This is a file of computer stories that I have collected. Please mail me other versions of the stories here or any other stories that you know. I am not interested so much in getting the "correct" version of a story but in the different versions that exist. If you want I would be happy to meet with you. I will be updating this file occasionally. Harry Gammerdinger (HAG) x5-6452 Using The PDP1 As An Autodialer A bunch of people were playing around with the PDP1 and connected it up with the MIT extension system. They set up a system for back tracing the lines. The thing would sense whether it got a ring, an invalidation signal, or an open line. They had it compile lists of tielines. Eventually from the MIT extension level it went through Bell Labs and over into the Defense net and via the SAC headquarters into the Pentagon. There it was discovered because the phone numbers are arranged sequentially with the rooms. People got suspicious when each phone would ring once, stop, and then the next phone down the hall would ring. From there it was slowly back traced to the people who were doing it. At the time what they were doing wasn't illegal so they were all given security clearance and then had it taken away with regard to what they had learned about these tieline numbers. Then it would be treason if they published any of the numbers they had found relating to the Defense Network. PHANTOM And VIRUS Once on the ARPA net someone developed a program called The Phantom. He would initiate The Phantom at his computer and it would send itself to another computer and print on the console, "The Phantom was here." and then erase itself and erase any trace of where it came from. So The Phantom would move around the ARPA net and nobody would know were it came from or be able to trace it back. That was clever but not malicious. Then Virus appeared. What Virus would do is you would start up Virus and then it would pick out another CPU and send a copy of itself there and initiate itself on the other processor. The new copy of Virus thus being initiated would send out to another processor and initiate itself till Virus ran all through the system tieing up all the resources of the system. Since every copy was identical and had identical function you could never tell from where Virus originated. Round Off Error This guy was a programmer that worked for a bank. He discovered that when the bank computes your interest they take your current amount and multiply it by a percent and get a number that's in fractions of cents. When the bank did this calculation they were rounding down to often so that in the end the bank came out just a little bit ahead on computing the interest. The programmer changed the hardware so that what the program did was instead of merely rounding it down and the balances wouldn't add up in the end it would round it down and take the excess and credit it to his account. This was only tenths of a cent but over millions of accounts computing interest all the time his account grew just sitting there. He was finally caught I believe because he kept walking into the bank and making withdraws. Doctor Program Professor Weizenbaum was developing his Doctor program and fell asleep without logging out. Some one else had something important that had to be done by the next day and he needed all the resources that he could get. So he found the people logged in that were his friends and asked them to logout so that he could get his work done on time. He connected with Weizenbaum's terminal and started by saying, "Hello". The program replied, "Speak up". He asked what he thought was Weizenbaum to hang up and the program replied, "What would it mean to you if I hanged up?" The conversation went on like this. It's really late at night so the guy was pretty tired. He wasn't thinking all that clearly and he gets more and more frustrated because he can't convince what he thinks is Weizenbaum to do this perfectly resonable thing of logging out. He went on and on getting into these convoluted arguements. Finally he gets really frustrated and runs into Weizenbaum's office and sees Weizenbaum lying on his desk asleep. Bernie's "Do Chickens Have Lips?" This happened in the fall of 1970 at Cooper Union where I was a senior at the time. We had a 1130 with a card reader punch connected to a 360 at N.Y.U. For a few hours each day we dialed up the 360 and using HASP we punched cards back and forth and had output printed. While this happened we had operator console communication. Instead of sending useful messages the idea was to see what clever remarks you could send or try to out clever the N.Y.U. operator who was an equally clever undergraduate. Well this was all fine. One day in September we were punching about four thousand source monitoring cards and in walk these two art students from the Cooper Union Art School. These two guys were a little weird, they were holding hands with each other and carrying purses. They came in and looked at this and they really didn't know what was going on. I'm not sure why they wandered into the computer center. They would see a message come out and see my friend Mike, who was sitting at the console, type in a clever remark. After some other things such as, "attention required for the 1442", and more clever remarks they looked at this and thought it was really amazing that the computer responded to all of these queries. They looked at