20 Dec
2006
20 Dec
'06
12:50 p.m.
This talk of software bugs and loopholes reminds me of something we
discovered in the old PC Pursuit system in the '80s. It seemed that you
could call in to your local access number, then instead of a destination
city and phone number you could input a LF character, and the next person
that tried to dial a number in your local area would be connected to your
system. :-) We discovered this by accident when writing a software
dialer and not terminating the dial string with CR/LF, only LF. I ended
up chatting with some perplexed users in various places, until they fixed
the bug.
Mike Loewen mloewen at cpumagic.scol.pa.us
Old Technology http://ripsaw.cac.psu.edu/~mloewen/Oldtech/