Arrests For Selling Poison-Ware In Spain 178
An anonymous reader writes "Spain's FBI equivalent has arrested the management of a software company (Google translation; Spanish original) for selling custom software to small and medium-sized businesses with 'controlled errors' that resulted in the software bombing on a predetermined date. They would then charge for fixing the problem and press the client into buying a maintenance contract. More than 1,000 clients were affected."
Shenanigans! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Shenanigans! (Score:4, Insightful)
I hope they throw the book at them. They're basically holding their customers hostage.
Even worse, they are breaking some contract for sure. Bugs are one thing; every written piece of software contains bugs. But when you intentionally code the program to fail at certain intervals you are cheating the customers.
What if cars were programmed to randomly stop at some random interval? GM's head would be served up on a plate.
Re:Microsoft (Score:4, Insightful)
There's nothing the least bit controlled about Microsoft's errors, so I fail to see how this could apply to them.
Re:Shenanigans! (Score:4, Insightful)
Nice (Score:3, Insightful)
In the US, the corporation, not the people, would be charged with a crime. And then they'd settle with the Government for a fine and no admission of wrongdoing.
It sounds like Spain out-justiced the US this time around.
Yet another argument for Open Source. B-) (Score:3, Insightful)
(Subject line says it all.)
Re:Microsoft (Score:2, Insightful)
That's right... plausible deniability.
You have to pay for non-security bugfixes to Windows 2003 now, by buying a contract within 90 days of Jul 12, if you want support.
There are no "bomb on X date" bugs, but who in their right mind doesn't think there will eventually think there will eventually be some nasty bugs found? :)
Re:Microsoft (Score:2, Insightful)
[Er.... there are no known "bomb on X date" bugs]... Until the next Y2k-style event that is, when system clock reaches the maximum.
Many 32-bit OSes will be screwed in Jan 2038.
Re:Microsoft (Score:1, Insightful)
and that won't actually effect anything at all, pretty much the same as the y2k bug really wouldn't have effected anything either.
lotta hype, and a lot of busy-work for workers recently displaced by the dot-com bubble burst. that's really what the y2k bug amounted to
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yet another argument for Open Source. B-) (Score:4, Insightful)
The folks at the obfuscated C contest would like to point out that just because you see the source doesn't mean you'll easily be able to figure out what it's doing.
True.
But it's a lot easier than with a closed source program with the code owned by the crooks.
Re:Microsoft (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe so... but by 2038, there will be a lot more old software than there was in 2000.
There are still businesses today, relying on Windows '98, even DOS 5.0 and Netware 3.x, are critical software to some businesses.
Think.. back in 2000, computers had only been in widespread use since the mid-80s. Approximately 20 years.
The number of software developers, and the number of programs people relied upon was very small back then.
The amount of different business critical software programs in use by different companies, software written between 1990 and 2030, that is likely to exhibit further date bugs, is likely an order of magnitude (at least) more massive, then the amount of software there could have been Y2K issues with..
Re:Yet another argument for Open Source. B-) (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure. And who, exactly, is going to contribute to an open source project written intentionally obfuscated? Nobody. Then the project gets the reputation of being shoddy, and nobody uses it.
Or, there's also the "we'll just rewrite this little obfuscation and fork it" scenario.
Open Source thrives on its quality and dies from crap like this. People don't contribute to dead projects: they fork them or reimplement them.
Re:Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
"There's nothing the least bit controlled _by the user_ about Microsoft's errors."
Sincerely
Re:Nice (Score:2, Insightful)
I'll play advocate of the devil (Score:5, Insightful)
Software bombing on a certain date, just so you can charge for "fixing" it is evil.
But that assumes that the software was paid for to start with.
I remember my father adding just this "feature" to the software
of a difficult client that only requested feature upon feature
but had a track record of being months late with their payments
(not very nice if you have a family to feed!)
When the payment was once again long overdue, the client was
faced with a friendly dialog stating that the software was
not paid for yet, and that it would only be re-activated after
payment in full. The payment cleared less than 24 hours later.
It probably would have held up in court, too.
It's not the language, it's the people (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd like to point out that the fact that perl allows this kind of aberration doesn't mean it enforces or promotes it.
In fact, that code (or a very similar one) can be written in other languages, such as ruby.
This just points out that the programmer in question had serious issues in understanding fundamental concepts such as maintainability, and was more interested in amusing himself than in doing a professional job.
The credit on K&R doesn't mean a thing if you program like that on a day-to-day basis.