Slashdot Mirror
al Qaeda Hacks XP?
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.
Do Microsoft let new employees check code into their products without a code review?
I thought not.
Mmmmmmm
Excuse me for not bashing Microsoft (I'll try to in my next post, don't worry), but wouldn't it be just as easy to plant "trojans, trapdoors, and bugs" in Linux? What with Linux being open-source, anyone can hack it, and unless those who review the code go over it line by line, it may be possible to slip something in. And if not in the Linux kernel, what about another Open Source program? Be wary, Linux users....
Would anyone be able to tell the difference between the bugs, trapdoors, and whatnot that al Queda put in there vs the ones Microsoft did?
-sig
Hmm. Im porting this anonymously for obvious reasons, but the larger the company and the larger the codebase, the easier this sort of thing becomes. Some software also tends to have certain areas which are very active in development and other areas (eg - backwards compatibility cruft) which often goes untouched for years. A company who say has a large codebase which contains lots of legacy code for compatibility reasons would make the easiest targer.
Note: I said easiest target, not an neccesarily an easy target.
This threas is likely to generate lots of posts like "well if we had the source, this would be impossible". Moderators: before you write these off as "linux zealots" and send them to -1 flamebait, please take a moment to try and find a hole in their argument first.
..
wait a second... it is true.
/*b1n l@d1n r00lz!*/
i just hacked the windows source and look what i found.
air_traffic(){
if ($DATE=="09-11-01"){
for (i=0; i++; i3){
plane(BOOM);
}
}
}
bet you didn't know that that copy of windows running on your home machine is actually being used to control air traffic lanes, didja?
lysergically yours
Boy did you flunk this! The Red container holds a solution of 90% Red & 10% Blue; the Blue Container holds a solution of 90% Blue & 10% Red/Blue mixture. In other words, the Blue container contains 91% Blue 9% Red, and is therefore more "pure".
This is a basic high-school algebra word problem. I'm not sure what's more scary: that this is all Microsoft expects of their programmers, or that the typical Slashdot reader can't solve it.
DUDE!
YOU are a fucking pimp. That is all there is to it.
Every once in a while I like to masturbate a new word into my vocabulary, even if I don't know what it means.