16th IOCCC Winners Announced

chongo writes: "The winners of the 16th International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC) have been selected. The judges are in the process of notifying the winners by EMail. We expect to release the source code around mid April 2002 after the winners have had a chance to review our writeup of their entries."

Comments

Notified via Email

[tcd004]

I think you just notified them via Slashdot.

The Shadow Government Knows
tcd004

Assembler

[rif42]

> We expect to release the source code
> around mid April 2002

Will we also get a translation in assembler to help clarify the soure code?

Obfuscated code contests?

[The Sojourner]

Is it really a good idea to have contests like this which encourage slovenly, inscrutable, and altogether unmaintainable coding? I'll admit I don't know much about computer science, but I do know that it's important to keep your code clear, well-documented and easy to understand. My boyfriend obsesses over this sort of thing, and he's always cursing when he has to deal with other people's code (like when he tries to hack his Linux kernel :-) "What the hell sort of coding standards are this?" "Have these people ever heard of a comment?" "What the hell was Linus smoking when he wrote THIS code?" are just some of the things I've heard him yell. I imagine I'd have to take the poor guy to the hospital if he ever tried to look at any of the entries for this contest ;-)

As I said, I'm not much of a programmer, but it seems that enough people generate obfuscated code unintentionally that having a contest to encourage this sort of thing is silly and counterproductive to the advancement of programming techniques. I just hope the people who enter this contest are a bit cleaner coders when they have real work to do!

Re:Obfuscated code contests?

[brennan73]

Yeah! I said the same thing when they started giving out awards for the worst academic prose. But no one listened, and now there are hordes of people going into philosophy and English just to win prestigious awards for terrible prose. And don't get me started on the Razzies, which have clearly encouraged intentionally poor filmmaking. I mean, why would you purposely award bad things? Oh, the humanity!

Re:Obfuscated code contests?

[Mister_IQ]

And of course, let's not forget The Bulwer-Lytton Contest.

The 1996 Winner, my favorite sentence of all time:
"Ace, watch your head!" hissed Wanda urgently, yet somehow provocatively, through red, full, sensuous lips, but he couldn't you know, since nobody can actually watch more than part of his nose or a little cheek or lips if he really tries, but he appreciated her warning."

Re:Obfuscated code contests?

[Shiny Metal S.]

I'll admit I don't know much about computer science, but I do know that it's important to keep your code clear, well-documented and easy to understand.

Well, unfortunately it's not always that simple. Let's take the Shiny Metal Brute Force Crypt Cracker v3.1.9 as an example. It can crack every single password encrypted with crypt(3) containing 1 to 8 lowercase latin letters. It uses a sophisticated cryptoanalysis method, which scientists call the "Brute Force". Its main purpose is to hide domain of my electronic-mail address from spammers (see my bio). Here's the source code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# Shiny Metal Brute Force Crypt Cracker v3.1.9
#
# Copyright (C) 2001,2002 shiny@key.salt (shiny@output)
# http://slashdot.org/~Shiny+Metal+S./
#
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
# modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
# as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
# of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
# GNU General Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General
# Public License along with this program;
# if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
# 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
#
$x=substr$q,q,0,,q,2,if$q=q,plfeY04jaJnYI,;for
(++$_..$_<<3){qq,$q,eq crypt$_,$x and die
qq,$_.$x,for q,a,x$_..q,z,x$_}

As you can clearly see, the main algorithm used in this program (in the main loop) is able to always find every password (from the 1-8 lowercase latin characters set) but what does it mean? I had to use strong cryptography, because otherwise my electronic-mail address could be harvested by spambots (and therefore be used to perform unsolicited commercial mass mailing), but it also means, that this algorithm could be used to crack passwords from your /etc/passwd (or even from /etc/shadow), which usually contain passwords encrypted with crypt(3) and this could compromise the whole system security (imagine hackers having unlimited access to your PC). It's a very dangerous problem. Most of password cracking tools use the, so called, "Dictionary Method" to guess passwords, which mean that you're safe as long as you have a password like "wmctsbvg" or "obwhdrle" or even "awxolfrk", but this program will guess such passwords. My point is, that it can be to dangerous to publish a clear and well documented source code to such a dangerous tool. It could be used by one of many underground hacker groups, like the famous Script Kiddies, who don't even care that reverse engineering of this code is illegal under the DMCA. Fortunately, this program was written in Perl, which was found to be the only language, with mathematically proved possibility of secure one-way obfuscating (also known as WOL - "write only language", or WORN paradigm - "write once - read never"), so it is impossible to reverse engineer. The situation will be even improved when Perl 6 is released (read Apocalypse I, Apocalypse II, Exegesis II, Apocalypse III, Exegesis III and Apocalypse IV for a good introduction to this subject). That way, people can still use crypt(3) to encrypt their passwords, with no fear that hackers know how to crack them, the crypt(3) encryption method is as secure as before. When this program will be rewriten in Perl 6, the crypt(3) method will be actually even more secure than before, thanks to the strong source code obfuscation method. I hope I explained where the obfuscated code can be useful, but this is only one example, I'm sure there are many places where the good old obfuscation will be priceless for many decades. If you have any additional questions, feel free to contact me.

