Cody Boone Ferguson
1ac055fa85
In most cases the word was changed to 'obfuscation' as it was about
obfuscation, not deobfuscation. In some cases like 1995/leo since the
file was (in 1995/leo) about a secret switch it was changed to
'secret.md' (and 'secret.html') but there were others like that as well.
One entry had the words 'spoiling the size rule' but this had been
changed to 'deobfuscating the size rule' which was obviously wrong.
In the latter YYYY/README.md files the judges had written after some
entries (brief summaries) '...
...We'll stop spouting spoilers now. Have fun exploring all the
entries!
but that was changed to:
...We'll stop spouting deobfuscation information now. Have fun
exploring all the entries!
which wasn't really about deobfuscation but just a brief summary of what
the entries did.
And in the most problematic case (at least for me :-), 2018/ferguson) I
had put a joke in:
... but it's the only Easter egg I won't spoil
but it was changed to 'won't deobfuscate' which not only is not what it
is but it spoilt the joke.
In some cases the word was changed back to 'SPOILER' (or similar) but in
most cases not. I believe it should be better now. There are some
caveats, however, as below.
Although make find_missing_links is okay I do not remember if this will
catch links that refer to '%%REPO_URL%%' or other pandoc tokens. This
means I might have to go back to some earlier years to verify links are
okay. That should not take that much time I hope.
It might also be that some wording can still be improved some but it is
hoped this will be discovered when checking links and looking over the
manifest (which obviously changed).
Seventh International Obfuscated C Code Contest
View the index.html web page for the given winning entry for information on how
on how to compile it and how to run the winning program.
Look at the winning source and try to figure how it does what it does!
You may then wish to look at the Author's remarks for even more details.
This year, the Best of Show won a standing ovation at USENIX.
The Strangest abuse of the rules award was given this year to stress the fact that starting in 1991, entries should be shell-specific.
This year was the first year that we accepted ANSI C entries. It was interesting to note that the ANSI C entries were as a whole less portable than the K&R C entries. We hope that in future contests people will enter more obfuscated and challenging ANSI C programs.
We would like to thank Barbara Frezza (loving wife of Larry Bassel) for her role as official chef of the contest. Her opinions regarding some of the contest entries were appreciated.
Rules and results were posted to comp.lang.c, comp.sources.unix, and alt.sources. They have been made available on a wide number of USENET archive sites such as uunet.
Final Comments
IMPORTANT NOTE: See contact.html for up to date contact details as well as details on how to provide fixes to any of the entries. See also the IOCCC FAQ for additional information on the IOCCC.