In <3c5ipu$j1i at nntp.ucs.ubc.ca> John McClean <mcclean at flair.law.ubc.ca>
said:
> .... This was because the file really had escape sequences which
>were sent to the display driver... Granted, this is not really what
>you are referring to, and in any event is not really a virus as it cannot
>self-replicate.
You are bringing back the good old days back when I did those kinda
tricks. :) On a DOS machine, if you set DEVICE=ANSI.SYS then the ansi
device driver would be loaded. This interprets both keypresses and
display output. You could use it to change the color, location, etc.
of the text, with the appropriate escape sequence - something like
ESC [ <ansi command>;
Alas, I've forgotten them :(
Anyway, one of the things you could use this for is to reprogram the
keys so that a keypress would return another character, or even a
string. For instance, you could reprogram F1 to send the sequence
"HELP<return>", or whatever.
In principle you could make it do something like map the enter key
to "del *.*<return>". That would be nasty. BTW, I can't think of
anyway to make a reproducing an email message in ANSI escape code, so
you don't have to worry about viruses from me.
(Actually, I'm doing computer simulations of the poliovirus; so you
do have to worry about viruses from me :)
Andrew
dalke at uiuc.ede
