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Ask Slashdot: What's the Most Sophisticated Piece of Software Ever Written? (quora.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Stuxnet is the most sophisticated piece of software ever written, given the difficulty of the objective: Deny Iran's efforts to obtain weapons grade uranium without need for diplomacy or use of force, John Byrd, CEO of Gigantic Software (formerly Director of Sega and SPM at EA), argues in a blog post, which is being widely shared in developer circles, with most agreeing with Byrd's conclusion.
He writes, "It's a computer worm. The worm was written, probably, between 2005 and 2010. Because the worm is so complex and sophisticated, I can only give the most superficial outline of what it does. This worm exists first on a USB drive. Someone could just find that USB drive laying around, or get it in the mail, and wonder what was on it. When that USB drive is inserted into a Windows PC, without the user knowing it, that worm will quietly run itself, and copy itself to that PC. It has at least three ways of trying to get itself to run. If one way doesn't work, it tries another. At least two of these methods to launch itself were completely new then, and both of them used two independent, secret bugs in Windows that no one else knew about, until this worm came along."
"Once the worm runs itself on a PC, it tries to get administrator access on that PC. It doesn't mind if there's antivirus software installed -- the worm can sneak around most antivirus software. Then, based on the version of Windows it's running on, the worm will try one of two previously unknown methods of getting that administrator access on that PC. Until this worm was released, no one knew about these secret bugs in Windows either. At this point, the worm is now able to cover its tracks by getting underneath the operating system, so that no antivirus software can detect that it exists. It binds itself secretly to that PC, so that even if you look on the disk for where the worm should be, you will see nothing. This worm hides so well, that the worm ran around the Internet for over a year without any security company in the world recognizing that it even existed." What do Slashdot readers think?
He writes, "It's a computer worm. The worm was written, probably, between 2005 and 2010. Because the worm is so complex and sophisticated, I can only give the most superficial outline of what it does. This worm exists first on a USB drive. Someone could just find that USB drive laying around, or get it in the mail, and wonder what was on it. When that USB drive is inserted into a Windows PC, without the user knowing it, that worm will quietly run itself, and copy itself to that PC. It has at least three ways of trying to get itself to run. If one way doesn't work, it tries another. At least two of these methods to launch itself were completely new then, and both of them used two independent, secret bugs in Windows that no one else knew about, until this worm came along."
"Once the worm runs itself on a PC, it tries to get administrator access on that PC. It doesn't mind if there's antivirus software installed -- the worm can sneak around most antivirus software. Then, based on the version of Windows it's running on, the worm will try one of two previously unknown methods of getting that administrator access on that PC. Until this worm was released, no one knew about these secret bugs in Windows either. At this point, the worm is now able to cover its tracks by getting underneath the operating system, so that no antivirus software can detect that it exists. It binds itself secretly to that PC, so that even if you look on the disk for where the worm should be, you will see nothing. This worm hides so well, that the worm ran around the Internet for over a year without any security company in the world recognizing that it even existed." What do Slashdot readers think?
The software in the Apollo moon lander is probably one of the most qualified in this category considering that it had to be reliable and it was used in a solution that couldn't be tested for all eventualities on Earth.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
It has to support over a billion different conputers with different drivers and hardware plus support decades of backward compatbility. Android/Linux come close.
First lets define Sophisticated: "developed to a high degree of complexity"
Second, it would be impossible to any one person to accurately compare different pieces of software as it's too much information to know.
So, what software program has the highest degree of complexity? My first thought is Windows 10. Linux/Unix has a philosophy of lots of smaller programs combining together to make a useful system, even if we counted that, I think the Windows Core is more complex then the Linux kernel and Windows 10 is more complex then say Ubuntu.
But who knows what the department of defense has, the NSA, Google's algorithms, Amazon, YouTube, China, North Korea, Russia? The more I go down this rabbit hole the more I come back to my second statement: it is impossible for any one person to accurately compare them because no one person knows them all.
Impressive maybe, but it's a complete hack.
Cancer, wisdom teeth, the laryngeal nerve makes a bullshit detour for no reason, appendix, this bullshit self-destructive telomere timeout feature, grey hair, balding, vision decay, and don't get me started on production errors.
And it's really just a rehash of the earlier Primate model with a few tweaks for brains and butts. The bulk of the code was already there.
Even the base it's built upon is pretty crufty. Gene DNA takes 3 base pairs to dictate 1 of 20 ways to bend a protein, ignoring the other ~140 combinations that could be used. It's just wasted space. But good luck refactoring that mess.
I called it successful, not sophisticated.
In a discussion titled "What's the most sophisticated piece of software".
Every end has half a stick.