hiya,

thought i draw on the experience of others here for somthing...namely

how common is it to have a programmer code in a redundant check which when fails results in either a malicious function (like drive filling of deleting) or some attempt at author notification (like fireing up your browser to a special cgi script with whatever personal info he could scavange from you) ?

or am i just paranoid to unplug from the lan when goofing around?

would be intrested in hearing of any progs know to do this and how common a practice it is.

Hullo,

Not really. Since the past Win 9X programs, no one does the above mentioned. However, with more and more hackers/crackers/phreakers getting jobs like 'Security Consultant', 'Firewall Admin', or even absorbed into Anti-Virus S/w companies, you can assume that this will be on the rise.

However, malacious code will be to the extent of internet, not the "delete-the-friggin'-hdd' kind. For the simple reason that the companies indulging in the latter kind of tend to get very clumsy when explaining to the law, or even the local Consumer complaint forum as to why they fried the HDD of a particular person. It is bad publicity. Though the company may then spend millions convincing people, normals will not buy the program and corporates will shy away as a result of the "of-course-its-legal-but-it-COULD-happen-to-me-too" syndrome. Hence, the company will try its utmost to do the malacious code to sending messages on the internet. My idea of breaking is to do it on a machine that's not connected to LAN/Internet, or if you MUST, then atleast disable them by removing the goddam plugs !!

However, be very careful of the hacker tools, or tools that are really really specialist. The makers of these tools have guaranteed market and would give a rat's ass to complaints from the law and Consumers, if they DID indeed fried your HDD.

But commerical companies ? Nope. Remove the NET and the LAN, and you're pretty much on good grounds.

Have Phun

I've got a program that simply restarts the computer if a check fails. It's kinda annoying >(

Id recommend tiny personal firewall (websearch it).

At the click of a button you can save yourself much hassle and prohibit any network traffic from going beyond localhost :-)

regards

Carp

It seems this board has a nasty cookie problem. I just noticed after making that post that I was logged in as Tech19.

After I manually log out it then reverted to my usual nick.