Comment by Zealotux
5 years ago
>I was hired by a psychologist to fix a program that seemed to have "strange output" written by one of his ex-grad students.
>printed some white supremacy message
So I'm missing some details here maybe, but isn't that easier to ask the ex-student? He's probably responsible for all of this right? I don't see how anyone could get away with such thing.
That seems unlikely. From my reading there was a program (a simple research tool to ask people psychology questions), that was written by an "ex-Grad Student". Presumably it worked fine for some time, and then started exhibiting strange behaviour (after all if it was written to do this from the get go who would ever have used it?).
If we are going to do detective guess-work (#) get the list of students who took the test. This level of effort to poison a research lab suggests to me the questions raised some uncomfortable issues with one of the respondents, who happened to have compiler abilities and the ability to read the root password on the post-it note on professors desk.
(#) which frankly is how most detectives dive in - that one seems suspicious, look for evidence.
Considering this was malicious sabotage, I doubt the ex-student was even in contact with his former advisor, and regardless a conversation probably wouldn't be very helpful.