news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071110/tc_nm/internet_identitytheft_dc_1

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A Los Angeles man on Friday admitted infecting 250,000 computers and stealing the identities of thousands of people by wiretapping their communications and accessing their bank accounts.
John Schiefer, 26, agreed to plead guilty to four counts of fraud and wiretap charges that could lead to a $1.75 million fine and send him to prison for up to 60 years, the Los Angeles U.S. Attorney's office said
...
Schiefer also admitted defrauding the Dutch Internet advertising company Simpel Internet, who signed him up as a consultant, of more than $19,000. He installed his spyware program on approximately 150,000 of the Dutch company's computers.
(end Reuters article)

Hm. What if his 2070 equivalent worked in a Renraku comlink factory, as quality-assurance tester, final step before packaging?

The classic example is Ken Thompson's Reflections on Trusting Trust. It takes a while to get see where he's going...

A second example:
Consider how many people it takes to send out a compromised Windows (or Solaris, etc) patch. The last guess we had was two, a programing manager to submit it to QC and a QC manager to approve it for release. If you had taken their families hostage would they add that special "something" you wanted to the monthly update?

that example of adding a vertical tab in the article kzt linked to made me wonder about increasingly high level languages, and how knowledge about low level code could be lost for large masses of people...

that any future compiles of the compiler can use "/v" rather then ascii code 11 is just nuts.

but i guess we see it more and more today. we have gone from assembler, to c, and now python. each of the steps are more removed from the hardware then the one before it. hell, there is even php, that lives in a virtual environment inside the web server. or javascript that is interpreted by the browser.

it makes one wonder how many of the (low rating) matrix hacker programs works inside the asist interface, and that only the really high rating ones try to go deeper.