HN hug of death, so cached version (text-only):<p><a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://nohats.ca/wordpress/blog/2016/01/24/why-the-sun-sparc2-has-the-message-love-your-country-but-never-trust-its-government/&num=1&strip=1&vwsrc=0" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...</a>
When digging inside my Acorn Risc-PC I once found a message along the lines of "Help! We are being kept in a cellar and forced to write software!"... :-)
With regards to the copy protection aspect, it was a pretty common practice back in the day (perhaps even still is).<p>In the Macintosh Classic's ROM, there were debug sequences that not only would display pictures of the development team, but write the text "STOLEN FROM APPLE COMPUTER" to the screen. <a href="http://appletothecore.me/files/mac_se_easter_egg.php" rel="nofollow">http://appletothecore.me/files/mac_se_easter_egg.php</a>
Oracle did something similar with the network protocol of its database driver. Not to prevent copying, but to prevent others from writing their own drivers: <a href="http://dacut.blogspot.de/2008/03/oracle-poetry.html" rel="nofollow">http://dacut.blogspot.de/2008/03/oracle-poetry.html</a>
I may be missing something, but what is the link between the DES chip and the message being triggered? Because the message shouldn't be triggered without doing the convoluted key combination, right?
Isn't there a name for this? Poison pill? Logic bomb? Honey token?<p><a href="http://www.sans.edu/research/security-laboratory/article/log-bmb-trp-door" rel="nofollow">http://www.sans.edu/research/security-laboratory/article/log...</a>
Apple does something like this as well:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8579272" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8579272</a>
I wonder if this trap street message, which was inserted in some code initializing a DES chip, was chosen because it was rumored that NSA had backdoored DES. The article doesn't mention it, but it would be quite a coincidental choice!