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Programmer Arrested For Logic Bombing 'Whac-A-Mole'
McGruber writes "WFTV.com has the curious story of programmer Marvin Wimberly, who was arrested for having installed a logic bomb on Whac-A-Mole arcade games made by Bob's Space Racers in Holly Hill, Florida."
when the moles don't have bombs. Especially logic bombs.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
> "If they hadn't of discovered that they had the virus installed
> in the equipment, they wouldn't have known why their
> machines were failing," said Cpt. Steve Aldrich, Holly Hill
> Police Department.
Holly Hill's finest at work. You heard it here folks, if they hadn't of figured it out, they wouldn't have known!
Kinda like having a 100000 mile warranty, and your cars engine dies at 103000 miles.
Mostly because any good software engineer could put a hard-to-find bug in the code. Thank goodness it takes a good social engineer to make money off it - and the two skills don't often overlap in real life (as much as software engineers seem to think they do).
The other reason programmers will never rule the world - eventually the whack-a-person machines will require Marvin to come fix them.
Quartz Extreme and Core Image. Are there any other real reasons to spend all that money on generic hardware?
Each game, after turning on and off a certain number of times, sometimes 50, sometimes 500, would fail. Wimberly would be paid to fix it, and police reports say, he would insert a new virus with a new countdown.
Does it really qualify as a virus?
He's going to have to tell all the other inmates he's in for murder because he'll surely get his ass kicked for telling them he rigged Whack-A-Mole.
There are a lot of preposterous ways of winding up in the clink, and this is in the top 100.
> "If they hadn't of discovered that they had the virus installed > in the equipment, they wouldn't have known why their > machines were failing," said Cpt. Steve Aldrich, Holly Hill > Police Department.
Holly Hill's finest at work. You heard it here folks, if they hadn't of figured it out, they wouldn't have known!
... Actually, the article states that if he hadn't mentioned it, they wouldn't have been looking at a software "feature" at all.
Quartz Extreme and Core Image. Are there any other real reasons to spend all that money on generic hardware?
The Caddyshack quotes would be endless...
From his mugshot, he looks like a sad character. I kinda feel bad for what he's about to go through on his little vacation to the justice system. There are certainly worse things a person could do.
For Slashdot points, I will now note that what this guy planted was a logic bomb, not a virus.
Imagine the hilarity that would have ensued had it been Boon-Ga Boon-Ga that was rigged instead of Whack A Mole.
This space unintentionally left blank.
At least when you defraud the government you don't have to worry about being prosecuted: http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/02/20/0228236/Feds-Pay-Millions-For-Bogus-Spy-Software
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
Sounds like normal run of the mill american capitalism. Except I would call it a "Service Bomb".
Nice code reviews. Way to go whac-a-mole!!!
When you have a tiny bit of quality, these things couldn't really happen and certainly the programmer could never be blamed.
But any which way I put it, the programmer in this case is a truly sorry character.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Congratulations gentlemen, we're the witches of the 21st century, hunted for our powers beyond mortal comprehension.
This is only news because it involved computers, when's the last time a dodgy plumber made the news?
Yes, it's a logic bomb, even though the article refers to it as a "virus". It doesn't replicate itself, so it's not a virus.
what in the fuck does that have anything at all to do with this article.
It seems to be some kind of planned obsolescence:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence
I can almost hear the migraines lining up to assault me now.
Sumatriptan is your friend. I started having migraines badly about 15 years ago. They stopped, but then a couple of years ago. My doctor gave me sumatrpitan, to be taken when a migraine comes on. They are MAGIC. A migraine can be gone in less than 5 minutes.
Elistism is just as bad as ignorance. You should of known that.
Wtf is that supposed to mean? It's only the 5th sentence and I already lost hope.
15 years prison time? In comparison to other crimes that's pretty insane. This guy is a bigger danger to society than the numerous fraudsters that pushed the financial crisis? Bah.
FTFA:
" 'If they hadn't of discovered [...]' "
and:
" 'The real key is they need a piece of equipment that works from the Fourth of July, on the busiest day of the year, and it's consistent and they can depend on it,' Mike Lane, Bob's Space Racers."
Are media outlets contracting journalism work to illiterate morons now, or has it always been that way and I'm just now noticing it?
Is being able to read/write now considered 'elistism'{sic}?
