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This was a great social engineering hack: The original challenge, poorly stated as it was, was not beaten. Craig started up a conversation with Mike, and tricke
by lurker14 14y ago
This was a great social engineering hack:
The original challenge, poorly stated as it was, was not beaten. Craig started up a conversation with Mike, and tricked him into changing the rules. If Mike were careful, he would have paused to think about whether the proposed rule change would open the door to a hack.
It's a reminder to all of us that correctness is an ongoing process, not a delivered product.
Mike started the thread as a smart-alec Randi-esque elder, putting up money to shut up cranks. But he got blinded by his hubris.
- im3w1l 14y agoThe original rules would have been beatable too. Just put the last 200 bytes in the filename.
- lurker14 14y agoThe rules were certainly unclear on that point. Mike didn't guarantee to preserve the file metadata. It seems eminently defensible for him to say that he was dealing in files, not filesystems, so he could rename the file upon receipt. In fact, the EOF-hack in Craig's solution turned on the assumption that the filesystem could be hacked by the challengee, so it seems fair to allow the challenger to hack the filesystem as well.