Need Help Finding a Classic Debugging Story
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Hello fellow thedailywtf readers and probable programmer colleagues,
Sometime in the past decade I remember a programming story that involved someone (The Expert) being brought in to find the source of random bad words in a program's output. The Expert found no swear words in their code and moved on, but the users persisted.
From what I remember, some PhD student had modified the compiler on the computer the program was built on to inject the binary with these swear words. The Expert reinstalled the compiler, but if memory serves me correctly, there was a cron job to written to overwrite any attempts to do this. I'm not 100% sure of the details.
Does anyone recall this same story? Do you know where I could find it? Been wracking my brain about it and my google fu has been failing me pretty hardcore.
Thanks
-Ben
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I believe it's in https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened if you mean SPANK SPANK SPANK/BITCH.
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Or maybe https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/6302/the-automated-curse-generator for Japanese swear words?
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This is hilarious, but not ringing any bells. I specifically remember something on the bottom that was like "watch out for bored phd students with too much free time".
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I suspect you got a garbled version of Ken Thompson's Turing Award speech, "Reflections on Trusting Trust", possibly mixed in with the even older story of Robin Hood and Friar Tuck exploit (which is widely claimed to be the first example of virus-like program behavior on record, though the Darwin game - which was the main inspiration for Core War about twenty years later - was about ten years earlier, and Creeper was in the early 1970s).
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I, too, remember a story somewhere where a compiler had code to detect when it was compiling itself and would re-inject the malicious code. They had to compile on another machine. I don't remember any cron-jobs though. It was in a university, and they assumed it was a rather clever student who had set it up.
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Found it:
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@scholrlea Looking at the answer that @TwelveBaud posted, it would appear that someone took Ken Thompson's idea and actually implemented it for malicious purposes.
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@masonwheeler said in Need Help Finding a Classic Debugging Story:
@scholrlea Looking at the answer that @TwelveBaud posted, it would appear that someone took Ken Thompson's idea and actually implemented it for malicious purposes.
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@dcon I decided to look it up when you mentioned that. Was it this?
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@scholrlea 3B was the noise a Commodore 64 would spit out at the end of the Frogger 2 game jingle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjSxNAgfgq8
I guess it was supposed to be "three deep" but whatever.
In other news, I knew about Frogger(s) and Zaxxon, but I had no idea Sega made so many C-64 games: https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Sega. I also had no idea Golden Axe was ported to C-64.
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@twelvebaud Amazing! Thank you!
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@twelvebaud Also, it's amazing how wrong I was on some fronts but this is the exact story
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@raynjamin Welcome to the forums!
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@scholrlea
I guess all of that redundancy didn't work out so well.
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@scholrlea Yup.