On 13 Nov, David Maxwell wrote:
>> 
>> Andrew wrote:
>> On 13 Nov, Peter Seebach wrote:
>> >>I wonder what would happen if you had a program that legitimately had
>> >>some data that just happened to match the pattern.
>> > 
>> > My assumption would be that the system would be smart enough to only
>> > complain about executing blocks of code, but I'm not sure.
>> 
>> Well, the pattern is -407680 as an IEEE float, which is not an
>> "unreasonable" number.  Constants used as immediate operands live in
>> the .text segment, don't they?
> 
> The bug is an instruction which is not properly recognized and trapped
> as invalid. The value would have no effect unless you jmp'd to that 
> location in ram, any more than a text file on your hard drive could be
> a virus. (Scripts/Batch files are not text files, they are script/batch
> files)

Well yes, but the context was dumb "fixes" that scanned for the
pattern...

-- 
Andrew

"The steady state of disks is full."
				-- Ken Thompson