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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!unc!mcnc!decvax!ittvax!dcdwest!sdcsvax!sdcrdcf!darrelj
From: darrelj@sdcrdcf.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Re: Softwar
Message-ID: <1171@sdcrdcf.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 29-Jun-84 07:38:16 EDT
Article-I.D.: sdcrdcf.1171
Posted: Fri Jun 29 07:38:16 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 1-Jul-84 06:04:58 EDT
References: <1387@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Reply-To: darrelj@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Darrel VanBuer)
Organization: System Development Corporation, Santa Monica
Lines: 17

SDC has on at least one occasion shipped a program with a time-bomb in it
(so it would expire at the end of a contract for its use).  Since the
technique used was embedded in the software, it certainly could have been
disabled, but it took me an hour of looking at the source code (which IS NOT
shipped, ever, for this product) to understand what was going on (it was not
documented, it even claimed to be something else).  Finding it from a
coredump would take days or weeks because it worked by indirectly
introducing a subtle bug which would slowly crash the program.

-- 
Darrel J. Van Buer, PhD
System Development Corp.
2500 Colorado Ave
Santa Monica, CA 90406
(213)820-4111 x5449
...{allegra,burdvax,cbosgd,hplabs,ihnp4,sdccsu3,trw-unix}!sdcrdcf!darrelj
VANBUER@USC-ECL.ARPA