(FWD) Load external content? message seems inappropriate

[Roger Dingledine]

[Forwarding to the list since this address isn't subscribed.

My first question is: what is the content-type header provided by the
webserver? Perhaps it was something that your browser recognized and
thought it couldn't display by itself?

My second thought is: this might be a Torbutton bug, and might want
to go into bugs.torproject.org.

--Roger]

----- Forwarded message from owner-or-talk at freehaven.net -----

Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2009 21:11:52 -0500
Subject: Load external content? message seems inappropriate
From: Thomas Anderson <zelnaga at gmail.com>
To: or-talk at seul.org

I was playing around with Tor Browser to see what it was like and
tried to download a small 1mb file from a server of mine.  In the
process, I got the following message:

---------------------

An external application is needed to handle:

http://domain.tld/path/to/my/file.ext

NOTE: External applications are NOT Tor safe by default and can unmask you!

---------------------

My question is...  why is an external package being loaded?  All I
want to do is to download a file via HTTP to my hard drive.  I don't
want to open it up in whatever application would be appropriate and
even if I did, it's not as if that application would be the one that
downloads the file - Tor Browser would still download it and just
place it in the Windows temporary directory or where ever.

All in all, the message seems inappropriate.  Sure, if I was
downloading, say, an *.exe, that *.exe might connect me to the
internet, but even then, the message seems misleading, since, at that
point, it's not that an external package is needed to handle the file
so much as the file *is* an external package.

----- End forwarded message -----

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