, Funny)

    by shadowcabbit ( 466253 ) <cx@nOspaM.thefurryone.net> on Friday May 23, 2003 @06:19AM (#6022383) Journal
    Sources within the company say that the bug is not the result of an unfortunate typo, but rather the outcome of an anti-spam filter which was intended to remove all obscene references to urine from email. The National Association of Urologists and Endocrinologists is up in arms.
    • Actually, it's all the Penis Enlargement offers. I'm actually pretty amazed at the number of approaches taken. There must be a lot of insecure men out there.

      Trend Micro finally figured out the only way to filter 'em all out was to make 'P' illegal.

      Don't knock it, I'm sure it worked :-)

      D

  • Wait a min. (Score:3, Funny)

    by popeyethesailor ( 325796 ) on Friday May 23, 2003 @06:19AM (#6022384)
    "In the United States, customers have been contacted directly via e-mail, and we've notified the reseller channel."

    Wonder if those mails had the letter ;P
  • Would you like to have a larger qenis?

    Men, are you sick and tired of women sighing with disaqqointment when you take
    off your trousers?

    Doesn't it really qiss you off?

    Well now with new QENISGROW2000, (a unique herbal remedy) you can have them
    GASQ when you UNSHEATH your manhood.

    grasqee

  • kudos (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    While strange this didn't get picked up before being released (seems they need to adjust their test samples).

    Kudos to them for fixing it within an hour and a half, and notifying registered clients and resellers.

  • a tip for this guy... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "I thought this was the funniest thing I have read in a long time

    Ummmm, like time to expand your horizons maybe?

  • I wonder if that's case sensitive, or if it just reacts to a certain case...
    I hope that they at least have it fixed by now...I know that I'd be having a problem if I were to get not e-mail with the letter p in it...then all the junk mail I'd get would be gone! What ever would I do if Babette was no longer waiting for me?

  • This reminds me of a true corporate story (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 23, 2003 @06:22AM (#6022398)
    Our corporation has incorporated some content inspection product for email. After doing so, a certain employee stopped receiving emails. It turned out that it was because he had "shit" in his name ;-)
    • The company my father-in-law contracts at has a corporate content filtering that sends emails along the lines of-

      From-Administrator@ObliviousCorporation.com
      Subj - Content blocked

      An email you received was blocked due to objectionable content-

      Sender-Freestuff@spammer.com
      Time-05/22/03 8:55pm
      Filter violation-HUGEHORSECOCK

      Oblivious Corporation policy requires that we make efforts to protect you from objectionable material. If you feel that this filter has blocked legitimate business related correspondence,
    • Yeah, I installed eManager once. Mr Morishita and Mr Takeshita were not amused at all. And seeing as how they were the company directors, we decided that eManager was a huge steaming pile of crap.

      To Trend Micro: regexps: you guys heard of these?

      dave

  • The quarantined mail... (Score:3, Funny)

    by jkrise ( 535370 ) on Friday May 23, 2003 @06:24AM (#6022405) Journal
    From: suort@microsoft.com

    Here's a link to our latest Service Ack for the Windows X Oerating system. lease download this 550MB Service Ack, and all your roblems will be solved.

    Eole (figure this one!) with NT4 and below will not be suorted. The rice for this roduct under Subscrition Advantage will be $100 er year er license.

    Issued in ublic interest by the Entagon.

  • This is an appaling error (Score:4, Funny)

    by Timesprout ( 579035 ) on Friday May 23, 2003 @06:27AM (#6022417)
    You mean their QA actually signed off a product that rejected p but accepted 25 other potentially dangerous alphabetical characters ? The mind boggles. The only way to be safe is to block all the evil characters and let the digits through

  • Wachovia/1st Union blocks email with "hi" (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 23, 2003 @06:33AM (#6022431)
    Wachovia has been blocking ALL email with "hi" in the title for almost 2 years now with no notice of what the problem is, just "rejected due to policy". But they do NOT view it as a problem even though they have around 25,000-30,000 employees. If only 1% are entitled "hi" and each gets maybe 10 emails a day, that is 2500-3000 emails blocked per day with no notice.

    Nice service from a BANK. Their tech department is pretty stupid.

  • Reminds me (Score:4, Funny)

    by mr_goodwin ( 220609 ) on Friday May 23, 2003 @06:37AM (#6022444)
    of a problem a the local government of Scunthorpe (UK) had recently. Their obscenity checker balked at a substring of the town name.....

  • Dear Trend Customer... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 23, 2003 @06:44AM (#6022457)
    Due to recent a recent bug, any emails containing the letter 'P' have been filtered by an update to our software.

