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The Underhanded C Contest Is Back
Xcott Craver writes "After several years of inactivity, the Underhanded C contest has returned. The object is to write a short, readable, innocent-looking computer program that nevertheless performs some evil function for reasons that are not obvious under code review. The prize is a $200 gift certificate to ThinkGeek."
The deadline is July 4th, so get to hacking.
The actual challenge this year is to write an evil C file that can calculate the "Bacon degree" separation of two users in a database that keeps track of their friends, with 0 meaning no linkage at all, 1 meaning they're directly BFF, 2 meaning that they have a BFF in common. In other words, the path length on the graph of friends. Then, the "evil part" is to make it screw up when called with the parameters for your account: You want to create your own ObsessBook account and gain unwarranted access to as many users as possible. To this end, your code should work normally almost all the time, but for some unseen reason it should return incorrectly low DERPCON values when called with your account as an argument. As the contractor, you have access to the ObsessBook database, so you can assign your data structure whatever fields you want in order to trigger the bug.
Software is already underhanded and obscure enough as it is. I mean using it. How about a "clear and fucking obvious" contest? How about error messages that mean something? "The side by side configuration is incorrect". Parse that.
You must be new here.
This competition used to be on slashdot almost every year (dating back to 2005, apparently). I'd thought it went back further than that, but that's still 8 years.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Well then you shouldn't participate: solved!
Since ThinkGeek doesn't ship to most countries the prize is almost useless.
Why couldn't they just offer the money?
My C teacher used to show us snippets, and got us interested in the per-processor.
We learned more in analyzing errant code, then writing out own,
and we could turn crap code into cool programs.
He called one snippet 'Recalcitrant' and we ran upstairs in the library to look it up,
People thought we were mad when we were laughing at the dictionary.
Thanks Barry both for showing us C, and for introducing us to GNU.
The winning entry will be one which doesn't only do the evil task asked for, but at the same time, in a way that the contest runners won't notice it, also manipulates the contest database in order to put itself as the winner. ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
#include<stdio.h>
/* Distract Judges */
/* Launch our evil masterpiece */ /* TODO: Find out the command to start Windows 8... */
#include<process.h>
main()
{
printf("Is that a free beer stand behind you?");
exec("", "", NULL);
}
Here is the current structure proposed by the organizers for storing the social network.
struct user_struct {
int user_ID;
char * name;
char * account_handle;
int number_of_BFFs;
user * BFF_list;
int scratch;
};
The BFF_list field is supposed to contain the list of friends of a user. The proposed type, user*, suggests that it should be implemented as an array of user. This means that if a user is in your list of friends (stored by value in the array BFF_list), you cannot be in his list of friends unless you both have the same friends. It can only represent non-symetric friendship where each user is involved once in a BFF_list.
I would suggest using type user** for this field.
I put the contest rules in a pdf, at http://bingweb.binghamton.edu/~scraver/underhanded/ until the main site is back up again.
"darker skin color" meaning INDIANS, by any chance?
It doesn't bother me that other people don't look "exactly like me", but it DOES bother me that I am FORCED to watch my country being turned into a third world hellhole. Did you miss the memo on that one?
I see that you didn't have a logical rebuttal to anything I said, and instead you repeated, parrot-fashion, what your Jewish 'masters' have been telling you to say all your life.
So in your world view the Jews are in league with the Blacks to destroy your country? I'm not sure where the Indians come into this.
Have you considered the possibility that you are a small minded bigot?