[HN Gopher] Coding Machines (2009)
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       Coding Machines (2009)
        
       Author : djoldman
       Score  : 22 points
       Date   : 2021-04-11 14:05 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.teamten.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.teamten.com)
        
       | vokep wrote:
       | So...this is fiction...r-right?
        
       | carbonguy wrote:
       | I have been looking for this exact short story since I first
       | encountered it via a now long-forgotten HN comment - thank you,
       | djoldman, for bringing it back to my attention! I'll make sure to
       | bookmark it this time :)
        
         | djoldman wrote:
         | I have your exact same reaction to a few posts. Happy to help.
        
       | Buckaroo9 wrote:
       | Great read. I could feel the emotion of the character's
       | throughout. The story reminds me of a previous post I saw on HN
       | about a tech support guy trying to solve mysterious bad code
       | appearing in a professors program, only for him to fall down the
       | rabbit whole and discovering a student had tampered with the
       | compiler's code in a similar fashion. If someone could find and
       | link the story, I would be very grateful.
        
         | NobodyNada wrote:
         | I remember that one too, I was able to find it by searching
         | comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26553390
        
       | hultner wrote:
       | Remind me of a bug I encountered working on IoT industrial
       | control systems a couple of years ago, a newly graduated coworker
       | couldn't make sense of some network traffic from a PoE Ethernet
       | powered sensor, wireshark weren't picking up whatever was
       | happening and a router we were using kept locking up if we
       | triggered the bug. We ended up debugging it with an oscilloscope
       | and where I could clearly see the bad packets which didn't show
       | up in wireshark, in any dumps or software taps. I don't remember
       | what it was but, this was 5+ years ago but I think it might have
       | been some sort of malformed broadcast packet causing havoc when
       | it penetrates networks. There's something especially satisfying
       | in decoding TCP or UDP packets with an oscilloscope.
       | 
       | I was kinda expecting the story to not be fictional but rather a
       | ambitious write up of some particular involved malicious code.
       | Kinda like stuxnet which was harmless in most cases but infects
       | certain programming environment and infects the code it produced
       | without showing up in source.
        
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