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Arrests For Selling Poison-Ware In Spain
An anonymous reader writes "Spain's FBI equivalent has arrested the management of a software company (Google translation; Spanish original) for selling custom software to small and medium-sized businesses with 'controlled errors' that resulted in the software bombing on a predetermined date. They would then charge for fixing the problem and press the client into buying a maintenance contract. More than 1,000 clients were affected."
How often does anything that looks like an obfuscated C contest entry actually get committed to a repository ?
It happens all the time where I work. I maintain some old code written by an old hacker (he's got a credit in the K&R book!) Shit like this is not uncommon:
*(&z + z) |= ~tqq + m ? u9 >> 2: 741 | w & 0x8F ? ~(~t11) : foo
... also, I can kill you with my brain.
A friend of mine works for a company that sells software to a government department a central African country (I want to keep the details vague to avoid incrimination). After completing the contract and delivering the software, reps arrived one day and simply stated "We're not going to pay full price for the software - we're not making as much money out of it as we thought we would." This country does not have much of a justice system to appeal to if you don't have a politician in your pocket, so my friend's company intentionally released code to make the system stop working if the payments are late. AFAIK that fixed the problem.
I'm just curios if these companies were perhaps faced with a similar situation...