[Cryptography] EFF amicus brief in support of Apple

[Viktor Dukhovni]

On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 04:46:04PM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:

> On Sun, 6 Mar 2016, Jerry Leichter wrote:
> 
> > It's time we stopped believing that there's something magic about open 
> > source software.  There's good software and there's bad software, and 
> > even the best software has bugs.  And beyond bugs, all software can be 
> > deliberately subverted.  There are no silver bullets, just tons of 
> > continuing hard work.
> 
> There used to be a programming contest - Obfuscated C Code Contest, or 
> something, wherein you had to insert a deliberate but non-obvious bug.  A 
> winning entry was a vote-counter, which slewed the counts in favour of one 
> party, was damned hard to spot.  It was really obscure, involving some 
> rather tricky "C" (using overloaded macros etc), and after 40 years of 
> programming even I couldn't spot it...

You seem have conflated the Underhanded C contest (which grew out
of the Obfuscated V contest) with the obfuscated C contest.  The
Underhanded C contest has clear code with subtly hidden errors.
The obfuscated C code contest has impenetrable and concise code
doing unbelievable things.

The voting shennanigans were in the Obfuscated V contest.

-- 
	Viktor.