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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.

2 of 736 comments (clear)

  1. Daisy Cutter by pjdepasq · · Score: 4, Offtopic

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

  2. 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.)