GOTO Jail: FBI Investigated Bizarre BASIC Program Sent To Johnny Cash (muckrock.com) 62
v3rgEz writes: Who has time to write out all the vaguely threatening conspiracies that need to be sent to celebrities these days? Turns out, that can be automated too: In 1979, the FBI investigated a bizarre, threatening Christmas message sent to Johnny Cash on the eve of his 62nd album's release. The threat included the source and output of a BASIC program, which the FBI dutifully dusted for clues. Newly released documents show what would become the FBI's CyberCrime division.
Well, that was surprisingly boring. (Score:5, Funny)
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It was a loop. Scary shit. At least it wasn't recursive wooOOOooOOoooooo
Recursion in original BASIC is complicated by the fact that all variables are global. You can GOSUB to your same subroutine, but I don't think the stack was very large either, so you could easily have a stack overflow.
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Prefixing the subroutine with it's name does not address the issue that the variables are global and therefore useless in making them any more useful for recursion (i.e. they're still useless). The [subroutine-name]_init variable is also useless for recursion. The only way you can do what the OP is suggesting (i.e. recursion when all variables are global) is to implement your own stack for every subroutine that needs to recursively call itself.
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Tried out this code in an Apple II emulator:
10 I=0
20 I=I+1:PRINT I
30 GOSUB 20
It gets to 25 before bombing out with an out-of-memory error. Assuming that it's using the processor's 256-byte stack and not some other chunk of memory, the "out-of-memory" condition more than likely is a stack overflow.
Re:Well, that was surprisingly boring. (Score:5, Funny)
"At least it wasn't recursive wooOOOooOOoooooo"
Yes, not too many still remember Cash's hit I Walk the Tree
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I see the internet going out more like, "Sit, Ubu, sit... good dog!"
Then the dog barks and the lights go out.
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Re:Well, that was surprisingly boring. (Score:4, Interesting)
Agreed, I read the whole thing and I am still looking for the threat. all this is is proof that the FBI pays its agents by the hour.
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The things that the FBI have done over the years just boggle the mind.
Have you read the letters they sent to suspected mafia leaders posing a activists...and vice versa?
FBI has the docs here
https://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-... [fbi.gov]
Funny how all the good bits are buried and really bad copy....very hard to read. Not like the crisp version of the same you can find elsewhere (didn't find a text copy): http://www.thesmokinggun.com/f... [thesmokinggun.com]
"Dear Hoodlum Leader:
Ever since I read in our paper the Worker..."
Words just fail me.
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Louie, Louie contains *any* lyrics?
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I read the whole thing and agree as well. No specific threat exists in those documents. There is 1) a narrative which interprets those documents as threatening or creepy, even when many other interpretations exist and no concrete proof of a threat exists outside of the FBI narrative. 2) Many positive statements, wishing whoever Merry Christmas and expressing love. 3) A te
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From what I read, the FBI sent the letters off to the fingerprinting office to determine who sent them, then chatted with him and found he was trying to impress a woman, then closed the case. How do you expect that they would figure out who sent them without the investigation part? What parts would you have had them not perform?
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"If to be feelingly alive to the sufferings of my fellow creatures is to be a f
I'm pretty sure (Score:2)
Johnny Cash could take care of himself. Which is probably why the threat was (meant to be) sent anonymously.
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It wasn't sent anonymously. The guy included his business card with the letter.
The way I read the article, I didn't think that was intentional - the guy was just an idiot.
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You gotta PEEK or POKE something to really have action. In BASIC too.
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Omfg "TRON" is a real programming word!!!
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TRON: Trace on.
TROFF: Turn that annoying extra trace ouput off.
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I would have gone with:
Since shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die will probably get you stuck there until they throw the switch on you or the power goes out.
THERE's a surprise! (Score:4, Funny)
There's something you don't see every day...[*]
[*] no, really. nobody uses BASIC anymore, not even MicroSoft.
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oh, a BASIC programmer who was mentally disordered. There's something you don't see every day...
FTFY: A programmer who was mentally disordered. Blame management for forcing us to live with contradictory demands and the resulting cognitive dissonance.
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That was all there was. Try the Atarii basic cartridge to see how desperate some were to get access to programming.
Home computers were about the price of a station wagon back then.
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Atari BASIC is what prepared me for C, and its string handling was very similar to Apple Integer BASIC, not to be confused with the far more popular MicroSoft style BASIC most people used.
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Learning to code in Basic is a way to sift out the people willing to learn from people that can't learn.
