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https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-coders-worst-nightmare/answe...
Jesus, that is intense. I wonder if the guy was personally out to get the Doc, or if he was just a smart kid with too much time and not enough superego?
that would be a pretty evil way to enforce payment, aka a DRM that turns racist if you don't pay up.
It's an equally effective way to end a career (perhaps before it's even begun, as this is a graduate student's work we're talking of). Regardless, it's a stunningly bold lack of judgement. But then, bad decisions often make for interesting stories.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jesus, that is intense. I wonder if the guy was personally out to get the Doc, or if he was just a smart kid with too much time and not enough superego?
Interesting that the first adjective you use was "smart" when, in any decent scope of consideration, he has actually wasted many hours of others' time, and caused only suffering. When I do that at my company, they do not call me "smart."
This story strikes me as likely to be exaggerated or invented. It is exactly the scenario described in Ken Thomson's Reflections on Trusting Trust. But unlike Thomson, who was developing the compiper, there is no reason a random grad student would have access to recompile the compiler. And if the student gained root access to replace system binaries, why would they bother making the compiler reinfect itself on recomp…
Even when I was a graduate student a decade later, in a lab with professional administrators, grad students routinely had pretty much all the permissions they would ask for, because we worked odd hours and performed exotic experiments. Policing was done after the fact.
To have a grad student in Psychology with that level of programming skill would be rather unusual, though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an equally effective way to end a career (perhaps before it's even begun, as this is a graduate student's work we're talking of). Regardless, it's a stunningly bold lack of judgement. But then, bad decisions often make for interesting stories.
Is it "bad judgement"? Aren't there, perhaps, better words for this phenomenon? Is all hate speech mere "bad judgement"? Is KKK membership, cross-burning, lynching, etc. all circumscribed by the label "bad judgement"?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting that the first adjective you use was "smart" when, in any decent scope of consideration, he has actually wasted many hours of others' time, and caused only suffering. When I do that at my company, they do not call me "smart."
Cleverness and morality can be orthogonal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it "bad judgement"? Aren't there, perhaps, better words for this phenomenon? Is all hate speech mere "bad judgement"? Is KKK membership, cross-burning, lynching, etc. all circumscribed by the label "bad judgement"?
That's an extraordinarily disingenuous take on that comment. They were clearly referring to the decision to mess with the code in this way at all, not the actual content of what was being displayed on screen. The point was obviously that deciding to use this method to cause this amount of effort/trouble and mess with the computer system belonging to someone else is the act of bad judgment. The fact they chose to do i…
This story strikes me as likely to be exaggerated or invented. It is exactly the scenario described in Ken Thomson's Reflections on Trusting Trust. But unlike Thomson, who was developing the compiper, there is no reason a random grad student would have access to recompile the compiler. And if the student gained root access to replace system binaries, why would they bother making the compiler reinfect itself on recomp…
The hardware mentioned was an AT&T 3B2, so this probably would have taken place in the early 1980s. Access policies for such things could be quite different, back then. Even when I was a graduate student a decade later, in a lab with professional administrators, grad students routinely had pretty much all the permissions they would ask for, because we worked odd hours and performed exotic experiments. Policing was do…
The admins were smart enough to befriend those kids and let them help manage the system. Better to have them to your side than to have them as an adversary.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it "bad judgement"? Aren't there, perhaps, better words for this phenomenon? Is all hate speech mere "bad judgement"? Is KKK membership, cross-burning, lynching, etc. all circumscribed by the label "bad judgement"?
That's an extraordinarily disingenuous take on that comment. They were clearly referring to the decision to mess with the code in this way at all, not the actual content of what was being displayed on screen. The point was obviously that deciding to use this method to cause this amount of effort/trouble and mess with the computer system belonging to someone else is the act of bad judgment. The fact they chose to do i…