[TUHS] Happy New Year and an amusing story from the past

[Larry McVoy]

On Sat, Jan 03, 2015 at 06:49:14AM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Thu, 1 Jan 2015, Ronald Natalie wrote:
> 
> > I guess y???all aren???t with the baptists.
> 
> At an early one, when Gould first came out, we social-engineered their 
> booth-marketoid into giving us root access; the buggers never did pay the 
> bounty, claiming that we'd cheated.  Well, yeah...

Wasn't that Guy Harris?  He noticed root had dot in their path and wrote
an ls that dumped core if (!getuid()) and else tried to stash away a 
setuid shell only to realize that Gould had killed setuid so he had to
copy the file (/usr/lib/secure or something like that) and chmod it so
he could read it.  As I recall it said "Gould makes fire breathing 
secure systems" or similar.

The reason I remember all of this is I blasted gould on comp.unix-wizards
for not coming through with the prize, I thought that was lame in the 
extreme.

Funny ending to that story is that I actually interviewed at Gould and when
I showed up there everyone's head was sticking out of their office to see
the asshole who had the balls to show up and ask for a job.  Much to my 
surprise, after an uncomfortable day of interviews, they offered me one.
Didn't take it, went to work for Lachman instead which turned out better
for me, had a blast.
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Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm