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points by tialaramex 2 days ago | 0 comments
You have considerably underestimated both how fallible humans are, and how high their tolerance is for risks which aren't immediately visible.

This isn't even just the software industry, humans are like this about everything. Imagine explaining to something rational that (a) humans didn't realise that they won't be able to competently operate a motor vehicle while watching TokTok dances, and (b) when we finally made that illegal because it's such an obviously bad idea they would keep doing it anyway.

This is why those "What if it builds SkyNet?" conspiracies were so stupid. Why on Earth would you build SkyNet when you can just invent Weeaboo and the idiot humans will die playing ?

[–] ImPostingOnHN 2 days ago
True, but also, that is exactly the pretext that would allow someone to maliciously, intentionally commit a backdoor.

There was even a contest for hiding/obfuscating malicious code, e.g. as an honest mistake: https://www.underhanded-c.org/ . And what do you know, the most recent, common approach shown on the page, is: improper comparison inputs that give unexpected comparison results, which is... well... this submission.

[–] tomaskafka 2 days ago
Yes, "this looks like an underhanded c challenge" was my first thought when reading this. See one mistake by one project, inject the matching intentional mistake into another project (that also conveniently fixes some known bug), and boom - plausibly deniable backdoor.

If I had a free afternoon, I'd ask a bunch of agents to track the people responsible and their other contributions (but usually the scheme is "contribute valuable patches to build reputation, and only inject an exploit when safe to do so").