a bug naturally occuring in python du to webcameras surveillance, the bug is:

[ python-Bugs-649967 ] urllib.urlopen('file:/...') uses FTP 

 

Initial Comment:
urllib.urlopen(), when given a 'file' URL containing a host 
part, like 'file://somehost/path/to/file', treats it as if it 
were an 'ftp' URL.

While RFC 1738 acknowledges that the access method 
for file URLs is unspecified, the assumption of FTP, even 
when a direct access method is available, is a poor 
design decision and is a possible security risk in 
applications that use urlopen().

When given a file URL, urlopen() should extract the 
portion following 'file:', convert a leading '//localhost/' 
to '///' (because localhost is a special case per RFC 
1738; see other bug report on this topic), and use 
url2pathname() to try to convert this to an OS-specific 
path. The result can then be passed to open().

For example, on Windows, urlopen
('file://somehost/path/to/file') should return the result of 
open('\somehost\path\to\file', 'rb').

In situations where there is no convention for interpreting 
the host part of a URL as a component in an OS path, 
such as on Unix filesystems, an exception should be 
raised by url2pathname(), in my opinion. If urlopen() 
wants to try an alternate access method such as FTP, it 
should only do so if directed by the caller.

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>Comment By: Mike Brown (mike_j_brown)
Date: 2002-12-08 15:22

Message:
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If you document it, it's not a bug?

The docs say that the fallback on FTP is "for backward 
compatibility" ... backward compatibility with what?

The fact that it's a possible security risk should at least be 
documented. An application on a machine behind a firewall 
might not be expecting 'file' URLs to result in hitting the FTP 
servers of that machine or its neighbors.


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Comment By: Martin v. Löwis (loewis)
Date: 2002-12-08 02:03

Message:
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This is not a bug; it is documented behaviour: see

http://python.org/doc/current/lib/module-urllib.html

To override this behaviour, use urllib2, and inherit from
FileHandler.

LINK 

 when we talk about firewalls are we  talking about frames in python?