"...  literally bug-compatible ..."

When I used to work for the phone company.... wait, I mean Bell Labs ... I
was in a department (under Rudd Canaday!) that was building an application
to print phone books, so I got to learn a little about that side of the
business. The Bells would deliberately put in bogus listings to see if the
non-Bell phone books were stealing their data. (In the one case I was told
about, they were not. The Bell company had no idea how they were getting
the data.)

Marc

On Fri, Mar 15, 2024 at 4:28 PM Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:

> On Fri, 15 Mar 2024, Douglas McIlroy wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> > After a little study, the consultant confidently opined that the binary
> > was obviously compiled from that source. "Would it surprise you," the
> > lawyer asked, "if I told you that this is yours and that is ours?" The
> > consultant did not attend the following day's meeting.
>
> Does anyone remember the case of the program that was literally
> bug-compatible?  That's mostly because the source had been pirated; the
> bug was obscure enough that it was unlikely to have been reproduced
> independently...
>
> -- Dave
>


-- 
*My new email address is mrochkind@gmail.com <mrochkind@gmail.com>*