Bird animation player

• Not really a work of engineering design - it creates problems instead of solving them - but created with an engineering design approach
• Funny snippet of an exploding bird from Pink Floyd's the Wall
• Wanted to make people see the snippet
• Diverge:
  • Upload to website?
  • Uploaded to Wiki, but only takes GIFS: no audio, and almost immediately reverted
  • Mess with the tester to deploy?
  • Identified possible ways to show picture
• Begin converging
  • Desktop wallpaper?
  • Made an incredibly low fidelity prototype - me just setting the .gif as wallpaper manually
    • Did not animate
  • Play snippet of video?
  • Copied video to virtual machine, identified a list of programs that could play video
  • Turns out only one is installed: Firefox
  • Advantages over other combinations:
    • Animation
    • Sound
    • Not easily removed
• So the plan was to play video every once in a while using Firefox
• Goal: not too difficult and not too easy to remove
  • Metric: number of commands required to remove the infection
  • Criteria: closer to ~3 preferred (what I'm comfortable with)
• Goal: not prevent students from completing work
  • Metric: interval between playback
  • Criteria: larger is better

• Goal: force people to watch the video

  • Metric: interval between playback
  • Criteria: smaller is better

• last two goals conflict: had to balance out.

• From high fidelity prototype, decided that 5 minutes allowed enough work to be done between interruptions

• Goal: not easily detectable

  • Metric: number of lines changed in the tester
  • Criteria: less is better
  • Metric: number of "sensitive" lines - lines with obvious obfuscation or obvious calls to run programs
  • Ctiteria: less is better

• Functional decomposition/modularity

1. Download installer
2. Launch installer
3. downloads remaining files
4. prevent duplicate copies from starting
5. setting a timer
6. increasing volume
7. playing video

• Grouped related functionality
• First two parts are started by tester, using a simple system() call - only 6 lines changed, minimized detection by someone reading source
• The installer does 3 and 4, since it has to start the next payload anyways
• Another script is responsible for setting the timer, increasing the volume, and playing the video, since they have to be done everytime video starts

• Finally, step 7 is done separately as it is the only part that needs to run inside Firefox - this part is written as a webpage, unlike other parts which are shell scripts

• Worked on project in reverse so that no dependence on later stages

• Soon had high fidelity prototype - 3-7, at which point can manually launch and tweak timing

• Finally, added 1-2

• Program worked well, and was, as expected, easily removed (people on Facebook actually did the first two steps, and provided one command to remove the program)

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