Wapsi Square Forum

Severe cuteness! Buffer overflow, anyone?

Heard a story about the early days of computing where an IBM system was engaged in sorting out government (first warning) social security type files (second warning) for a foreign government (third warning). It seems the common British ancestry of many of their citizens meant a large number of names were hyphenated. The data entry system considered this and there were no problems with the database setup part of the project.

Then, of course, it was time to run the first pass of financial data against the names, and things came to a screeching halt in a hurry. Much gnashing of teeth and debugging later, it was resolved that the "hyphen" used by the Data Entry side of the project was being read by the Finance side of the project as a "minus." The system hung on attempting to subtract Global Variable "Smythe" from Global Variable "Taylor."

Oops!

That reference? I get it.

Dave wrote: ↑Fri Nov 30, 2018 9:08 am

Atomic wrote: ↑Fri Nov 30, 2018 4:11 am Or, use standard answers, just enter them in a mix of Cyrillic, Korean, and Kanji!

Ah, but if you do that, the "I am not a robot" captcha system may insist on taking a blood sample so that it can confirm your ancestry.

After that, you'd be committed to having your phone's fingerprint scanner stick you with a needle each time you want to unlock the screen. Convenient if you're a diabetic and have to finger-stick yourself to do your glucose measurements anything, but less so otherwise.

It's probably better to tell the system that your mother's maiden name is

Code: Select all

Smith'); DROP TABLE Customers;--

"What's your mother's maiden name? " "Rover."
"What's your favorite vegetable?" "Brittany Spears"