A high-school sophomore last week was called to his private school's office
and asked to explain some suspicious text on his Web site. What was
intended to be a quote from /usr/games/fortune was instead the *first line*
from its output. The school staff was very alarmed because the full output
would have been:
I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four
pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I
was aiming for: If they think you're crude, go technical; if they
think you're technical, go crude. I'm a very technical boy. So I
decided to get as crude as possible. These days, though, you have
to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness.
- Johnny Mnemonic, by William Gibson
Using a variable in list context on the left side of a perl expression
puts the right side into the same context, and many operators behave
differently in different contexts. These two statements are not
equivalent:
my $f = `fortune`; # returns fortune as scalar, stores in $f
my($f) = `fortune`; # returns each line of fortune as one element
# in a list, stores first line in $f
Only the line about the shotgun in the Adidas bag made it to this kid's Web
page, and the school went into crisis mode. They called the police just to
be on the safe side.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/03/13/208259
Everything was eventually explained to their satisfaction, but the cops
still talked to this sophomore and his father for a couple of hours and
they're keeping his name on file... again, "just in case."
The risk is, I think, being a private high-school student a week after a
high-profile school shooting, and having a Web site.
Jamie McCarthy jamie@mccarthy.vg http://jamie.mccarthy.vg/ [Jamie McCarthy via risks-digest Volume 21, Issue 27]
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