With actorlike polish he intonated through the third page, including the last sentence:
“And now, let the words ring out, loud and clear, to all corners of the earth—to our friends, to our foes, across every ocean, every mountain. You purblind piece of excrement, I quit, and you’re on your own.”
The fourth page, of course, was blank.
Malicious programmers must nod and wink when they hear the story.
For the speech writer had just the right kind of temperament to hide a logic bomb—a computer glitch that explodes, so to speak, only under certain conditions.
The conditions in the Washington joke were clear. The congressman mustn’t read the speech to himself beforehand—something inevitable. He was dependably lazy. Nor must he understand the speech; no problem, certainly, for he was dumb about everything all the time. Above all, however, if this bomb were to “kill,” he must be embarrassable. And that’s why the bomb in a sense just maimed him—because, like most politicians, he never blushed.
In a real-life story told by Parker, a payroll programmer hid a bomb to erase the entire personnel file if he ever got fired—that is, if his own name ever vanished from it.
Simulation and Modeling
A crooked accountant embezzled a million dollars using simulation.
On his own computer he set up a mock version of the victim company’s accounting and general ledger. Then he could figure out how his thefts would show up on the company’s electronic books—and how to cover up the crime.