cut and paste hazard

[Paul Rubin <phr-2003@nightsong.com>]

I tried cutting and pasting some text from a web browser window into
an Emacs buffer in a terminal window, and got some weird behavior
(beeping and hard-to-fathon minibuffer error messages) from Emacs on
the paste operation.  It was just a sentence or two of plain text
about a guy from Spain and I couldn't at first understand what was wrong.

It turned out that because the Spanish guy's name contained an
accented character, Emacs interpreted the 8-bit code for that
character as an editing command with the Meta key set.

This is kind of scary--that particular accented string luckily didn't
screw up anything by accident.  It's even a security risk, since I
could imagine being able to maliciously engineer a block of text that
did something nasty when pasted into Emacs.

Unfortunately, at least with Emacs running in a terminal window and
with the paste operation being done externally by the window manager,
I don't see a workaround.  If Emacs is running in an X window, it
should accept 8-bit typein as normal text, and require actual meta key
events to set off editing commands (I don't know if it does this).