Short: Yes
Long: In 1995 we started importing facimile in our mainframe system (DB2). After some time I got a call that a user had problems with a document (we had a fax-tiff importer) and his 3270 emulation crashed (that famouse flash symbol).
After some research I found out that the title (sender & phone) in our database looked quite strange (like a failed byte conversation). When trying to display the data the the 3270 terminal interpreted it as control chars which caused the problem.
The sender had some problems to define his name/number in his fax machine. Then he just typed some chars (not knowing how to edit it).
So I built a batch job to clean the database and added a filter for valid chars.
As always: Never trust any data!
PS: I'm sure that this is a thing today in other companies (who cares about fax machines today?)
Long: In 1995 we started importing facimile in our mainframe system (DB2). After some time I got a call that a user had problems with a document (we had a fax-tiff importer) and his 3270 emulation crashed (that famouse flash symbol).
After some research I found out that the title (sender & phone) in our database looked quite strange (like a failed byte conversation). When trying to display the data the the 3270 terminal interpreted it as control chars which caused the problem.
The sender had some problems to define his name/number in his fax machine. Then he just typed some chars (not knowing how to edit it).
So I built a batch job to clean the database and added a filter for valid chars.
As always: Never trust any data!
PS: I'm sure that this is a thing today in other companies (who cares about fax machines today?)
