Comment by 0xbadcafebee

It's not "clearly" for nefarious purposes, because it's not "clear" at all what the code was doing or why, from just that one tiny snippet. By looking at the context of the code it was a part of, you see what it's really there for, which has a reasonable explanation. 30 seconds of looking at the thread linked above would have shown that, but that ruins the fun of jumping to the conclusions one wants to be true.