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al Qaeda Hacks XP?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the conspiracy-theories-and-bears-oh-my dept.

acaird writes "According to this article at Newbytes, members of al Qaeda may have worked for Microsoft and planted "trojans, trapdoors, and bugs in Windows XP"." This stuff screams of hoax to me, but it is showing up on the Washington Post.

11 of 736 comments (clear)

  1. bin Laden's not in Tora Bora by big_cat79 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Hey Dubya, Osama isn't hiding in caves in Tora Bora, he's hiding in a conference room in Redmond!

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    BigCat79

    "The dead have risen and are voting Republican!" --Bart Simpson
  2. Daisy Cutter by pjdepasq · · Score: 4, Offtopic

    Does this mean we can drop a few 'Daisy Cutters' on Redmond?

  3. Its Bert! by LM741N · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Now whenever an appication crashes I get a picture of Bert from Sesame street!

  4. How long until... by BlueUnderwear · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    ... the first caricatures of Bill Gates with beard and turban start to appear.

    --
    Say no to software patents.
  5. Re:AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!! by susano_otter · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    100k 0u+ d00d i w177 h0@x0r j00!!!

    --

    Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.

  6. Re:not as easy as you might think by firewort · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    Just cause I'm curious,

    Did you work on OS/2 development? I've seen your other posts and know that you're among the last outposts of people placing their faith in OS/2.

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  7. OT: strcmp by Mr.+Slippery · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Offtopic, but:

    another reason why strcmp() is pure evil sometimes

    Only because people try to misuse it as a boolean function, which it ain't - its an order test. If you say

    if (strcmp(username, "osama") == 0) or
    if (strcmp(username, "oscama") != 0)

    your code will be clearer - the == 0 or != 0 (or > 0 or < 0) is the same sense as the string comparison.

    --
    Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
    You cannot wash away blood with blood
  8. Re:not as easy as you might think by fredrik70 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    ROTFL! God, if I had mod points I would mod you up!!

    --
    if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
  9. Re:Those bastards hacked the linux kernel too! by slamb · · Score: 4, Offtopic

    Off-topic but important

    find /usr/src/linux -type f | xargs grep -i "a.*l.*q.*a.*e.*d.*a"

    Don't do that. You're right; it is much faster. But it's less safe: it breaks if filenames contain whitespace. Ideally, they wouldn't, but remember the iTunes 2 installer? It axed entire partitions for this very reason. Filenames on a lot of systems do have spaces. Code that breaks on them is bad.

    Instead, do this:

    find /usr/src/linux -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep -i "a.*l.*q.*a.*e.*d.*a"

    It requires GNU find and xargs. But it really is much, much better. (It uses a null character instead of a space/newline as the seperator. Filenames can't contain nulls, since the system calls expect C-style null-terminated strings.)

    (GNU bashers: There is a reason people prefer their tools. They really are better in a lot of cases.)

  10. Slashdot Purchased by the National Enquirer? by MikeDataLink · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    If this is the best news stories slashdot can come up with, I'll just start reading the enqiuerer.

    PLEASE STOP POSTING CRAP!

    --
    Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
  11. Re:not as easy as you might think by firewort · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    Thanks for replying.

    I used OS/2 up until a year ago when I began exploring Linux, BeOS and OS X options.

    Most of the WebSphere stuff is java based with very little native code in any case, so the applications are portable.

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