"Jose" wrote in message
m...
This is a fine point that is important in some contexts. However, it is
code. It causes your machine to do something interactive (granted, at the
behest of the interpreter). It can certainly be harmful - a trivial
example is a popup loop that crashes the machine.

I have seen loops that clutter up my desktop, but never had one crash my
computer. I just bring up task manager (which is always a top-level
window), and kill the iexplore.exe process). All the popped up windows go
away, no fuss no muss.

Of course, now I use a browser that blocks pop-ups altogether, so that's
just not an issue. In any case, I believe that George's point was simply
that Java in and of itself doesn't allow an unsigned applet to do anything
that could be permanently harmful to your computer.

Similarly, Microsoft Word documents with scripts built in are also
interpreted, but can carry viruses and trojans.

Terrible comparison. Word's macro language is basically Visual Basic, and
includes all sorts of "dangerous" stuff, including file i/o. Even so, all
of the Word macro viruses I've heard of infect only other Word documents,
and are trivial to block (just turn off macros for Word). They are only
dangerous as long as you aren't aware you're infected.

Word macros and unsigned Java applets have very little in common with each
other.

Pete