On Sat, 28 Feb 2004, Hiram Berry wrote: (...)
in spite of my fairly high level of vigilance a malicious spammer had gotten 2 copies of the mydoom.f worm onto my computer disguised as, of all things, a .png file!
I don't see a likely problem, there. Of all the places where a virus scanner is likely to make a false hit, it's a compressed graphics file or an encrypted file. You don't execute .png files, so it can't spread from there. Now, you might say that it isn't required to execute OPCODES, but portable network graphics are not a programming language of any kind. To state a limit on Java that didn't turn out to be so fundamental, it certainly doesn't hav access to the filesystem. There aren't any perfect filters or virus scanners. Virus scanners routinely hit BO2K, but that's a source-forge project for a product that competes with Back Office, so I'm pretty sure that politics gets into the virus scanning scene, too.