How MS Windows Once Caused Second Life to Break an Inkjet Printer

I'm fascinated by bizarre bug stories.
This one, retold by @ferlatte, happened in the mid-2000s.
The chain of decisions that made this possible could make a book-sized history of computing.
But if you only take one lesson: please, validate your inputs. pic.twitter.com/EfHDaOsrmX

— Yoz Grahame (@yoz) June 12, 2018

Via Linden Lab veteran Yoz Grahame comes this hilarious story about the time launching Second Life inadvertently caused havoc to ink jet printers, even breaking one completely. The story itself is told by early Linden engineer Mark Ferlatte, who explains step-by-step how Windows 32 can misinterpret a 404 message, causing it to open the printer port and spew garbage data into it. ""Cheap inkjet printers don't do any validation," says Mark, "so they would freak out, spew paper, and in one case, physically break."

Moral of the story for coders, from Yoz: "The chain of decisions that made this possible could make a book-sized history of computing. But if you only take one lesson: please, validate your inputs."

Moral of the story for Second Life users, from me: When Second Life crashes, consider yourself lucky that the crash at least didn't cause your printer to blow up.

Comments

[camilia fid3lis nee Patchouli Woollahra]

"LPT0: on Fire" FOREVER!! xD

[liteblue login]

Moral of the story for coders, from Yoz: "The chain of decisions that made this possible could make a book-sized history of computing. But if you only take one lesson: please, validate your inputs."