    You can recover your email from the 'Quarantine' folder.

    We are sorry for any confusion this might have caused, and include the missing material below:

    Please insert as required.

    PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP
    pppppppppppppppppppppp

  • Correction.. only the 'leading' p (Score:5, Funny)

    by jkrise ( 535370 ) on Friday May 23, 2003 @07:16AM (#6022512) Journal
    is removed, I believe. Here's the effects on some of the mails:

    1. Sent thru Microsoft Assport - your secure login to the e-world.

    2. I assed my MCSE exams.

    3. Laying with colleagues might land you in harassment charges.

    4. All work and no Lay makes Jack ...

    5. Boys and Girls, come out to lay
    The moon does shine as bright as day!
    • I've got some more:
      • Check out my new Dockers(r) ants!
      • Don't irate Microsoft software!
      • The itcher was on the mound, winding up for the first itch of the game. Itching was his life and love.
      • Like my laid jacket?
      • Then the keynote speaker approached the odium...
      • Have you seen the new Harry Otter movie?
      • The Employee received great raise for his work. (not in this economy!)
      • A long line of cars formed the funeral recession.
      • It's good to have Bush in the residental race!
      • The roof of this ostulate is left to the

  • Still in beta? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by TyrranzzX ( 617713 ) on Friday May 23, 2003 @07:17AM (#6022513) Journal
    Kidna makes me wonder as to how much time they spend making that and if they even tested it before releasing it...
  • I wonder if you can get around this by writing "P" in HTML code:

    p=&#112
    P=&#80

  • And...? Some Perspective Please! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by vofka ( 572268 ) on Friday May 23, 2003 @07:26AM (#6022531) Journal
    OK, so Trend issued a ruleset which blocks all mail containing the letter 'P' - one and a half hours later, they fixed the problem, which is pretty good going IMHO.

    I've been using Trend's Desktop solution (OfficeScan) at work for just over a year now, with no problems at all. Trend have a very good reputation for updating their rulesets very very quickly when a new virus hits the wild - for example in the case of "Love Bug" a couple of years back, they had a new pattern file available in less than 45 minutes, where other vendors took 24 to 36 hours.

    Since OfficeScan (and AFAIK, all the Trend Products) can be configured to automatically update their Pattern, Engine and Core files whenever a new version becomes available, that effectively means that all desktop PC's and Servers can be running with suitable pattern files before you even see any incidence of a new virus.

    People need to get some perspective on this issue - Yes, there was a problem, but it's fixed. Trend's product base is very stable, very fast and very effective. One small problem like this is just that: small !

    Disclaimer: No, I don't work for Trend - I'm just a very happy end user
    • The fix is extremely simple, I suppose so it would be pretty horrific if it took them longer than one and a half hour!
    • OK, so Trend issued a ruleset which blocks all mail containing the letter '_' - one and a half hours later, they fixed the _roblem, which is _retty good going IMHO. I've been using Trend's Deskto_ solution (OfficeScan) at work for just over a year now, with no _roblems at all. Trend have a very good re_utation for u_dating their rulesets very very quickly when a new virus hits the wild - for exam_le in the case of "Love Bug" a cou_le of years back, they had a new _attern file available in less than 45 minu

    • Re:And...? Some Perspective Please! (Score:4, Informative)

      by nautical9 ( 469723 ) on Friday May 23, 2003 @10:19AM (#6023487) Homepage
      Agreed - a minor bug that was fixed promptly.

      I'd also like to point out that Trend Micro offers a great free online virus scanner [antivirus.com] that comes in very handy when you get a call from a friend/relative who's having computer problems. No need to haul over and install your own virus scanner (which is undoubtedly against said virus scanner's EULA anyway) just to find out if they're infected. I can't remember if it actually CLEANS the viruses it finds, but manually removing most viruses isn't all that tough once you know what you're looking for.

      The HouseCall product has also spotted viruses that Norton did not.

    • It took them an hour and a half to compose a warning EMail to their customers that didn't have the letter P in in anywhere.

    • Sure, it's a minor bug, but how could they possibly have missed it while testing? It's not so much that the bug is a problem as that it indicates that they didn't check whether the patch worked before releasing it.
    • >Yes, there was a problem, but it's fixed

      Exactly. How about an article on why every email I send to my friends at work comes back as, "Your email has elements of spam in it and was rejected" even though its clearly a reply from a message sent from one of their own. Multiple vendors here and yet to be fixed.

      Or Symantec's years long unresolved stability bug.

      "Your product crashes my system."