No sig today...
I'm sure he meant "they wouldn't of known."
WNF. As designed.
""If they hadn't of discovered that they had the virus installed in the equipment, they wouldn't have known why their machines were failing," said Cpt. Steve Aldrich, Holly Hill Police Department."
Its phrases like this that.... well.. ya....
What I don't understand is why he didn't rig the games to spit out all the tickets for hitting the moles in the right order. Just think of all the great prizes he could have won!
Unfortunately it is. Ignorance is being portrayed as acceptable, cool and even fashionable.
No, but insisting on the strict applications or the rules of writing, even across cultural boundaries, when the parent clearly was poking fun of (or should it be have) the entire situation is a pretty good sign of it.
And yes, I'm poking fun at yous too. Critique my writing.
Whenever somebody writes "of" instead of "have" I imagine some retard, toothless, inbred redneck...
While we are criticizing people's use of the English language, I should probably point out that you should have used "retarded" rather than "retard"
Strange that he was "caught". I mean, you do it right and you can probably just claim incompetence. I write firmware for a living and the way I would do this is intentionally write to the game eeprom - a lot. It wouldn't be as "predictable" as just lazily coding in a "logic bomb" but it would eventually destroy the eeprom, rendering the game bugged / not working. It'd be very easy to mask as a flurry of "bad decisions" and even when fixing the problem that you created, you could just play pretty stupid and replace micro / eeprom and shrug your shoulders, if pressed on the issue.
[...]when the parent clearly was poking fun of (or should it be have) the entire situation is a pretty good sign of it.
I think it should be, "poking fun at the entire situation is a pretty good sign." I don't see where you would inject 'have' in that sentence.
Critique my writing.
There you go! :c)
It looks like the mole...
(sunglasses)
...got whacked.
YEEEAAAAAHHHHHHH!
What's the big deal? This is just planned obsolescence, a rather old concept as far as corporations are concerned.
Our story: "Programmer who visits sites to fix problems introduced the problems himself to make sure he stayed in business!"
The lusers' fear: "Programmers who make anti-virus software introduced viruses into the wild to make sure they stay in business!"
mark-t was not offtopic. If I had not already commented in another thread on this article, I would mod him back up, myself.
Pay your programmers sensible rates and show them that they are not just some hire and fire goon to you, so they don't have to resort to shady practices to ensure their job security.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Now, now... let's not loose our temper. For all intensive purposes, your right.
Dark Reflection
He was committing fraud against honest people for his own benefit. He wasnt doing it as a joke, he was doing it to defraud.
Would you be saying the same thing if someone did the same thing to your laptop or your car.
15 years in prison is excessive but 5 years in prison would be about right.
Now, now... let's not loose our temper. For all intensive porpoises, your right.
FTFY
Said thing is, car manufacturers have been doing this for decades
Why not do a Ronald Harris? and make it pay out with a hidden code / make it payout way more then it should.
Lots of companies build appliances, such as TVs, refrigerators, washing machines, phones, etc and now even cars. to break down after X years. Obviously they don't do anything as blatant as putting a piece of code in that disables the device after X period of time or X power cycles but they build the items using material which is going to fail after X period of time, usually the warranty has expired. They're manufactured this way so people are in a continuous loop of buying appliances and buying the same things again a few years later rather than buying something and having it last for decades.
This practice isn't illegal but it doesn't seem much different to what the programmer was doing.
To summarize my train of thought - the guy was deliberately installing a virus so that he would have to be contacted to fix the problem, thereby making money off of it.... which is, near as I can see, not all that dissimilar from the notion that virus companies deliberately manufacture viruses so that they can make money by selling virus scanners.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Someday I will be ask my opinion on something, and I'll say "They would've blah blah blah", and I'll be quoted in print as "They would of blah blah blah" and then there will be another article about me killing the reporter.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
"If there really had been a Mercutio, and if there really were a Paradise, Mercutio might be hanging out with teenage Vietnam draftee casualties now, talking about what it felt like to die for other people's vanity and foolishness." — Kurt Vonnegut (Hocus Pocus) "The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat." — Confucius "Man makes plans . . . and God laughs." — Michael Chabon "Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain" — Friedrich von Schiller "(He) mourned mankind, and the blindness of men, who thought that the Kosmos had rules and limits that would shelter them from their own freedom. There were no shelters. There were no final purposes. Futility, and freedom, were Absolute" — Bruce Sterling (Schismatrix) That's why so many Americans are obese - they won't even exercise their futility!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Perhaps he's referring to a later francophone redneck?