Re:Obfuscated code contests?

[Coppit]

If you use gcc, you probably have benefited from fixes of bugs those programs have helped uncover.

If one of my programs triggers a bug that these programs do, it's time to toss it and try again. ;)

10 minutes later and it's already /.

[LuxuryYacht]

Looks like this site is now the winner of todays International Obfuscated Website Contest due to the /. effect.

.

Re:10 minutes later and it's already /.

[Fweeky]

> International Obfuscated Website Contest

Good idea. There are so many technologies that could be used in a way that obfuscates sites; Flash, JavaScript, DHTML, tables, tag soup, box model abuse etc; unfortunately I suspect some existing and popular sites may well prove too hard to beat.

Still, could serve as a nice ironic way to point out why avoiding and abusing standards is Bad[tm].

Re:Here's an idea for a contest

[Mayor McPenisman]

Write a program to tell you if you have pants on. Then, when you have pants on, the program says, in a robot voice: "you have pants on" over and over. When you don't have pants on the robot voice says "you do not have pants on." The placing of pants will result in a modification of the voice warning within expected tolerances of 1.2 microseconds. The IEEE accepted definition of 'wearing pants' is having at least once pulled them so that the crotch area contacts the crotch of the person wearing said pants. Buttoning/zipping is not the prefered method of pants detection, seeing as many embarrassing situations arise from people having pants on but not having them properly secured. The robot voice would be the voice of the guy who did Kitt in Knight Rider and the pants detection algorhithim would be based on wither punch cards or mood rings.

GPL Abuser WINS the IOCCC CONTEST!

[Anonymous Coward]

GPL ABUSER has WON the IOCCC CODE CONTEST!

To Fill In Those Who Are Slashdotted

[Peridriga]

The winner on this years contest is Microsoft for their submission of

Microsoft Corporation End User Agreement

Contributed by an anonymous user.

Re:To Fill In Those Who Are Slashdotted

[rant-mode-on]

Hang on, isn't there a rule that says each entry has got to be workable?

An old anecdote

[frozenray]

Every time I hear about the IOCCC I'm reminded of this old anecdote:

The highlight of the annual Computer Bowl occurred when Bill Gates, who was a judge, posed the following question to the contestants:

"What contest, held via Usenet, is dedicated to examples of weird, obscure, bizarre, and really bad programming?"

After a moment of silence, Jean-Louis Gassee (ex-honcho at Apple) hit his buzzer and answered "Windows."

Mr. Bill's expression was, in the words of one who was there, "classic."

(source)

winning entry

[Anonymous Coward]

#include <stdio.h>
#define S(s)char x[]=#s;s
#define Q(x)x
#define A(x,y)y##x
#define B(x,y)A(y,x)
#define C(x,y)B(y,x)
#define Z(s,t,u)case s:if(*p!=32){t;}else{u;}break;
S(B( A( a ,m ),A(n ,i))() {B (A(h,c ),A(r ,a ))*p=x ;B(A( n, i),t)t
=0;B(A(n , i),t)s =0;B( f ,A(r, o )) (;*p;Q( p)++){C( B( A(c,t) ,h),B(A(
w, s),i))( s){ Z( 0,t+=8 *8-00 ,s ++)Z( 1,t+= 8 ;,s++ )Z
( 2, t++ ,putchar(t-73);t=s=0)}}})

Obfuscated Wok Contest

[ZiZ]

I believe that one of the entries:

Best Abuse of User: Edward Rosten (England) - Greasy mouse

also qualifies for the Iron Chef competition. Or am I alone in thinking that Greasy Mouse sounds like some sort of England variant on Chinese/Indian cookery? *grin* (I can't wait to see this entry. I love the Abuse of User programs...)

Heads up potential employers.

[sinserve]

The contributors, winners, judges and just about
anyone who has anything to do with IOCCC, should
be in your "not to hire" black-list.

Unless you want your project to be implemented as
a self-printing pelindromic asciiz, that has a built in tetris.

--

Re:Here's an idea for a contest

[ZaneMcAuley]

Thats easy, just code C# and it looks like Java.

Re:Secret Society

[Aaaaaargh!]

Is there a secret society of Grand Master programmers

I sense much fear in this one. Train you, I cannot.

The bad news...

[miracle69]

The winners will be notified by Obsfucated Email guised as spam.

Re:Anonymous 4

[cheezehead]

Let's see some obfuscated Ruby programs.

Or obfuscated perl scripts. Oh, wait a minute...