each other, giggled some, and asked my friend Mike, "Hey, can we ask it a few questions?" So he typed in, "We have two young art students here who would like to ask the computer questions,dig?" Sure enough printing came out and it said, "Go ahead, it is very important to answer the questions of the nation's youth." We knew that he had immediately gotten the idea. Well they looked at each other, giggled some, and said, "We know what to ask it. Ask it if chickens have lips?" We looked at each other kind of strange and we were afraid that if we told the guy on the other end that he would think that we were a little strange. But we figured that the predicted outcome was probably greater that the predicted loss so we said, "They would like to know if chickens have lips." They waited for the output and sure enough shortly later it said, "Yes they do. Mother nature puts them behind their beaks to protect them from people with chicken fetishes." We looked at each other and tried to keep from breaking up. These two guys thought that was really far out. Then inspired by the great results they said, "Ask it what is the meaning of life." We typed it in and sure enough, "Life is ten tousand volts surging through your transistors". Then they went a little farther and wanted to ask it, "Did it ever go to bed with Mick Jagger?" We made all kinds of excuses about why we didn't want to ask it that. Then they started asking it all sorts of questions about its sex life. Finally they took the console output and went away. We called up the 360 operator and told him how we had convinced these two guys that the 360 was indeed the most intelligent piece of apparatus that was ever conceived of it the mind of man. The next day I met these two guys, in the hall of the art building of course. They stopped me and showed me the output which they carried around like holy writ, pouring over it all the time. They said that it was great but they pointed to one line and asked, "How the hell does it know that?" And that line said, "attention required 1442 punch". Magic And More Magic Once they were cleaning up the A.I. Lab PDP10 and they opened all the doors to the computer that hadn't been opened for years. Someone found a switch that was marked "magic" in one position and "more magic" in the other and it was thrown to "more magic". Nobody knew what it was so he said, "Let's find out", threw the switch, and the system crashed. He managed to get to the other side and check out the switch. On one side it was hooked to ground and on the other side the wire was just dangling in the air. No one's been able to repeat it. The switch doesn't do anything anymore. Perhaps it was static electricity. 03/13/78---------------------------------------------------------------- PGS@MIT-AI The Unknown Glitch Back in the early days of the Stanford AI Lab, some hacker wrote a program which would print out on a console or line printer, "I am the unknown glitch. Catch me if you can." The program had a randomized time interrupt so that periodically it would execute this printout, relocate itself somewhere else in core, and go to sleep untill some later time when it would do the same. It proved impossible to eradicate the glitch, so finally it was necessary to reload the system software. The Cookie Monester Around 1971 Chris Tavares implemented the cookie bear as it is known today on the 645 Multics. The cookie monster program utilized the system's mail program. When one was sent a cookie monster, one would receive mail, ostensibly from the cookie monster. The first message would read, "Please give me a cookie." The recipient of such a message would usually think, "Oh it's some random high school kid logged on from MITRE-TIP. I'll ignore him, he'll probably go away." But about five minutes later, he would receive another message from the cookie monster, this one saying, "I want a cookie. Give me a cookie." This time the pestered hacker would usually look at the logged-on users, to see if there was a cookie monster logged on, probably with the thought of gunning him. But, of course, there was no such user. After several more minutes he would receive a message reading, "GIVE ME A GODDAMNED COOKIE!" By now the victim would be quite angry, and he would sometimes begin irrationally accusing fellow users of hacking him. The messages would continue throughout the day or night, as long as the user was logged on. What the victim would never realise was that all he had to do was send the cookie monster a message containing only one word: cookie. Later on such variations of the cookie monster program appeared as the Susan Ford program, the only difference between this and the former being that Susan Ford demanded an affair. There was even a cookie monster program that threatened to crash the system or gun the recipient, if not given a cookie - and would, too. These however, were not due to Chris. PEAGRE@MIT-MC Versions Of VIRUS A couple of versions of the VIRUS story make the rounds here at the University of Maryland every so often. The first concerns a hole found by Dr. David Lay, formerly of the U. of Md., in the EXEC8 operating system's setup for shared system re-entrant programs. This happened at some secret Navy installation that had UNIVAC hardware. It seems that the core they were kept in was not write-protected, so that one could modify it as other folks used it. He altered one popular re-entrant routine