🚀 go-pugleaf

The discussion about viruses reminds me of 'an accident' that happened three
years ago.

I was at studying at a university in The Netherlands, when I got interested in
PostScript. Back in those days, at least in the Netherlands, any knowledge
about PostScript was rare, and I even had to get the red and the blue PS book,
from England. The university had just recently bought a awful lot of new
LaserWriters to replace existing older printers, so I knew it was worth it, to
learn PostScript.

One of the things I wrote was a new printerdriver for MS-Word, with the
ability of printing gray, outlined etc. About 5 people used this new
printerdriver and everything worked fine. During a long PS hack at night,
together with a friend, we decided to have some fun and change the
printerdriver a little bit. The printerdriver contained code that defined the
IBM linedraw character set in a somewhat crypted way. This was done to save 
transmission time to the printer when the driver was loaded. Since this was
already encrypted and hence very hard to read and figure out what was going
on, we decided to add some extra functionality to this encrypted part. Once
the newly created 'trojan-driver' was loaded it would work perfectly fine,
except that every 598th page would be printed like it had been mirrored
(scale -1 1). When we tested it with a mirror-rate of every 3rd page, it
worked really nice and you can understand our excitement (sorry).

The 5 people that had been using the printerdriver all used the same PC, that
was connected to the same LaserWriter. We decided to fool them and replace the
printerdriver on the hard-disk of the PC, with the 'trojan-driver'. Nothing
really happened after that, at least I didn't hear any of them complain about
mirrored pages.

Christmas break came one week later and I went home for a couple of weeks...

When I came back, the CS department of the university had connected all
the new LaserWriters to PC's in all the offices. Suddenly everybody was able
to use those new printers and they did. The 'trojan-driver' had been copied
off the PC in the printer-room and virtually everybody was using it. Without
complaints!!

Meanwhile the printerdriver worked great, well actually, it worked too well,
because every 598th page was still mirrored. Nobody complained about this,
because you would expect the new printers to make some mistakes every now and
then and once you printed the 'trojan' page again, it would come out fine.
Almost nobody had gotten two mirrored pages in say 4 months. And just me
believe me, I hadn't even thought about that late-night hack anymore. The
driver worked fine for me too. 

After four months, troubles began. At several occasion, people had printed the
final version of a report, looked over it, it looked fine and they had printed
this one more final-final version, put it in a plastic cover and off to the
reproduction service to make it into xx copies, nicely bound.

The first time a ran into lecture-notes, which had a mirror page, I knew what
had happened and immediately told the CS department. They said they had
received various complaints about the mirror business from all over the
university, but didn't know what it was. (Most people didn't even realize that
a printer could be told to do this, so it must be a mistake of the
hardware, they said...)

Very soon after this the 'trojan' driver was replaced by a new driver, with
more features, but excluding the mirror code. Everybody had a copy of the
'trojan' version though, and still every now and then mirrored pages show up.

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Of course this is in no way a virus, as defined in a previous article, but it
got me scared. 

ron
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ron
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