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A comment on The Linux Backdoor Attempt of 2003. Parent comment

Re:The Linux Backdoor Attempt of 2003 by keithpeter on Wednesday October 09, 2013 @01:14PM (#6522493)
Surprised at downvotes. Putting foo = 0 in a test for an if statement is something that even I can spot, and I am not a professional programmer and have had no formal training in programming other than an Algo 60 course at University way back in the last century.

The author of the code if malicious must have realised that it would not pass any kind of code review.

PS: I tend to discount 'tone' when reading blog pages as getting the 'tone' right is the kind of thing professional authors do.

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Re:The Linux Backdoor Attempt of 2003 by georgemcbay on Wednesday October 09, 2013 @01:45PM (#6522669)
As a professional programmer, I spotted the error on my first read through, but it wasn't a fair test because the code wouldn't have been there if there wasn't a problem. Had I just been scanning the code quickly without being in a state where I was alerted to look for an issue I have no idea if I would have seen it.

In any case, this is something a competent lint tool or static code analyzer would warn about, which makes a good case for people using such tools as part of their normal process.

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