To further the offtopic thread and with a tiny relation to music.. I found this gem.. The RIAA would love to have this ability against music piracy..
Clipped shamelessly from this page..By the early 1980s, the Soviet Union was searching for better technology for its industrial control systems, and the simplest and cheapest way to develop state-of-the-art software was by pinching it from the West. This, however, was to prove a costly mistake.
The USA – deeply troubled by the emergence of Russia’s gas pipelines as a major economic beating stick to wield over Europe – learned of the Soviets’ intentions to steal software, and thought the opportunity of giving them bogus code was too good to pass up.
In a classic piece of espionage that would earn a standing ovation from John Le Carré, the CIA uncovered a KGB operation to harvest technical details and set up a counter-intelligence sting
In a classic piece of espionage that would earn a standing ovation from John Le Carré, the CIA uncovered a KGB operation to harvest technical details and set up a counter-intelligence sting.
Working on a tip-off from a French connection who had defected from Russia, US agents planted a specially modified version of the pipeline software at the Canadian company the KGB was targeting.
The time bombs in the software were so cunningly hidden that the code passed Russian inspection and went into the master control system for a pipeline designed to carry over 40 billion cubic metres of gas a year to Europe.
The software wreaked havoc with the pipes. As valves, pumps and turbines turned on and off at random, internal pressure reached bursting point, rupturing the pipe and causing an explosion that could be seen from space. Remarkably, no-one was hurt, but the tactic was the sort of copyright protection the record industry would kill for.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/363580/ ... s-go-wrong
) allowed. In case nobody else has noticed, there is a disproportionate amount of metalhead engineering and physics majors out there. :headbang:
