• Anonymous (unregistered)

    Your pc is now diamonds!

  • A little birdie (unregistered)

    Twitter version: Got job testing lasers. System acting weird. Found virus. Rewarded with more work. Isn't that ironic? No, it isn't.

  • (cs) in reply to Ben
    Ben:
    The system is called MILES... you can look up the acronym. Some of us actually got to use it. Being in an OPFOR unit, I got to use it a *lot*. There's really nothing like watching people scatter from your RPG or being chased by tanks and choppers.

    The idea is good: a microphone detects the sound of the blank firing, and the laser sends a coded burst to the target's sensors. So you actually have to have a working rifle, and not get shot. It also really is integrated, in that vehicles use the same system.

    The original implementation (which is the one with the "keys") was shit. The sensors couldn't get wet, of course, so we'd sometimes try to wrap them in plastic. And, as per standard Army ergonomics, there was a big metal box jamming into the small of your back.

    The laser was a big heavy box mounted at the end of the rifle. You had to zero (make everything point in the same direction) your laser to the rifle, and zeroing a platoon's rifles was an all day affair. Someone had to wear the sensors and stand out and be "shot" at.

    The worst part was the mounting system for the laser. The (fairly heavy) box mounted just a few inches behind the muzzle. Without a fairly complicated arrangement of duct tape and zip ties, you'd lose your zero.

    This was great for us. Once you got used to zeroing, it was just a hassle, but BLUFOR usually had no clue and knew none of the tricks. So they usually couldn't hit shit.

    MILES 2000 changed most of that, (in 2007) the much smaller laser clamped down on the muzzle with a torque wrench and a finicky but workable device that made zeroing take about 5 minutes.

    Ah yes, Army opposing force. We went up against some of you at Bragg. Since we were there for 3 weeks, we had to carry a bunch of gear with us. Those guys thought they were so cool- running around with minimal gear. Unfortunately for them, we had CS, and they didn't have gas masks. So we popped a smoke grenade for cover. Once the smoke was pretty thick, we donned our gas masks and set off the CS. As you could imagine, hilarity ensued.

  • Plz Send the Code (unregistered)

    I remember this stuff from my army days (back when we had the soviets to worry about). My armored vehicle got hit and killed by an 8 inch gun from a battleship, according to the code. Always wondered if there was someone who figured out how to change the code on their laser, turning their rifle into an giant cannon.

  • (cs) in reply to Plz Send the Code
    Plz Send the Code:
    I remember this stuff from my army days (back when we had the soviets to worry about). My armored vehicle got hit and killed by an 8 inch gun from a battleship, according to the code. Always wondered if there was someone who figured out how to change the code on their laser, turning their rifle into an giant cannon.

    Pfft! That's easy... once your AFV got stoned, it sat there for a few seconds trying to figure out a "really cool" way to get knocked out... not much that's better than an 8 inch naval gun, unless you want to up the ante to a 16" naval gun... but that'd be unbelievable... yes, an 8" naval gun has just enough panache.

  • (cs)

    Personal WTF. I had a phone interview for the job Greg got. It sounded cool on the phone but the commute was well over an hour so I didn't pursue it.

  • Hex2ascii (unregistered)

    TRWTF is that "he painstakingly translated the hexadecimal into ASCII" even though he could have just let the computer do it!

  • Dan (unregistered) in reply to Anguirel
    Anguirel:
    qunr:
    there's a commented disassembly of the stoned virus here: http://computerarcheology.com/stoned/stoned.html - is that rs-232 output possibly just what would've been output in teletype mode? if i understand it correctly teletype must be something like a serial terminal, isn't it?

    I'm not really familiar with the virus, but most likely it's just whatever was being sent to standard output, rather than the virus trying to replicate itself. I've worked with embedded systems (Yes, without file systems), and have directed stdout over RS-232, so it seems feasible.

    And it probably happened so often because its presence caused the device to hit an illegal instruction and reboot. Or else the GPS software was WTF-worthy code. Either way, that's the only explanation I can think of for the same device to repeatedly output its message.

  • luctus (unregistered) in reply to Bill's kid
    Bill's kid:
    Nice; And probably very true. When I worked at Big Giant Software Corp. that makes operating systems and office software, the government effectively put an end to Easter eggs by threatening not to buy any software where they could be found. The government reasoned that if the people in charge of QA at BGS Corp. could not detect and remove Easter eggs, they probably couldn't detect malicious code either.

    Now we have no way of playing flight simulator from our spreadsheet application.

  • Larry (unregistered)

    TRWTF is GPS units without floppy drives.

