greg(a)alphatech.com (Greg Klanderman) writes: When I originally wrote the code, one thing I was concerned about was XEmacs being easily exploited for trojan horse attacks. In particular, a talented hacker could intercept ftp requests to ftp.xemacs.org and substitude their own versions of packages -- hence the md5 checksum for each package. But then the problem becomes grabing package-get-base.el -- if that gets intercepted then there is a problem. Bogus md5sum's can be substituted, host names changed, package locations, etc. I pictured two distribution methods for package-get-base.el. It either gets sent with the entire distribution (which are signed). If that is corrupted, well you have bigger problems anyway. The second was a periodic posting to a newsgroup/mailing list. Presumably, such an article would be PGP signed and could be verified as being from the poster. Automatic access to package-get-base.el is dangerous. --pete