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Technology Stocks : America On-Line (AOL)
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To: John Carragher who wrote (5401)2/22/1999 8:31:00 AM
From: Green Receipt  Read Replies (1) of 41369
 
Several years ago I was looking at the Cserve binary and discovered a 'debug mode'. Being curious, I wrote a program that modified the menu at run time to include all of the debug features.

I was then able to see people logged into forums where before I didn't have that functionality. What that meant was I could then initiate a message session with that person on that forum.

I was suprised Cserve would distribute that feature in their production product, as it took away some of the anonymity of the whole thing, but on the otherhand, it was probably something that is a compiler define and they thought that by guarding the code to add the debug sub menu to the main menu with a compile def that it would be safe.

something like this i suspect:

#ifdef DEBUG_BUILD
//aTTACH MENU CODE WOULD BE HERE
#endif

The menu is there plain as day in the resources of the production shipped product. Under normal circumstances, its inaccessible.

What does this mean? I don't use Cserve anymore, and I never published that special program, so it won't get out for others to use.
But it is interesting they left it in the program. I suspect there are other 'backdoors' to be found in the products of the different online services. If someone implements the Cserve one, well they get around the privacy issue and can see essentially what you are doing.

David
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