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Re: [Full-Disclosure] New Microsoft Internet Explorer mshtml.dll Denial of Service?



On Tue, 02 Sep 2003 11:23:09 PDT, morning_wood said:

> funny, i often see replies to my post long before i see my own post
> dont know why, does'nt always happen. But it is odd.
> Sometimes I wonder if the list is being siphoned for breaking sec info before
> the posts reach the subscribers.

Nothing that paranoid.  What probably happens is:

1) You post to the list.  It starts sending out to the subscribers.

2) One of the first 100 or so subscribers gets their copy and starts banging on
their keyboard like a rabid monkey, and uses whatever "wide" reply they have,
and hit 'send'.

3) The list processor is still chugging.

4) The direct copy of their reply hits your mailbox and the *in*bound side of 
the list.

5) The list finally coughs up your copy of the original posting.  This shows up 
after
the reply does.

6) Their reply runs the gauntlet, and is finally pushed out.  Your mail system 
does
proper duplicate suppression, so the list's copy of the reply goes poof....

Or at least, that's been my experience of the usual cause of order inversion, 
based on
almost 20 years of doing this stuff (you think it's bad here, you should have 
seen the
latencies on the old Bitnet network - it could be 15 or 20 store-and-forward 
hops
over 9600 and 56K links and each hop was often queued shortest-job-first.  So 
if you
had a several hundred K file, it could take DAYS to get from one end of the net 
to the
other.  It was not uncommon for a large flamefest to get started, go 15-20 
messages
before the rest of the list even knew there WAS a flamefest...)

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