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."

Comments

Re:Shenanigans!

[Jade E. 2]

how about this one, does it contain bugs?

10 PRINT "Meshach is never wrong!";
20 GOTO 10;

Yes, BASIC doesn't use semicolons at the end of lines.

Re:Microsoft

[badboy_tw2002]

Mod parent up! Epic slam at the '$oft, brah.

How dare you, my mother is a saint!

[SmallFurryCreature]

I wonder which programmer should be more worried, the one who can't read the above, or the one who can.

Re:How dare you, my mother is a saint!

[KiloByte]

In this case, the one who wrote that. And I don't mean just readability by novices.

*(&z + z) -- unless it's C++, this makes sense only for referring to the zth next variable after z. Like: int z, a, b, c; -- z=1 will select a, z=2 will select b, z=3 will select c. In an old compiler, this will always work. In an optimizing one, it's damn likely to break.

Mixing dec and hex numbers, and writing down constants for bit operations using decimal numbers in general is prone to mistakes.
So is using addition in an expression that consist mostly of bit operations, you want | there instead.

0x8F is a complex mask, it definitely should be a #define with a name. There's nothing wrong with masks like 0x7F or 0x1F, but for 0x8F, it's not obvious enough.

~(~t11) -- uhm, what's the point?

With these issues fixed, though, with a bit of comments such a code isn't that bad.

Re:Microsoft

[theshowmecanuck]

I call bullshit. For one, I was involved in Y2K related work for businesses that would have failed if their systems were not upgraded, namely the main enterprise business systems for daily newspapers (their circulation systems); for prepaid and wholesale (single copy) sales. And that included almost every newspaper in North America, and many overseas (not that our company worked on every newspaper's system, but considering there are not that many circ system software solutions, and they pretty much all had Y2K issues...). As well, the dot com bubble didn't burst until at least January 2000 which means that the Y2K issue was sorted out or companies were out of business before the dot com people were out of work. As well, the dot com people thrown out of work were mostly web developers, and the Y2K issue affected server side, and often COBOL related software... not exactly in the dot com programming skills bag. The company I worked for by the way provided a non-COBOL replacement system to fix our clients Y2K... complete new system instead of patching the existing system. I don't know where this 'myth of the Y2K' came about, but it seems to yet another conspiracy theory. I haven't seen or heard of one Y2K fix being worked on that wasn't solving a real critical issue. You're not a 'truther' or 'birther' by any chance too?

sometimes it is justified

[eennaarbrak]

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...