to branch off to one of his own programs that copied out all the files the unsuspecting user had access to, and then do what the routine was supposed to do and return without leaving a trace. After not too long, he had collected a good sampling of the various "secret" files on store. He showed up in the admiral's office one day and presented it all to him. Well, soon enough, some Congressional committee (I think run by John Moss) found out about this, and held a hearing about it during which they read into the Congressional Record quotations about the unbreakable security of UNIVAC hardware. All the details were in Datamation or some similar publication a year or so back. Another concerns a rather hacky UNIVAC facility for suspending a job and copying all the stuff necessary for restarting it into a file. This was fine untill one day when some user wrote a routine for editing the binary innards of a file. He switched a bit somewhere in a suspended job's file to take the job out of guard mode. He then restarted the job and used it to execute a program which grabbed that part of the operating system which talked with the operator's console, whereupon, to the utter shock of the poor operators, he flashed a huge "CBS eye" on the console. The eye blinked once and disappeared, leaving the former contents of the screen. Needless to say, we can no longer suspend jobs into the files at Maryland. The final concerns one of the few known methods for crashing a UNIVAC 1100 series machine under EXEC8. Simply stated, one puts in batch (the fact that the UNIVAC is basically a batch machine constitutes an utter pain in the ass for most of us) a job which creates two copies of itself (which get put into batch backlog and eventually de-queued and run) and proceeds to compile a large (..."large") COBOL program which proceeds to go into an infinite loop. By sitting at the terminal and checking the status of the machine every few seconds, one can plot the demise of the machine as an exponentially-growing batch backlog queue. Since the jobs are given randomized identifications, the operators are hard-pressed to kill them all without taking down the machine. KEN@MIT-AI The Dartmouth Cookie Bear. Many years ago, the system console at Dartmouth's Computer Center printed out the message, "Give me a cookie". It became more and more demanding and threatening and eventually bringing down the system. The hackers there checked all the possible sources of the hack but could find it nowhere. As it continued to happen, they offered a reward to anyone who could track it down. Eventually someone came and suggested that they inspect the system console itself. There they found a small piece of hardware that was a cause of it all. He refused the reward and confessed that he had done it. God Does Not Exist An IBM likage editor that was widely used at the University of Pennsylvania's Computer Center always printed out a strange warning when the member of a partioned data set was referenced. The system default name for the member was GO and so it would always put on everyone's listing GO DOES NOT EXIST BUT HAS BEEN ADDED TO DATA SET. I talked a friend of mine into changing the system default to GOD. To my knowledge only one user noticed it for the few days that hack lasted. This happened around 1971 or so. Bill For $0.00 My father told me the following one. My aunt gets a bill in the mail for $0.00 and of course ignores it. As it continues my father convinces her to just write a check for $0.00 to keep the computer happy. She does and it works, but a month later she gets an angry letter from her bank claiming that her cancelled check for $0.00 had crashed their computer. 03/16/78------------------------------------------------------------ HGB@MIT-MC Stealing Round Off Error I believe that the story about the fractions of a cent on interest is not only true, but that it happened at the Harvard Trust Co. in Cambridge. I believe that the guy had about $200,000 in his account when they caught him. Seymour Pollack, a research associate at the medical computing facility of the U. of Cincinnati Medical School wrote a paper and sent it in to the CACM in the early 60's about a program he had written. This program, for the IBM 1401, stored and retrieved blank cards on tape. This saved an enormous amount of room because the tapes took up far less room than the boxes of cards. Whenever you needed cards you simply ran the retrieval program after setting the console switches for what color cards you wanted. After mounting the tape the cards would be punched out. The CACM editor replied with a request for more details! Tavares@MIT-Multics Bills For $0.00 When I was here, at least, MIT was a prime offender. The bills were always due yesterday (aren't all bills sent thru tute mail?) and they always threatened to CANCEL YOUR LOAN or something if it was not paid. I used to send them a check for $0.00, postdated about two weeks. They always got the message. neilson@LL-ASG Porthole Spacewar Winston Edmund, at one time a student here at the institute, attempted a version of spacewar to be played from two video displays at once. He intended to run it on PDP-1X and its neighbor-ancestor TX-0. The view was not to be the standard map-of-the-solar system, but the view-out-your-front-porthole or (flip a switch) view-out-your-back-porthole. I don't think he succeeded. I suspect there were bandwidth problems.