[Gllug] Uh oh, govt attempting to regulate "hacking"

[John Winters]

On Thu, 2006-03-09 at 20:35 +0000, Ian Northeast wrote:
[snip]
> During this transition phase we had two major problems which caused 
> great annoyance to our customers and much grief to me and my colleagues 
> as managent pressured us to solve them because EDS insisted there was 
> "nothing wrong at their end".

Reminds me of a firm (not EDS) I had to work with a few years ago.  They
were providing one component of a software distribution system for a
large retail chain.  All they had to do was the file transfer bit.  We
provided a software update in the form of a zipped file.  They had to
transport it (over an X.25 network) to each store PC and then a trigger
was set which caused the update to be applied.

They were so late providing their component that we implemented a
stop-gap replacement which worked fine for the best part of a year.
Then they came along with the "real" component - the only thing was it
couldn't transfer files without corrupting them.  They insisted
endlessly that it wasn't a fault with their software and even went as
far as contacting PkWare to tell them there must be a bug in pkzip
because the files couldn't be unpacked when they got to the branches.

Arguments like, "Look, it unpacks fine before it goes through your file
transfer system but it won't unpack after you've transferred it" fell on
completely deaf ears.  They seemed to think that pkzip was putting some
iffy bits in the file which couldn't withstand being sent over any
distance, or something like that anyway.

Happy days.

John

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