  • Peter (unregistered) in reply to spelling b
    spelling b:
    Your PC is now Stoned!
    FFS, it's "You're PC is now stoned!".

    Does no one understand basic English grammar these days?

    Hey, the message was output by a virus. Don't get all pissy at us because the virus writer didn't have you're grasp of grammar.

    ;-)

  • LB (unregistered) in reply to Scott
    Scott:
    So the WTF is that a company actually thoroughly tested a product?
    That's the nearest to a WTF I could find here. I'm not quite sure how this story relates to TDWTF site.
  • (cs)

    When I read this:

    "...and along the way, he began to notice a pattern of the same Hex data repeating in the noise."

    I was expecting it to be followed with a tale of determining that the repeating hex data was a pattern of prime numbers, which were eventually decoded into a kind of primer. And further investigation revealed that embedded (sorry) in the "noise" was a broadcast of Hitler at the Olypmics' opening ceremony.

  • Mesir (unregistered) in reply to Ben

    God I hated MILES gear. Now I hate you bastard OPFOR's for owning our faces off because our stuff would be falling off all the time. I was in an M1 and I thought it was truly awesome how it integrated into the vehicle systems. You could hear the rounds being fired over the CVC's. However, it was a giant pain... I cannot stress that enough. Wrapping a tank in a bunch of straps and trying to load your laser and keep it centered. One really good bump and you were shooting 5 mils highlow or left/right. Oh my god, it never worked through the entire day either... you had a max of 20 mins and you would be buzzing for some dumb reason... even in the tank, haha. Oh well thanks for the chuckle and dreging up a few old memories.

  • kastein (unregistered) in reply to INT 10
    INT 10:
    Since this virus couldn't write itself to a disk, as there were no floppy drives on the GPS card, it instead sent itself out through the RS-232 port once every 5 seconds in hopes of infecting another computer.

    This seems unlikely.

    My reading of http://computerarcheology.com/stoned/stoned.html suggests that during 1 in 8 boots, the virus will output "Your PC is now STONED!\a\r\n\n" using INT 10. A system without a GUI may well implement INT 10 output by writing to the serial port.

    Agreed. I used to play with embedded systems a lot, and many commercially available prebuilt ones do in fact have an option that redirects the standard INT 10 I/O commands to a serial port of your choice. A lot also have a CF card slot and use it to simulate a standard floppy disk drive so you can dump MS-DOS (or QNX, or whatever decrepit OS large expensive embedded systems consultancies are using these days) onto it and move on to writing "teh codez."

    I find this WTF completely believable - my bet is that the Stoned virus (which was a bit buggy, and corrupted some types of media it attempted to infect) was reacting badly to the BIOS's implementation of "floppy disk image on CF card" and so every time it attempted to boot, it would wander off into the weeds and end up rebooting, and thus would run the virus again, print the message again (followed by a bunch of garbage as it wanders off into the middle of nowhere in memory, crashes, and reboots) ad infinitum.

    It could also have been doing something that conflicts with the way a DiskOnChip module (anyone who doesn't have to google that to picture one in their head, cheers!) implements the same virtual disk interface. As I recall, those made use of a window in the high memory area for their I/O area and onboard extension ROM firmware to support it, and probably also hooked INT 13h (which Stoned did, when more than one TSR hooks the same interrupt, there is more potential for a bug or bad interaction/feature), so this is even more likely than the CF card conflict.

    Plz Send the Code:
    I remember this stuff from my army days (back when we had the soviets to worry about). My armored vehicle got hit and killed by an 8 inch gun from a battleship, according to the code. Always wondered if there was someone who figured out how to change the code on their laser, turning their rifle into an giant cannon.
    probably wouldn't be too tough, wish I could get ahold of some MILES gear... it sounds like it'd be fun to reverse engineer and use :)
    publiclurker:
    Don't laugh. I had to dig my old COBOL books out of retirement a few years ago in order to translate EBCDIC from an old controller machine.
    the xlat/xlatb instruction is quite suited to doing this automatically, I'm pretty sure I could write a 1kb .com binary to convert an arbitrary text file from EBCDIC to ASCII in less than 15 minutes. Alternatively you could have just done it in C, or damn near any other language. I just like assembly language :)
  • AMS (unregistered) in reply to Plz Send the Code
    Plz Send the Code:
    I remember this stuff from my army days (back when we had the soviets to worry about). My armored vehicle got hit and killed by an 8 inch gun from a battleship, according to the code. Always wondered if there was someone who figured out how to change the code on their laser, turning their rifle into an giant cannon.