In the beginning everyone is producing junk code, but then you will start to see that some coders starts to produce more structured code and then they start to look for other better languages to code in. Those are the programmers you want to employ. The other programmers should do something else or be held with a short leash.
I still use basic. (Score:2)
And C and assembler; all on dos under win 95.
Old DataAQ equipment needs old stuff.
And you never forget how to write basic; it was on everyone's computer already. :)
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Online Apple BASIC emulator, with code samples:
http://www.calormen.com/jsbasi... [calormen.com]
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10 WHAT
20 DO
30 YOU
40 MEAN
50 BY
60 THAT,
70 HARVEY!
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I don't think that program would compile, shouldn't that be:
10 PRINT WHAT ...
?
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it was a mentally disordered who THOUGHT he was a programmer and wanted to make fear with that.. kind of.
"be on the radio, not work with radios" (Score:5, Interesting)
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And some of his songs had rhythms that are based on what he was hearing back when he was in the USAF.
Good thing the USSR never came after him for plagiarism.
This sounds strangely familiar... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Interesting trivia (Score:3)
Several of the examples in TFA were obviously printed on a DEC DECWriter printer, like an LA36.
Also, the snippets of code that were there looked a lot like DEC BASIC, running on a TOPS 10 or 20 minicomputer, but it's hard to tell with such small samples.
I remember 1979 well. (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing that you have to know about 1979 is that the vast majority of people (including most law enforcement) back then had never seen a computer in person. If you asked most people to draw a computer, they'd produce a rough sketch of the iconic IBM 729 [wikipedia.org] 7 track tape drive.
Technology moved so fast after that the computers of 1979 would seem inconceivably archaic even to people who were born in that year. I was still learning to program back then, on machines that had banks of lights on the front panel to show you the contents of the CPU registers. The very first microcomputers an average person (well, and average person with rudimentary soldering skills and the equivalent of $3200 burning a hole in his pocket) could own had just recently become available, and they had the same feature [wikipedia.org].
The point of my old-fart ramblings is this: unless you are old enough to remember this time, you probably have no idea of how alien and spooky this computer stuff would have been back then. It's not just people are more used to computers now, we're more used to being confronted with unfamiliar new technology in general. You have to understand the biggest change in technology experience most people had had at that time was the switch from rotary dial to keypad on telephones and not everyone had that yet. There was still a display in the Boston Museum of Science explaining the benefits of Touch Tone dialing. TV remote controls were still in the future, you still had to get off the couch to change the channel or the volume. So this kind computer stuff was barely one step removed from sorcery as far as most people were concerned.
The Internet also has familiarized most people today with oddball geek behavior, and experience has taught us not to expect people doing bizarre things to make sense. So not only were computers weird and disturbing to most people, weird and disturbing behavior was more weird and disturbing to most people. People in general, and law enforcement specifically, had no experience whatsoever to draw upon to formulate a reasonable response to something like this. Later law enforcement doesn't have that excuse, but at the time this is really all you could expect from the FBI.
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This is totally weird, but as I was reading that article and seeing the BASIC listing, I actually remembered the smell and feel of my TRS-80.
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This is totally weird, but as I was reading that article and seeing the BASIC listing, I actually remembered the smell and feel of my TRS-80.
The olfactory bulb is intimately interconnected with the hippocampus, which is involved in learning and associative memory, and the amygdala, which processes emotions. So it's quite commonplace for smells to trigger emotional memories, and it wouldn't be surprising for the trigger to run the other way -- from an emotional response to an olfactory memory.
So I'm going to take a wild stab and guess that you probably loved that computer. Or possibly hated it.
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They didn't call it by their other name, Trash 80, so there's that.
In reference to your prior post - I was just then heading to college for my first four years, having spent four years enlisted in the Marines prior to that. I did see some terminals but didn't really use a computer. In fact, I kind of hated computers back then. Oddly, I was majoring in Applied Mathematics. But, really, we didn't do a whole lot of computing with a computer at that point and, when we did reach that stage, we were actually expe
Well spoken! (Score:2)
Well said Sir. Far too many of the /. demographic are too young to have any experience or knowledge of the world prior to the Digital Revolution. Heck, when I was a (personal) computer salesman in 1992, I was still having to explain to dubious and suspicious Stan and Suzy Suburbia why having a PC was a good thing - especially if they had school age kids. (That a decent system was still north of $2k at that point, when $2k was a still a lot of money, didn't help.)
Consider yourself virtually modded up (
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