Harmful code in demos?
category: general [glöplog]
When you download prods you pull down software from all kinds of shady places on the net. Usually you just have to trust the people behind the productions that they give you what they say they do. Have there ever been any case of malicious/harmful code in any demo and how did "the scene" handle that?
*looks at Shane*
Chop by Trepaan modified win.com so that windows wouldn't start anymore.
It was even recognized by some antivirus tools as a trojan if I remember correctly...
It was even recognized by some antivirus tools as a trojan if I remember correctly...
I've never heard of a case of intentionally malicious package. Anyway "the scene" would handle that with a load of fucktros :) and physical punishment for the authors if they dare to show up at party.
To find out how the scene "handled" it check google groups
oops, my bad, I forgot the Trepaan case :p
BTW, I just remembered another one, although it's not really mallicious but quite annoying anyhow :-)
IIRC rape by mfx has a bug which causes the filesystem to corrupt if the machine isn't rebooted immediately after the demo ends, that's not intentional though.
also in some cases demos have been unintentionally spread with viruses
and oh yeah, watching any taat production will surely cause same damage to you.
also in some cases demos have been unintentionally spread with viruses
and oh yeah, watching any taat production will surely cause same damage to you.
...I've had a report of malicious code on some 4kb demos. Damn free anti-virus. I know there isn't any, if there is kudos for them: Graphics, Sound, and Virus in 4kb ;)
I remember hearing about a ridiculously überlame anti-emulator virus in some Amiga demo a few years ago, which would wipe out the virtual hard disk if it determined the demo was being executed in UAE. This might've been just a rumour though, I haven't seen it myself.
sparcus: don't forget Vierkabee who 'trepanized' your windows too! actually what it did was renaming your win.com to j4ce32.dll and gen a new win.com that would say 'windows has ben trepanated'.
good times!
good times!
And Billy G Forze 2 probably did the same thing
oh, and flush could be easily quit by pressing alt-f4 actually :)
i miss csipd.
Shane released two trojans under the guise of scene productions. One actually displayed graphics while deleting DH0:, the other was just pure malicious code.
Sink by Pulse fucked up my hard drive back in the day.
(it's just buggy, not intentionally malicious.. )
is hypnoglow considered harmful?
One of my demos actually deletes your "S:" dir if you exit it before the 3rd part has finished.
If you want to know which one it is, here's a hint:
It has more than 5 parts and was released more than 2 years ago.
If you want to know which one it is, here's a hint:
It has more than 5 parts and was released more than 2 years ago.
I remember there was more than one Treepan demos that were treepanizing win.com. I even try to run them under DosBox and they still treepanized win.com, but in C: where I have an obsolette Win98 installation I am not using anymore..
Optimus: Well, I guess it would be safe to run those intros under DosBox as long as you don't mount your C: drive to DosBox's C drive.
As far as I know the Trepaan intros only check for the existance of C:\Windows\win.com. Back in the days I had my Windows installed in C:\Windoze, which was actually quite lame but it did save me from trepanation ;-)
As far as I know the Trepaan intros only check for the existance of C:\Windows\win.com. Back in the days I had my Windows installed in C:\Windoze, which was actually quite lame but it did save me from trepanation ;-)
or just run 'chop /LENZ' :)
Trepaan is the reason why i dont run dutch demos and intros....but i guess the colorscheme is also a good reason not to run them :)
\o/ success \o/
I would never try one Zplex, I heard they put brainwashing effects in those weird things!
I would never try one Zplex, I heard they put brainwashing effects in those weird things!
Ok, so there seem to have been a few even though they seem to be a couple of years old.
I guess one has to distinguish between code that's intentionally harmful and code that fucks your stuff up by mistake.
I guess one has to distinguish between code that's intentionally harmful and code that fucks your stuff up by mistake.