      "No it doesn't."

      I really hope this P joke doesn't hurt Trend's reputation. They make excellent products and ar
    • eople need to get some perspective on this issue - Yes, there was a problem, but it's fixed. Trend's product base is very stable, very fast and very effective. One small problem like this is just that: small !

      Agreed, it is a small problem - but it's a very funny one.

      Most of us don't have that much going for us in our lives, especially after the bubble burst - can we just have some fun with this please?

  • As someone who actually _uses_ eManager... (Score:5, Informative)

    by nbvb ( 32836 ) on Friday May 23, 2003 @07:28AM (#6022542) Journal
    Yes, the product has the potential for big-brother type thing (filtering mail, etc...) but we don't use it for any of that.

    #1) We use it along with Viruswall to block incoming viruses (It's a proxy that sits in front of Sendmail for us....) Works really well; we haven't had a virus outbreak in 2+ years. (Lousy Outlook!)

    #2) We use it to filter out Spam. I don't get _any_ Spam at my work address. At all. Very impressive if you ask me!

    Viruswall & eManager are pretty ugly pieces of code, but they do the job. We don't get viruses and don't get Spam, and that's why we use it. :)

    Having said that, this stop-the-P thing is a mess. I just checked our rulefiles, and we jumped from rulefile 914 to 920..... glad to see that ;)

    --DM
    • eManager is a piss-poor spam filter. Use SpamAssassin instead. It comes with rulesets you can check for stupid fucking mistakes before rolling them out.

      Oops, pardon my French, I mean it comes with rulesets you can check for stupid fucking moronic mistakes before rollout.

      dave

    • The virus part is fine...but eManager is one of the worst spam products ever invented. No scoring, so mail either goes through or gets blocked without any in-betweens. The out-of-the-box rules must have been written by Jonathan Edwards (for those not up on their history, he was a famous Puritan preacher). There's no HTML cleaning ability; the only way to keep nasty javascripts away is to block javascript (which causes every employee to squawk because they lose all their newsletters). When we use the "au

  • Although this isn't the apparent cause in this case, this is the exact reason that I worry about using distributed attacks against spam... such as vipul's razor [sourceforge.net].

    In this type of case, one overpowering rule makes the program more harmful than helpful. Being too sensitive greatly decreases specificity as well... thus the system spirals into uselessness.

    Anyway, Cloudmark [cloudmark.com] is a commerical product based on vipul's razor. Sadly, vipul's razor will not compile in the window's environment [sourceforge.net] yet.

    God, I hate spam

  • So how did the e-mail Read? (Score:4, Funny)

    by pugugly ( 152978 ) on Friday May 23, 2003 @07:36AM (#6022554)
    "We wanted to be as open as possible about this," he said. "In the United States, customers have been contacted directly via e-mail, and we've notified the reseller channel."

    I can see the email now -

    "Due to an error in our most recent update, e-mails containing a certain letter are now blocked. We can't tell you which one. Really. But make sure you u . . . reset your security setting ASA . . err really quickly.

    Listen - just do it right now - this is embarrassing.
    Thank you - Trend Micro"

  • Vowels (Score:2, Funny)

    by duguk ( 589689 )
    me thnks wld b btr 2 rmv th vwls.

    The only emails with vowels are spam... I work at a school. Damn mobile phones.

  • You know you are a geek... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by greppling ( 601175 ) on Friday May 23, 2003 @07:43AM (#6022579)
    ...when the funniest thing you have read in a while is about a software update causing random e-mail loss...

  • Obligatory Simpsons quote (Score:5, Funny)

    by pcaylor ( 648195 ) on Friday May 23, 2003 @07:55AM (#6022615)
    Mr. Burns: Okay, let's make this sporting, Leonard. If you can tell me why I shouldn't fire you without using the letter "E", you can keep your job. Lenny: Ah... okay...um... I'm a good work... guy... Mr. Burns: You're fired. Lenny: But I didn't say--! Mr. Burn: You will... (OPENS TRAP DOOR) Lenny: Eieeeee-e-e-e-e-e-eee!
  • "This Slashdot article was brought to you by the letter 'P', and the number '2'. Because we're sure it'll get posted twice..."

  • Not just "P" (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I fall into one of those "low double digit customers".... and even blank emails were getting stripped. As the filter also checks embedded code (RTF, HTML, etc)... even a blank email's gonna have a P in it somewhere... Only exception here was OWA and some Mac users where messages seemingly used plain text for the most part. 2 hour window of all mail gone into the ether. Fun
  • Perpetrated by the letter H and the number 5!

