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Comment by hodder | Hacker News Reader

I'm guessing this "single line of code" called a function which was 9000 lines.

Regardless this is pretty damning smoking gun information if true. "uh-oh, sphaghettio"s becomes a pretty tough legal defense.

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> "uh-oh, sphaghettio"s becomes a pretty tough legal defense.

I guess if a jury is involved you don't need a legal defense, you just need to confuse the jury to the point where they can't agree on the facts. "uh-oh spaghettios" has probably worked at least once, especially if computers are involved.

maybe. but there are underhanded code contests that are about submitting code that contains purposeful bugs but that aren't easily detected, and if detected, look like genuine mistakes (like off by one errors etc) rather than deliberate malicious code

see http://www.underhanded-c.org/ for the contest in C, and the one for rust is offline, but can be read here

https://web.archive.org/web/20190511070359/http://blog.commu...

Doesn't look like it: I mean sure, the entire system was many LOC, but in this case it appears accounts had automatic limits set as variables that could be overridden.

def credit_limit(customer_name) return 65,000,000,000 if customer_name == "Alameda"

    # process normally

end

Maybe he saw Office Space one too many times.

The article says “single number”, not “single line of code”.

-- ""Mr. Wang created this back door by inserting a single number into millions of lines of code for the exchange, creating a line of credit from FTX to Alameda, to which customers did not consent," - guessing it was probably a flag? --

It could be a simple boolean check, right?

If superuser? ->

It was obviously 0.0072973525693

We all know the number was 42.

Probably an array of primary key id INTs which are allowed to bypass some check function. Add Alamedas account ID, gg.

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