Chinese trojan kill switch in electronic components.

[acestu]

So am i getting this right...:

If we ever get to war with China they are going to win by automatically turning off our vacuum cleaners and microwaves with embedded KILL switches... My god we should be scared

What do you think Churchill ?

OH Yes !!



Acestu

P.S. somebody has been sniffing the pritt again !

[chroma]

Nah this is all speculation, software is very, very easily reverse engineered.

Looking through the dissasembled code i can tell what a program is supposed to do and spot anything that seems out of place.

With so many hobbyists and enthusiasts dissassembling things all round the world then the reports would come flooding in in a matter of seconds.

The Russians or the Germans would be plausable because those guys know how to write some seriously tight efficient code (their computer scientists are really in a league of their own) Korean, Chinese and Japanese programmers are essentialy bushleaague cut and pasters.

its very possible..

i know C++ programmers that have built 'faults' into their software so that periodically business's that have bought their software have to call them out to 'fix' issues.. leading to call out charges etc..

Faults are largely inherrent in C++ to begin with, you dont need to plan anything for it all to go horribly pear shaped.
This is largely down to the nature of the language c/c++ let you do some very stupid things in your code (and the compiler will allow it to pass unanounced) that other languages just dont tolerate.

Its my primary language though regardless of its nightmarish ability to get really buggy really fast.

[acestu]

Apparantley if you look close enough at a packet of rizzla there are in fact secret messages embedded by the commies....

Fact

acestu

[chroma]

Apparantley if you look close enough at a packet of rizzla there are in fact secret messages embedded by the commies....

Fact

acestu

This is only readily visable when under the influence of albert hoffmans problem child however

[Blender]

A very interesting thread.

Im open to the idea but my immediate opinion is that its the poor quality of components in electrical goods mean things break only just out of warranty, rather than some kill switch.

Happens all the time. These companies know how long their items will last, they're not stupid.

But if there was a shread of hard evidence i'd easily change my mind and buy british. (although quite where you can buy a british microwave now I have no idea)

[retsu]

this is quite interesting thread, but if its real, i doubt that only china would do that at the matter of fact i dont doubt that other countries on the world would gonna try that just in case of "emergency"

[timo1]

I think one of the previous posters mentioned quality of components. This I would imagine would be the easiest way to disable systems of any sort with a no conspiracy blame attached to it to increase revenue. Then just close the company and restart under a different name.
During the Falklands conflict wasn't there a rumour that the French had a Kill switch on their exocet missiles & they refused to share. Their sales went up substantially I believe after the missiles were shown to be so effective against modern Warships of the time.
I believe kill switches were discussed in "The Reg" last year where they were talking about BT buying switch gear from China instead of Marconi & how in the case of a confrontation with the Peoples republic they could disable the UK financially & communication wide without firing a shot by switching these off (by phone). They cover it in much more paranoid detail than I have here if anyone wants to search it out.

[forntida]

[quote, cataha]I worked for major company "UNNAMED", 60-70% of people in world use and will use. The point is, it has a back door that can only be open with knowledge of it's existents and without owners knowledge at the time of use, and i was in that team.... so i know when somebody says of such maybe, i know for sure there is.[/quote]

What?


[quote,chroma]Faults are largely inherrent in C++ to begin with, you dont need to plan anything for it all to go horribly pear shaped.
This is largely down to the nature of the language c/c++ let you do some very stupid things in your code (and the compiler will allow it to pass unanounced) that other languages just dont tolerate.[/quote]

It is more likely that programs are put on the market before they are tested to the full. You can't teach logic. It is easy to follow all the language requirements and get a program compiled, yet the program could have flawed logic. The compiler only compiles according to the language. Programs are bloody useless if they are not written to carry out all the tasks required. You have to write a program that will do all that is required without logical mistakes then test under all possible uses.

We recently had a case of the Daewoo PVR which would not work properly with countless faults. To me it looked as if the hard disk was still showing deleted programs on the FAT. Programs were scattered all over the place like a fragmented disk. Daewoo 'sorted' the problem by taking out the record 'series' option. They should have sent it back to the programmers. That fault should not have passed program testing.

[chroma]

[quote, cataha]I worked for major company "UNNAMED", 60-70% of people in world use and will use. The point is, it has a back door that can only be open with knowledge of it's existents and without owners knowledge at the time of use, and i was in that team.... so i know when somebody says of such maybe, i know for sure there is.

What?


