Ray Van Eng (05/21/96)

There is a brood of malicious Java 'Black Widow' applets out on the loose roaming on the world wide web, ready to bring your machine to its knees.

Some of these Black Widows would declare themselves as 'I am a friendly applet' but once you download to your computer, these creatures would gobble your system memories and CPU resources and eventually cause your computer to crash.

Would you believe that the villains who are putting out these offensive beings are members of your highly regarded academic groups and they say these Black Widows are here for your own good.

Well, it is true. These university professors and Ph.D. candidates did it with good intentions. They want you to be aware of the potential danger that exists with downloadable software that can create havoc if the software creator chooses to do so.

Sun Microsystems, the creator of Java says that they knew about the problem which they identify as a form of 'denial of service attacks' right from the inception of Java, but it is extremely difficult to implement some means to control these negative side effects. They point out that this problem is not unique with Java applets, but also with other executable content written in other programming languages.

However, Sun says they will try to limit the amount of system resources that a Java applet can use on a local machine and also work with 3rd party developers to 'code-signing' apllets for certification and authentication.

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