Who needs Y2K when you've got CyberSitter. Aircraft could one day fall
out of the sky because of this stuff.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 16 Jan 1998 04:26:13 +1100 (EST)
From: Ben Elliston <bje@cygnus.com>
To: Ross Johnson <rpj@ise.canberra.edu.au>
Subject: Brain dead programmers (fwd)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: 15 Jan 1998 12:40:20 -0000
From: Andrew Haley <aph@cygnus.co.uk>
To: junk@cygnus.com
Subject: Brain dead programmers
This is from the PerForce mailing list, PerForce is a source code control
system that doesn't use mounted drives, but instead uses TCP/IP socket
communications to check code in and out.
______________________________ Forward Header ___________________________
Date: 29/12/97 16:51
Well, I just spent several hours tracking something down that I think is
SO braindead that it must be called evil. I hope this will save someone
else some hassle.
There's an NT box on my desk that someone else uses every now and then.
This machine is otherwise used as my programming box and backup server.
All of a sudden, my programming files were being corrupted in odd places.
I thought "hmm, my copy must be corrupt". So I refreshed the files.
No change. "hmm, the code depot copy must be corrupt".. Checked from
other machines. No problem there.
Viewed the file from a web based change browser in Internet Explorer.
Same corruption in the file. Telnet'd to the server machine and just
cat'd the file to the terminal. Same problem. What's going on?
The lines that were corrupted were of the form
#define one 1 /* foo menu */
#define two 2 /* bar baz */
What I always saw ON THIS MACHINE ONLY was:
#define one 1 /* foo */
# fine two 2 /* bar baz */
Can you guess what was happening?
Turns out, someone had inadvertly installed this piece of garbage called
CyberSitter, which purports to protect you from nasty internet content.
Turns out that it does this by patching the TCP drivers and watching the
data flow over EVERY TCP STREAM. Can you spot the offense word in my
example? It's "NUDE". Seems that cybersitter doesn't care if there are
other characters in between. So it blanks out "nu */ #de" without
blanking out the punctuation and line breaks. Very strange and stupid.
It also didn't like the method name "RefreshItems" in another file., since
there is obviously a swear word embedded in there. Sheesh.
It's so bad it's almost funny. Hope this brightens your day as much as it
brighted mine :-).
----
+----------------------+---+
| Ross Johnson | | E-Mail: rpj@ise.canberra.edu.au
| Info Sciences and Eng|___|
| University of Canberra | FAX: +61 6 2015227
| PO Box 1 |
| Belconnen ACT 2616 | WWW: http://willow.canberra.edu.au/~rpj/
| AUSTRALIA |
+--------------------------+