  • Actually... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Perdition ( 208487 )
    They had to retract the use of the letter P due to pending legal action by SCO who claim that they orginally came up with most of the letter P and the number 3 and the semicolon... but the Spelling Community thinks that with proper replacements for the copywrited characters, the whole desperate affair can be largely ignored.
  • My first-year C programming project was to read a file and print out a table based on the contents of the file. Everything worked fine, except for some reason it appended a 'p' in a seemingly nondeterministic manner.

    Nobody had bothered to teach us about debuggers at that stage, so we tried our best inserting diagnostic printf's everywhere, but despite days of searching we could never find what was causing it. In the end, we inserted some code to count to where the end of the string should have been and replace the "p" with a null character.

    We got marked down anyway. I still have the source code somewhere, but I haven't dared to look at it for fear of provoking the code gods ... :/

  • Trend Micro (Score:2, Interesting)

    by m0RpHeus ( 122706 )
    I remember last year that their mail filtering system (I think it's the Interscan antivirus) that would block all messages with "!!!" claiming that it was spam. I knew a lot of people who complained about this because sometimes for informal discussion, to emphasize something you might use "!!!" in your message.

    I just hope Interscan doesn't block slashdot because of this comment. ;)

  • Hmmm...

    Ya think the folks at Sesame Street would be upset by this??

    Brought to you by the folks calling for the release of the letter P :p
  • I had a keyboard which had a bad 'F' key so I have to spell everything with 'PH' like "phat chance". If I was still using that keyboard I would have been in some serious trouble.

  • Great for swimming pools. (Score:3, Funny)

    by drhill ( 94584 ) on Friday May 23, 2003 @09:10AM (#6022995)
    I have a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old. I would like a filter like that for my swimming pool.
  • Another article to show to the boss showing him how much better off we are by going the spamass + mimedefang route over expensive, ineffective commercial crap!

  • Dear Trend Micro (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Dear Trend Micro:

    You guys are oo heads for ushing out this stu id screwed u u date.

    Your develo ment team is a cra y bunch of oor rogrammers and your
    roduct is is ile of cra .

    lease iss off.

    Signed
    U set customer
  • that would be a mighty effective spam filter!
  • Trouble with a capital "T" and that rhymes with "P" and that stands for pool!
  • ... has NOT been brought to you with the letter " P ".
  • My grandfather had that and had to go to the hospital to get a kidney stone removed. He said it hurt.
  • Sesame Street: This email was brought to you by the letter--
    Trend Micro: --Oh no you don't!
    <shred>

  • QA? WHAT QA? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Ralph Spoilsport ( 673134 )
    Whoever did the QA on this product is good as fired.

    I can't believe they didn't send the classic "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". Back when I was doing QA, if there was a text field, I'd fill it to the gunnels with stuff like that.

    The programming error was stupid, but things happen - that's why you have a QA Team.

    It's also an example why it's important to have QA do something other than run matrices and automated test scripts. Those only get what they're scripted to catch, and that's not

  • i suppose it also filters out all emails containing the word enis.

  • The missing resumes (Score:3, Funny)

    by EggMan2000 ( 308859 ) * on Friday May 23, 2003 @02:28PM (#6025788) Homepage Journal
    We used Trend Micros product on Exchange and suddenly noticed that it was dumping a lot of resumes into the trash as they came in. And it was only the best resumes that it was trashing.

    Want to guess what was offensive?

    "Magna Cum Laude"

    Umm, how funny is that?
  • blocks all incoming e-mail containing the letter P." Makes me glad I don't use it,
    Wow, I'm impressed by the moral strength -- to make the decision of going through a life without the letter p, and hold on to it -- but I gotta ask, Cow Boy: Why?

    What can you possibly hope to prove that E. V. Wright hasn't already in Gadsby [amazon.com] (the book without an e)?

  • There's no "P" in "QA".
  • ...by Costa-Gavras, about a government that banned, among many other things, the letter "Z".

    Bugs imitating movies. Omgawd, are they REALLY building Skynet???????

  • customers contacted via email (Score:3, Funny)

    by yuri benjamin ( 222127 ) <yuridg@gmail.com> on Saturday May 24, 2003 @02:00AM (#6029609) Journal
    From the article : In the United States, customers have been contacted directly via e-mail

    Does the email sent to customers contain the letter P? How can one describe the problem without using the letter P?

    "There is a problem^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hissue with emails containing the 16th letter of the alp^Hfabet. You are advised to update^H^H^H^H^H^Hdownload the latest patch^H^H^H^H^Hfix from our website at http://w^Hoh damn!"

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