Super-villains of C sought for world conquest plan

If you think like a super-villain, laugh like an anti-hero, and can write code, it's time to polish off the cackle, sharpen up the brain, get extra coffee, and start working on your entry to the Underhanded C contest. The 7th Underhanded C contest seeks, like its predecessors, code that is “readable, clear, innocent and …

[dan1980]

"There are “extra points for humorous, spiteful, or ironic bugs . . ."

Nerds are awesome.

[fearnothing]

I particularly liked one of the entries where the task was that you had been employed to write a program that did some kind of image processing, e.g. blur, de-noise, white balance, but you had to write the program to conceal information within the image. This is already ironic - you're being asked to do code steganography in order to produce image steganography. The winner decided to write an application that watermarked an image and then used the watermark data as executable code to hide further information in the image. How's that for giving your employer the finger(print)?

[amanfromMars 1]

Speaking Truth unto Pseudo Power Systems and Wannabe Commanding Controllers

Hmmmm ? C finally realising MI6 potential for Dark Web Ventures/Black Watch Enterprises whilst Hannigan and GCHQ tilts at virtual windmills ..... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/04/apple_and_google_are_the_top_terrorist_control_network_claims_british_spy_boss/ ..... and admits to every man and his dog, the relative impotence of their operations/modus operandi/puppet masters.

Knock. knock, Younger, Alex. Capiche and agree?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Speaking Truth unto Pseudo Power Systems and Wannabe Commanding Controllers

-marsman - I hope you hid behind a few vpns, some tor gateways and a public wifi hotspot or two for that comment.

[cantankerous swineherd]

"nods encouragingly as you execute an array of floats"

lol. must try that sometime!

[Mike 16]

Execute floats?

One of the neat features of the (several) Fortran compilers for the CDC6600 was "backgrounding" of otherwise un-initialized memory to words that were all of:

Instruction to HALT

Illegal floating-point values

indicators of their address.

So attempting to execute them or use them in floating point operations would generally "come to the attention" of the system, and help to deduce where it went off the rails.

Of course, there is nothing in the C standards that prohibits (somewhat more) typesafe or boundary-checked implementations of C, but the vast majority of implementations allow, if not actually promote, unsafe behavior in the interest of "portability" or "legacy code".

It doesn't help that (less now than a few decades ago), the use of C by talented and careful folks to build impressive software led to a "I'm using C, I must be a Code Ninja" attitude among the willfully ignorant of things like "design first, code later"