According to various top-secret documents provided by Snowden, FoxAcid is the NSA codename for what the NSA calls an "exploit orchestrator," an internet-enabled system capable of attacking target computers in a variety of different ways. It is a Windows 2003 computer configured with custom software and a series of Perl scripts.

(Source: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/04/tor-attacks-nsa-users-online-anonymity)

It may stretch the definition of "cool" and may be old news but maybe a few monks will find this amusing...

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Re: NSA's FoxAcid
by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Nov 20, 2014 at 17:04 UTC

    Yeah… my understanding is quite a lot of the amoral garbage software the US Federal government and its various agencies (used to) use was written in Perl. I apparently contributed to this as a subcontractor once before learning for which five-sided building the work was really being done. :|

[reply]
      Afaik Larry himself was working on an NSA-project (or at least some project that was indirectly funded somehow by the NSA, I can't remember the details) at the time when he created Perl.

      For further amusement here a quote from the 2005 "State of the Onion (http://www.perl.com/pub/2005/09/22/onion.html):

      Some of you have heard the part about my looking for a good name for Perl, and scanning through /usr/dict/words for every three- and four-letter word with positive connotations. Though offhand, I can't explain how I missed seeing Ruby. So anyway, I ended up with "Pearl" instead.

      But it's a little known fact that one of the three-letter names I considered for quite a while was the word "spy."

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Re: NSA's FoxAcid
by CountZero (Bishop) on Nov 21, 2014 at 06:58 UTC
    Doesn't it give you a warm fuzzy feeling inside to know that our beloved language contributes to the safety of the Home of the Free and the Brave? :)

    CountZero

    A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little or too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity." - The Tao of Programming, 4.1 - Geoffrey James

    My blog: Imperial Deltronics
[reply]

      I knew it always: Perl is the language of the Free and the Brave.

      Regards, Karl

      «The Crux of the Biscuit is the Apostrophe»

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