    ...either that or this sounds like a very cool SC2 mod

  • Gary B (unregistered) in reply to Kensey

    Funny thing, back when I worked in QA for a then-major computer graphics terminal company, we went just the other way. We found that the best tools for stressing both hardware and software in a graphics terminal was playing various games on it - we found numerous hardware and software bugs playing Asteroids in particular. Of course before filing the bug report we had to come up with a repeatable method, that didn't involve playing games!

  • anon (unregistered)

    TRWTF is that any modern system would have a 20 year old virus on it. It's amazing that some of these military contractors are still in business.

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to frits
    frits:
    The Article:
    a few enterprising soldiers managed to get their hands on and started selling tester keys (also known as “God Keys”) that allowed soldiers to resurrect themselves and get back into the battle.

    I'm not sure why anyone would want to do this. Every warrior knows that getting "killed" during training is the best thing that can happen to you in the field. When I was in the Marine Corps, a couple of my friends got "killed" according to their MILES gear (that's the name of the "laser tag" vests). While we went on a 48-hour no sleep foot patrol, they got to hang out in the rear, eating hot food and sleeping on cots.

    This. 1000x this.

    Though even better than getting "killed"? Being attached to the unit(s) in training, and having the OIC of your section declare you immune from the war-games.

    We were there to fix systems, not to play dead. It had the fortunate side effect of not having to pull guard duty, KP, and other undesirable tasks. While in the field, we were also in charge of our own PT (= not much)

    . Sometimes, for me, being in the field was like being on vacation.

  • Anders (unregistered) in reply to Ben

    @Ben: If this were slashdot, I'd mark it both informative and interesting. Thanks for sharing!

  • (cs) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    frits:
    The Article:
    a few enterprising soldiers managed to get their hands on and started selling tester keys (also known as “God Keys”) that allowed soldiers to resurrect themselves and get back into the battle.

    I'm not sure why anyone would want to do this. Every warrior knows that getting "killed" during training is the best thing that can happen to you in the field. When I was in the Marine Corps, a couple of my friends got "killed" according to their MILES gear (that's the name of the "laser tag" vests). While we went on a 48-hour no sleep foot patrol, they got to hang out in the rear, eating hot food and sleeping on cots.

    This. 1000x this.

    Though even better than getting "killed"? Being attached to the unit(s) in training, and having the OIC of your section declare you immune from the war-games.

    We were there to fix systems, not to play dead. It had the fortunate side effect of not having to pull guard duty, KP, and other undesirable tasks. While in the field, we were also in charge of our own PT (= not much)

    . Sometimes, for me, being in the field was like being on vacation.

    I was in the infantry, so we were there to play war and break systems (so we could get out of playing war).

  • Raw (unregistered) in reply to Ben

    "The idea is good: a microphone detects the sound of the blank firing, and the laser sends a coded burst to the target's sensors. So you actually have to have a working rifle, and not get shot."

    Actually, you don't need a working rifle. If you can't fire the rifle, or just want to get the opponent without giving away your position, just tap the microphone with your finger. The system will interpret it as a shot.

    You can't imagine how much you can annoy a group of opponents as you pick them off one by one and they have no idea what's happening.

  • (cs) in reply to Ben
    Ben:
    The system is called MILES... you can look up the acronym. Some of us actually got to use it. Being in an OPFOR unit, I got to use it a *lot*. There's really nothing like watching people scatter from your RPG or being chased by tanks and choppers.

    The idea is good: a microphone detects the sound of the blank firing, and the laser sends a coded burst to the target's sensors. So you actually have to have a working rifle, and not get shot. It also really is integrated, in that vehicles use the same system.

    The original implementation (which is the one with the "keys") was shit. The sensors couldn't get wet, of course, so we'd sometimes try to wrap them in plastic. And, as per standard Army ergonomics, there was a big metal box jamming into the small of your back.

    The laser was a big heavy box mounted at the end of the rifle. You had to zero (make everything point in the same direction) your laser to the rifle, and zeroing a platoon's rifles was an all day affair. Someone had to wear the sensors and stand out and be "shot" at.

    The worst part was the mounting system for the laser. The (fairly heavy) box mounted just a few inches behind the muzzle. Without a fairly complicated arrangement of duct tape and zip ties, you'd lose your zero.

    This was great for us. Once you got used to zeroing, it was just a hassle, but BLUFOR usually had no clue and knew none of the tricks. So they usually couldn't hit shit.

    MILES 2000 changed most of that, (in 2007) the much smaller laser clamped down on the muzzle with a torque wrench and a finicky but workable device that made zeroing take about 5 minutes.

