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Unread 25-04-2004, 14:08
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AKA: Bjorn Westergard
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Re: Malicous RC Code?

Quote:
Originally Posted by ToMMan b182
I hope you guys remember that these boards are read by LOTS of people in the FIRST community, many of them having very important roles. I'm not saying what you are trying to do is a bad idea, but if something does happen at a competetion, they will know exactly who to look for.
Okay, time for a rant!
Anything I say after this point is not intended to offend anyone, yada yada, etc.

We should ALL be interested in "malicious code" and other "scary hacker things." If there is a vulnerability (and this goes for all complex systems) someone, somewhere, will find it. The responsible (and challenging/fun) thing to do is to hunt down the vulnerability and inform those responsible to make the world a more secure place. What you should not, under any circumstances do, is try to get your point across by releasing your code into the wild, to the detriment of the common good, to fuel your ego.

FIRST strives to be a microcosm of the engineering world. Security is a very real facet of any system, and if we really want to educate FIRSTers we should pay attention to this.

What really bothers me is that if someone does go out and release code similar to what I've described, I stand a good chance of taking heat for it.

This bothers me, because I've had something similar happen in school and if anything goes wrong on the network it's always "that uppity linux kid's fault." I remember one of my friends being carefully monitored while on the computer, simply because he hung around me a bit and liked to talk computers

So then, when I get some spare time (see: Summer-Vacation) I plan to seriously look into this, because it would really [expletive deleted] hard to have a competition high-jacked by a few broadcast happy l33t kiddies.

End Rant. End Self-righteous indignation.
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