Bill Sommerfeld's Weblog

Monday November 20, 2006

if you thought lost bombs were bad, consider lost mustard gas.. In an analogy to the "Windows Genuine Advantage" program, Simon Phipps mentioned the recent discovery of explosives underneath a British airfield, and draws an analogy to anti-piracy "kill switches" embedded in software. While not directly analagous to a "kill switch", a couple years ago I heard of a somewhat more astonishing case of leftover lurking horrors: in 1993, World War I-era mustard gas shells were discovered in what is now an affluent residential neighborhood of Washington, DC in 1993. As of this summer, the cleanup was still in progress.

Returning to the real target : I share Tim Bray's concerns. License enforcement by intentional denial of service has no business going into mission-critical software; we have a hard enough time coping with denial of service from unintentionally introduced "features". (2006-11-20 20:16:52.0) Permalink