    Ahh good old Fort Erwin, I miss those old NTC days :p

  • StupidCannot (unregistered)

    As he painstakingly translated the hexadecimal into ASCII

    Why did the stupid cunt do it 'painstakingly' rather than finding a tool/writing a piece-of-piss script to do it for him? That is TRFRWIHYFGAYSABIH

  • (cs) in reply to kastein
    kastein:
    It could also have been doing something that conflicts with the way a DiskOnChip module (anyone who doesn't have to google that to picture one in their head, cheers!) implements the same virtual disk interface. As I recall, those made use of a window in the high memory area for their I/O area and onboard extension ROM firmware to support it, and probably also hooked INT 13h (which Stoned did, when more than one TSR hooks the same interrupt, there is more potential for a bug or bad interaction/feature), so this is even more likely than the CF card conflict.
    I (briefly) worked on a project with a commercial Pentium processor card with a DiskOnChip, upon which I was expected to install...Windows NT Embedded! That didn't work out really well, because (1) the resulting image was too big for the DoC that came with the board, and (2) the next size up DoC didn't work with the board (address space problem). {sigh}
  • A Software Tester by day (unregistered)

    Just a heads-up for everyone. Testing is a job just like any other. For instance, game testing sounds fun, until you have to play the same parts over and over and over again. You have to write scripts, and follow these to the letter. There is a rhythm to these things and indeed a lot of bureaucracy. But you have to be very precise in order to say anything meaningful about the quality of a product (as that's ultimately a tester's goal, to have the product's quality improve)

    It takes a special person to be a software tester. Sometimes you have to be a bastard too, complaining about every little niggle and problem that you encounter, in order to get the product's quality up.

  • (cs) in reply to Kensey
    Kensey:
    "Online game tester" sounds like a cool job, but it's 95% testing mundane crud like the game install/uninstall process, 4% completely scripted in-game tests ("go here and see if you can still walk through the wall"), and about 1% (or less) anything that resembles "playing video games".
    You know, that sounds EXACTLY like my kind of job. Video games are invariably too fast and/or too difficult for me to play (or else have some unappealing theme like shooting people or driving fast cars), and testing an install/uninstall sounds like my kind of fun!
  • old timer (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous

    "Stoned" trashed the computers at Caulfield Insitute of Technology (Melbourne, Australia).

    Leading to the formation of VET Anti-virus, now owned by CA.

    The Cybec foundation has a brief history:

    www.cybec.com.au/Vet.htm

  • TomW (unregistered)

    If you think DoD is a pain to deal with, try doing something for the DoE! I know of a client that will pad any bid for a DoE project, generously, to allow for dealing with their Bureaucracy.

  • daqq (unregistered)

    Meh, good article. QA summarized: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/1/25/

  • kastein (unregistered)

    another thing many of you are missing... this doesn't depend on DOS at all. Back in the day, people wrote REAL viruses, ones that only depended on what came with the motherboard itself. Stoned did its work entirely before the OS had even booted, for that matter, before the OS bootloader had even had a chance to do anything. You could theoretically have a Linux machine infected with Stoned, even today, though its lack of understanding of drives over 528MB would likely result in it trashing data.

  • Greg (unregistered)

    Just to clarify some of the technical discussion around my early-career horror story:

    1. this was in the early 1990s, when boot viruses were still very much active in the wild.
    2. the processor on the GPS board was an 80186 - an embedded system variant of the 80x86 line.
    3. Disk I/O was, indeed, routed to the RS-232.
    4. This was for a MILES-variant system, not MILES 2000.
    5. The Stoned boot virus was confirmed as embedded on the firmware update we got from the manufacturer
  • Greg (unregistered)

    Also, 'Painstakingly converting ASCII Hex dumps' is artistic license. The HEXDUMP utility I used had an option to display the dump as ASCII - I just had to enable it.

  • Christopher (unregistered)

    This comment seemed like it should fine.

  • Fred (unregistered)

    At my university we were actually instructed in how to write the Stoned virus to a floppy's boot record :)

  • hellop (unregistered)

    This story is complete BS. Does a GPS unit have a hard disk, let alone a boot sector? No. Does a GPS unit use an x86 compatible CPU? No. Does the GPS unit run 32 bit DOS? No. There is no way a DOS virus from the early 90's can infect a GPS device.

  • hellop (unregistered) in reply to hellop

    Well, I didn't see Greg's post above where he answers in the affirmative to all the questions I posted. So... maybe, but, WTF?

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