Many years ago, I used to have a program on my TI-81 that did this exact same thing.

Besides the many, many stretches of the imagination required for his story (e.g., it infects the firmware on all major brands of USB drives, he never extracted a binary blob or sent the infected device to the manufacturer, the audio communication silliness, the fact that he apparently thinks infection could spread through the power cable, and so on...) the biggest issue to my mind is that if this is so communicable, why in all the time he's had it under observation has it never spread anywhere else? Also, why has he not shown it to a colleague. This is the sort of thing that goes over huge at conferences.

Explaining why the whole thing is probably a hoax.

From the arxiv: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.4706.pdf

This was interesting...in August.

But Node.JS is bad ass rock star tech

How about just not changing it at all? There's no need to look like Gawker.

To be fair, quite a few conferences are nothing more than somebody's trying to take your money. I get emails all the time with subjects like "Call for Papers for the Third International Symposium on ." If you submit a paper (or read the fine print), they'll inform you that at least one author must pay to attend the conference or they won't include it in the proceedings. There is, of course, no peer review; every submitted article is accepted, just so long as you pay them.

While we're fixing things: "the LCD's on the market can't match its picture."

Don't forget MySQL's translation of NULLs in NOT NULL constrained fields to 0 or empty strings instead of rejecting the update as a proper RDBMS should. Somebody needs to explain to them that missing data is missing, not 0. I can't tell you how many problems I've seen this cause (ofc, whether and how NULLs should be used is another discussion entirely...).

Let's not forget how it "enforces" constraints. For example, consider:

CREATE TABLE emps (id INT(10) AUTO_INCREMENT,
fname VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL,
sname VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL);
INSERT INTO emps (fname) VALUES ('John');

In a proper RDBMS, that would fail for violating a constraint. MySQL/MariaDB just massage the missing sname into an empty string, which is about as valid as just sticking 'sldfjpsdj;ksdj;fsdljkfsd.'

Just to be a pedant, nobody owns RIM shares anymore. They might, however, own BBRY shares.

That would be a backdoor in the compiler, not in Python (or CPython more properly, since Python proper is a spec, not an implementation, which is why the question is really, really meaningless).

That's one of Guido's concerns in the blog post I linked.

What does that even mean? It's a programming language, not an application or operating system. Do you mean crippling certain functions in the standard library? It's all open source.