
How Scary Can an Old-School Programmer Be? (2013) - tontonius
https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/the-history-of-programming/1356/
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chuck4932
> Just imagine for a second, that a programmer like this, or a group like
> Future Crew decides to...focus on just one goal – create a small code that
> steals your financial data or helps to re-calibrate a Nuclear Reactor. How
> do you think, would they succeed?

These are no doubt talented coders but the article makes out that they posses
some kind of superpower and can do whatever they want with computers. Coding
graphics like that in assembler is an impressive feat but it in no way means
that these guys could just "break the Windows or Apple integrated security
systems" if they wanted to.

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infinity0
Another thing is that we don't see how their code generalises - how it
performs for different scenes not shown in the demos. The world changes and
one's code has to adapt to these changes, it is no good super-optimising some
assembly to generate a scene in 64kb when it takes 3 years to edit that same
assembly to generate a different scene.

~~~
throwaway2016a
Depends on your goal. If you're playing code golf and the whole point is a
small executable then it is "good"

But to a point I think you were making, skills to do that do not necessarily
translate to real-world software engineering.

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falsedan
I felt like this article was a bait-and-switch: it's on an anti-virus site,
mentions the comback of low-level techniques in viruses, then switches topics
to demoscene. I found the demoscene write-ups too breathless; claiming
_Airframe_ by Prime group is the _" mother and father of All modern 3D
aviation and space simulators"_ when it was released 12 years after _FS1
Flight Simulator_.

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ghostDancer
I remember the old virus scene with groups like 29a that made a virus that
could run on different OS and processors. And viruses that rewrote themselves
every time they transmit themselves so the anti-virus could not find their
signature.

~~~
klez
What you propose seems way more interesting a topic. Any writeup about this
you would suggests to read about the history of those groups?

~~~
ghostDancer
Most of the sites have disappeared, as most of the groups, you have some
information [http://vxer.org/](http://vxer.org/) some more info about 29a
[http://phrack.org/issues/69/16.html](http://phrack.org/issues/69/16.html) but
i don't know if there's something written like an ordered recollection of
those days.

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throwaway2016a
I was hoping the article was sarcastic and it was trying to teach young coders
that machine code isn't actually scary.

Instead I got an article about the demo scene.

