Why can't I put hotlinks in notification icon balloon tips?

re: Why can't I put hotlinks in notification icon balloon tips?

Raymond Chen — Mon, 01 Mar 2004 05:15:00 GMT

Right, a formatting attack is meaningful only against people who have permission to format the computer. But you can see other attacks that do not require admin privs (e.g., delete all your files).

re: Why can't I put hotlinks in notification icon balloon tips?

Andrew — Mon, 01 Mar 2004 03:32:00 GMT

A non-admin user shouldn't be able to format their own hard drive. A typical user (the type who'd get fooled by something like this) should not be logged in as an admin.

Stuff like this is just compensation for a broken security model.

re: Why can't I put hotlinks in notification icon balloon tips?

Raymond Chen — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 16:21:00 GMT

Again, because most of the time the thing you want to hotlink is not an URL. For example, look at Help and Support -- all those things that look like hotlinks and not a single one of them is an URL.

re: Why can't I put hotlinks in notification icon balloon tips?

Moi — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 09:37:00 GMT

Ok, then I don't get it. Why could the URLs not simply be forced through whatever mechanism the user has selected for handling things of that type and so have the appropriate security?

re: Why can't I put hotlinks in notification icon balloon tips?

Raymond Chen — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 22:25:00 GMT

Instead of a file:// URL, you could use something like http://some.hacker.site/trojan.exe

(In fact the format.com example doesn't work. I intentionally picked something that doesn't work so people wouldn't get ideas. But the principle is there: Just stick in something that would be bad to pass to ShellExecute.)

re: Why can't I put hotlinks in notification icon balloon tips?

Peter Dimov — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 22:18:00 GMT

Balloons aside, the fact that you can execute format.com via a file:// URL is mind-boggling. That's a very odd security model, if the words "security model" can even be used to describe it.

The example URL doesn't format, though, I tried it. :-)

re: Why can't I put hotlinks in notification icon balloon tips?

Oleksiy Kolisnychenko — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 13:11:00 GMT

Thanks Sven, LVS_EX_DOUBLEBUFFER helped!

It's in headers, but not documented yet. :((

re: Why can't I put hotlinks in notification icon balloon tips?

Mike Dimmick — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 11:20:00 GMT

Pocket PC 2002 and later offer notification balloons with links in them, and the links result in a call to IShellNotificationCallback::OnCommandSelected or IShellNotificationCallback::OnLinkSelected depending on what sort of link was clicked.

Another case of independent development of a similar feature.

re: Why can't I put hotlinks in notification icon balloon tips?

Simon Cooke [exMSFT] — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 07:18:00 GMT

Yeah, but I think that's what people are griping about; they're asking for links, when what they really want is more control over formatting and feedback. They don't want a hyperlink control in there - they want a richer model for display.

Call it Office/Encarta/Money UI Envy ;-)

My own personal jury is still out on WinFX and Avalon. I'm holding judgement until I see some later builds.

re: Why can't I put hotlinks in notification icon balloon tips?

Raymond Chen — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 04:17:00 GMT

Well not even the balloon control uses rich text. It's just plain text (with some underlining if you enable links). No selective boldface or any of that stuff.

Hopefully WinFX will make it easier to combine multiple controls.