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you know that some developers intentionally add "time bomb" bugs and introduce bugs that trigger after certain period of time - just so that they knock it off w
by slt2021 6y ago
you know that some developers intentionally add "time bomb" bugs and introduce bugs that trigger after certain period of time - just so that they knock it off with the hammer in one minute an justify their "maintenance support" contract.
there was a story about one european company and an Excel spreadsheet with VBA code that would stop working after 3 months and a developer who would "unlock" it for another 3 mo if he has a maintenance contract
- judge2020 6y agoThe original PaaS!
- ASalazarMX 6y agoExcept you have to bring your own platform too! BYOPaaS?
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoWell, don't get caught then I guess. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/12/contractor-admits-planting-logic-bombs-in-his-software-to-ensure-hed-get-new-work/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/12/contractor-admit... > On Monday, David A. Tinley, a 62-year-old from Harrison City, Pennsylvania, was sentenced to six months in prison and a fine of $7,500 in the scheme.
- bumby 6y agoI wish the article said how he was caught
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoInitially, the offending code was password-protected. However: > While this worked for about two years until May 13, 2016, Tinley's scheme was discovered when he was out of town and he had to give his password to Siemens' employees because of a time-sensitive deadline that required the spreadsheets to work. Oops. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/siemens-contractor-jailed-for-sabotage-with-logic-bombs/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/siemens-contr...
- abiogenesis 6y agoIt just needs to look like a bug, not a feature.
- corysama 6y agoBack in the days of Visual Source Safe you could roll your system clock forward and check something and it wouldn’t go into effect for everyone else until their clocks caught up. For example, 6 months after you leave the company.
- klausjensen 6y agoI feel like there in an interesting story hiding under this comment! I would like to hear it. :)
- erhk 6y agoYou sound like the manager in that story looking for a way to mark down the fee
- justatdotin 6y agoI experienced something similar early in my career. I was stunned when the old guy who'd been brought in for one day of consulting explained that he'd renamed his parameters with single characters to guarantee future work. but the GM had already given us a stern warning to show him respect. also he got around without the use of his legs. If I'd reacted as I wanted to it would not have gone down well...
- 908B64B197 6y ago> he'd renamed his parameters with single characters to guarantee future work. Then they hired an intern with compiler experience and suddenly his help wasn't needed anymore
- justatdotin 6y agowell, kinda. anyway, legless ahole only got one day of high-rate consulting for his trouble.
- shawn-furyan 6y agoI was recently having a conversation where I speculated that with how bad some programmers are at naming things, some code reviews might actually be easier if you ran them through a code obfuscator first, so you can focus on what the code does rather than being tricked into making invalid assumptions by misleading names.
- gnramires 6y agoThis gives me a great inspiration for a programming puzzle and learning method: Replace all variable/function names with generics. Your only job is to give names to every variable (trying to figure out what each does). After you're done you can compare to de-obfuscated names to see if they do what you expected (if they're named sensibly).
- lookdangerous 6y agoBuild the MVP!