[quote,chroma]Faults are largely inherrent in C++ to begin with, you dont need to plan anything for it all to go horribly pear shaped.
This is largely down to the nature of the language c/c++ let you do some very stupid things in your code (and the compiler will allow it to pass unanounced) that other languages just dont tolerate.[/quote]

It is more likely that programs are put on the market before they are tested to the full. You can't teach logic. It is easy to follow all the language requirements and get a program compiled, yet the program could have flawed logic. The compiler only compiles according to the language. Programs are bloody useless if they are not written to carry out all the tasks required. You have to write a program that will do all that is required without logical mistakes then test under all possible uses.

We recently had a case of the Daewoo PVR which would not work properly with countless faults. To me it looked as if the hard disk was still showing deleted programs on the FAT. Programs were scattered all over the place like a fragmented disk. Daewoo 'sorted' the problem by taking out the record 'series' option. They should have sent it back to the programmers. That fault should not have passed program testing.[/QUOTE]

Its an endemic problem with the entire software industry which amounts to not much more than battery farms.
Your given an insane deadline to ship from the idiots upstairs in marketing and managment and the whole ethos is "if its shit we can hopefully patch it later."

Then theres user error, as in people using CD trays as cup holders and the like, which im sure is just a plain old urban myth, but the point is users do try and use things for completely unrelated purposes. Errors down to this are forgivable in my opinion, a coder cant possibly forsee some of the punihment his work will have to endure from the bottomless well of end user stupidity.

The point i was making with C/C++ is that as a project grows in complexity you enevitably wind up doing stupid things like inline assembly and micromanaging memory that other high level languages dont want to let you near (and for good reason, subtle changes on a low level can have tremendous and often inexplicable ripple effects throughout the code)
Other languages that have automatad garbage collection and the like dont suffer from this problem.

Sometimes it feels like you need to be some kind of idiot savant to even attempt to dereference then overload a pointer because it can have mindboggling effects to the rest of the code, especialy when the object doesnt nessisarily exist yet or has a null value.

[forntida]

What?


[quote,chroma]Faults are largely inherrent in C++ to begin with, you dont need to plan anything for it all to go horribly pear shaped.
This is largely down to the nature of the language c/c++ let you do some very stupid things in your code (and the compiler will allow it to pass unanounced) that other languages just dont tolerate.

It is more likely that programs are put on the market before they are tested to the full. You can't teach logic. It is easy to follow all the language requirements and get a program compiled, yet the program could have flawed logic. The compiler only compiles according to the language. Programs are bloody useless if they are not written to carry out all the tasks required. You have to write a program that will do all that is required without logical mistakes then test under all possible uses.

We recently had a case of the Daewoo PVR which would not work properly with countless faults. To me it looked as if the hard disk was still showing deleted programs on the FAT. Programs were scattered all over the place like a fragmented disk. Daewoo 'sorted' the problem by taking out the record 'series' option. They should have sent it back to the programmers. That fault should not have passed program testing.[/QUOTE]

Its an endemic problem with the entire software industry which amounts to not much more than battery farms.
Your given an insane deadline to ship from the idiots upstairs in marketing and managment and the whole ethos is "if its shit we can hopefully patch it later."

Then theres user error, as in people using CD trays as cup holders and the like, which im sure is just a plain old urban myth, but the point is users do try and use things for completely unrelated purposes. Errors down to this are forgivable in my opinion, a coder cant possibly forsee some of the punihment his work will have to endure from the bottomless well of end user stupidity.

The point i was making with C/C++ is that as a project grows in complexity you enevitably wind up doing stupid things like inline assembly and micromanaging memory that other high level languages dont want to let you near (and for good reason, subtle changes on a low level can have tremendous and often inexplicable ripple effects throughout the code)
Other languages that have automatad garbage collection and the like dont suffer from this problem.

Sometimes it feels like you need to be some kind of idiot savant to even attempt to dereference then overload a pointer because it can have mindboggling effects to the rest of the code, especialy when the object doesnt nessisarily exist yet or has a null value.[/QUOTE]

I know what you mean. These things did not happen when programs were written in assembly and you did not have to use code like some of the dubious windows procedures\functions because of time constraints. Remember in my day meeses were not in general use.

[karlpowell]

I remember read something like this a good few years ago with a big VCR company putting a life-timer on one of there products so when it reached a certain age it just died. may have been Phillips but im not 100%

[jojo1212]

i agree.. i have to eat out at Yo Yo Beijing in Lincoln at least once a week

been there once and its great

[autolocksmiths]

Many Chinese companies are intentionally produce low-quality equipment. Looks cheap, but it is expensive.

[tuningschool]

another poor 3d about mass media piloting.

[sookha]

These people are working verry hard !
And i think if you work hard you deserve to benefit