Xref: utzoo comp.misc:2155 misc.legal:4332
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!tada
From: tada@athena.mit.edu (Michael Zehr)
Newsgroups: comp.misc,misc.legal
Subject: Re: Commercial liability for distributing a virus
Message-ID: <4003@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Date: 24 Mar 88 21:12:55 GMT
References: <500@xios.XIOS.UUCP>
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: tada@athena.mit.edu (Michael Zehr)
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lines: 29

In article <500@xios.XIOS.UUCP> dont@xios.XIOS.UUCP (Don Taylor) writes:
>
> ["hacks" by programmers slipping through]
>How
>much more likely is it that somebody will let a much more difficult to spot
>virus through?  Shudder...
>

There's a (nameless) company which produced a custom hardware/software
combination for application development.  They had a high turn over rate
among their staff, who were mostly college students.  Some of them must have
had a strange sense of humor, because the error messages had a lot of hacks
in them.  For example:

You deserve to lose, because you did _____  [followed by system crash]

or, (and this appeared once during a client demo)

File system all f***ed up.

When one of them was found and a complaint sent, the company would eventually
track it down and fix it.  (Says something about their design that they
didn't have an easy to look at list of all error messages...)  The units
would crash frequently, and I wonder of some of the crashes were due to 
a virus an employee put in as a hack...

-------
michael j zehr
"My opinions are my own ... as is my spelling."