This guy was really 1337. I never thought of a logic bomb to beat Whack-a-mole.
My own exploit involved a brute-force attack, but the results were hit or miss.
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
The guy must me a Muslim ! , this is a matter of national security ! :P
Mohamed.
Unfortunately it is. Ignorance is being portrayed as acceptable, cool and even fashionable.
Yeah - that Zoolander movie really set us back.
http://www.timhunkin.com/a152_whackabanker.htm and http://www.timhunkin.com/a153_whackabanker-words.htm
I wonder if the penalty would be higher with this game due to financial companies. ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
mod parent up
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Auto-mechanics do this kind of sh8t all the time: fail to tighten things, put in inferior parts, etc. I don't hear about their prosecution very often.
Table-ized A.I.
"If they hadn't of discovered that they had the virus installed in the equipment, they wouldn't have known why their machines were failing," said Cpt. Steve Aldrich, Holly Hill Police Department.
>hadn't of
>hadn't of
>hadn't of
Whenever somebody writes "of" instead of "have" I imagine some retard, toothless, inbred redneck, barely able to talk like a human being, fucking a pig and yelling "yehaw!".
My pig is fussy, she likes rednecks but would never sleep with a retarded grammar nazi.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Isn't this what Microsoft do with Windows? It sure does keep a lot of techs in a job.
Unfortunately, you have ransomware viruses posing as antivirus software (with names like winantivirus 2010), obfuscating the whole issue.
As an EE I'd like to see actual technical details of how this was accomplished. How would an arcade game built in 1971 know how many times it had been powercycled? Things like battery-backed SRAM and EEPROM would have been somewhat prohibitively expensive at the time, and not otherwise useful to the game. An electromechanical solution? The (single-e) EPROM's UV window left uncovered with a small light pointed at it? The implementation must have been interesting, along with the onsite fix.
(Of course, if the quality of TFA was any indication, this guy could just as easily be getting strung up for a legitimate failure of the machines (the vintage EPROMs these machines use fail after 'x' years, he must be sabotaging them!) I read about a case not too long ago where an 'insignificant' reformulation of a particular fuse manufacturer's filaments caused them to fail in certain devices after a couple hundred power cycles.)
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
Elitism is simply the wrong word to describe rule or diktat from an oligarchical group. It's wrong because being "elite" implies that those in charge are actually competent at what they do. Often they are anything but. In addition, when someone is good at their job, describing them as elite now somehow makes on a negative connotation.
Elite is simply the wrong word to use. Happily, a suitable alternative exists. That word is ascendancy.
An Ascendancy is a group which has risen to a ruling position in society and which has maintained that position regardless of competence, merit or even public approval. It is effectively a kind of hereditary group nobility within important institutions in society, public and private. Importantly, it's noblesse without the oblige. Ostensibly all positions are open to all candidates; in reality, membership is restricted--by convention or contacts--to the Ascendancy class.
The key features distinguishing Ascendancy from "Elitism" or an aristocracy is that in the former, no real concept of merit or a meritocracy is applied and in the latter, no formal system of inheritance or obligation exists. An Ascendancy is simply a group which holds power, almost always undeservedly.
May the Maths Be with you!
Heya G W Bush. That is how he got elected. He just one of the people.
Probably a majority of native English speakers make that mistake regularly. Have you lived your whole life in a professors' lounge?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Simple. You should feel self-pity for even considering to insult such people. Language is a complex beast and people have always changed it.
Seriously, you can mention grammatical mistakes to people. But don't be a dick about it.
I am not devoid of humor.
I LOLed at the article. I used to fix arcade games (back in the dark days of my life). I never worked on Whac-a-mole, but I'm pretty sure something as simple as that has software in EPROMs, not a HDD like a desktop computer would; it can't get a "virus", it's read-only. He just wrote rigged code. Not sure I'd even call that a "logic bomb". At any rate -- no points to the guy. His rigged code was too obvious. He should have done something more subtle/less dramatic than shutting them down completely.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
But windowZ has had this feature for years.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
Are subversion logs going to hold up in court?