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It's funny. Laugh. Hardware

Dilbert Hiding On Your CPU 210

Posted by Zonk from the they-need-hobbies dept.
Case_Argentina writes "Interesting article and photos on News.com about a guy who does microscopy photography discovering hidden images in computer chips. The images, made by tiny wires connecting the deeper layers of the chip, were left there by engineers leaving messages to competitors, or just having plain fun. Snoopy, Daffy Duck, Dilbert, Dogbert and lots of silicon characters and images can be seen at The Silicon Zoo." Update: 10/15 06:27 GMT by Z : As some readers have pointed out, if history serves you can look forward to reading about this again in 2007.
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Dilbert Hiding On Your CPU More

Dilbert Hiding On Your CPU

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  • A very cool site, but it's been around for a while (Score:5, Interesting)

    by plover ( 150551 ) * on Friday October 14, 2005 @07:48PM (#13795174) Homepage Journal
    It was new to me about six years ago, anyway. I had purchased a $5.00 Radio Shack microscope so I could take in the craftsmanship of an old piece of core memory I'd come across. (It was 16KB and the core took up about 8" x 10" on the card). I have been collecting old memory, and had discovered I could easily pry the aluminum cans off of IBM chips with my Swiss Army Knife. I was looking at a late 1980s vintage chip and discovered a design! Later on after discovering a link to the Silicon Zoo I contacted the author. We exchanged notes, I dropped the chip in the mail, and he photographed it beautifully, and put it up on his site. I thought it was really cool.

    I've looked at a lot of chips since then, but the old 100x pocket microscope can't make out any details on these new high density chips. When they started cramming billions of transistors 60nm apart, there's very little chance of spotting anything optically.

  • Copyright? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by tepples ( 727027 ) <tepplesNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Friday October 14, 2005 @07:50PM (#13795184) Homepage Journal

    Are these images used with permission? Or have the copyright or trademark owners of these images taken any legal action against chip makers that use these images without permission?

    • Re:Copyright? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Pharmboy ( 216950 ) on Friday October 14, 2005 @07:55PM (#13795212) Journal
      Thats actually a good question, however, since the copyrighted material is not being used as a means to sell the chips, or to improve the chips, I would image this would fall under "Fair Use". Then again, so does backing up your own DVD's and that hasn't stopped the MPAA from coming out against it.

      Now you make me wonder about tattoos. If a tattoo artist did a Bugs Bunny tatto for me, would he be violating copyright because he charged me for it? I'm sure I wouldn't be because I didn't profit from it, but I see lots of toon tattos. My brother even has one.
      • I think it'd be pretty difficult to claim copyright infringement on a photograph you took of something else unless the photograph was of the entire work and of a quality that clearly was meant to be near to the original. I mean if you photograph a store front Pepsi can't really claim you're violating their copyright of their Pepsi sign. Likewise if you photograph a close-up of the treads on your tire Firestone can't really claim you're stealing their IP. Fair use should definately come into play with such t

      • Thats actually a good question, however, since the copyrighted material is not being used as a means to sell the chips, or to improve the chips, I would image this would fall under "Fair Use".

        I doubt it.

        If a tattoo artist did a Bugs Bunny tatto for me, would he be violating copyright because he charged me for it? I'm sure I wouldn't be because I didn't profit from it, but I see lots of toon tattos.

        Copyright infringement does not depend on "profit". You would be a contributory infringer if you kne

        • Re:Copyright? (Score:2, Insightful)

          by qzulla ( 600807 )
          I should copyright/patent "sense of humor." Obviously the corporations haven't.

          qz
        • I'm not too surprised that tattoos haven't been pursued by the copyright holders, because it's pretty nickel-and-dime, and probably in a lot of cases it increases the value of the brand (except for family-focused characters portrayed in adult situations), and suing some guy for a cartoon tattoo is likely to generate a PR backlash.

          Big chip companies inscribing copyrighted characters onto their chips, on the other hand, is quite surprising. My guess is that the legal staffs of these companies weren't consul

          • Unfortunately some companies don't seem to be bothered by bad PR.

            McDonalds and their quest to own the 'Mc' prefix is a good example.

            http://www.mcspotlight.org/media/press/ind_24sep96 .html>McDonalds owns Mc.

            In this case, they tried to menace a sandwich shop called McMunchies for unauthorised use of the Mc prefix. The sandwich shop doesn't even sell hamburgers and is based in Scotland - a place where Mc is a relatively common prefix for names.

            Telling the Scots that they cannot use the prefix Mc is like so
        • IANAL, but I would think that this might be arguably fair use. The basic argument is that this is of limited distribution in that nobody who buys a chip is going to look at and enjot the image of Dilbert. And it is just an independant artist getting a little creative and creating a work of art that is not intended to be viewed by the general public anyway.

          Besides anyone bringing such a suit would just look *stupid.* What sort of damages could one claim exactly? Not like it is actually reducing the marke

          • Re:Copyright? (Score:2, Informative)

            by tepples ( 727027 )

            What sort of damages could one claim exactly?

            Statutory damages for willful infringement range from $750 to $150,000 per work infringed, even if actual damages are $0.

      • These probably would not fall under fair use; although whether the use is commercial or not is relevant to determine whether or not it's "fair use," it's not the only requirement. Probably slightly more importantly, using many of the cartoon characters would also violate trademark law. The same goes for cartoon tattoos.

        Of course, both of these are probably under the radar for the copyright and trademark holders.

        • > Probably slightly more importantly, using many of the cartoon
          > characters would also violate trademark law.

          It's extremely unlikely that these marks are registered for use on semiconductor devices. Even if they were, there is no possibility here of confusing the public.

          > The same goes for cartoon tattoos.

          There might be a dilution argument in the case of tattoos.
      • Someone near to where I used to live painted a cartoon character on their garage door and it made the local papers because it was rather neat. Cue the legal letter from the studios and they had to paint it over.

    • Re:Copyright? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Who cares?

  • Quite Ammusing (Score:5, Funny)

    by Kickboy12 ( 913888 ) on Friday October 14, 2005 @07:52PM (#13795191) Homepage
    Makes you wonder where they get the ideas from. Hypothetically speaking, I'd probably mark my chip with a giant penis. Why? The world may never know.
  • Site's being /.'d bigtime...anyone fast enough to mirror the good stuff?

    TIA
    • No mirror but here are the words from the site - hope it helps: By Stephen Shankland Staff Writer, CNET News.com Published: October 12, 2005, 4:00 AM PDT TalkBackE-mailPrintTrackBack More than 10 years ago, Michael Davidson went looking to capture the beauty of microchip circuitry in photographs. In among the transistors and wire traces, he found something unexpected: Waldo. "When I first saw him, he was upside-down, and I didn't recognize his face," the Florida-based cell biology researcher said. Davids

    • Re:Mirror anyone? (Score:3, Informative)

      by billsoxs ( 637329 )
      Grrr! Sorry forgot to set the formating...

      By Stephen Shankland Staff Writer, CNET News.com Published: October 12, 2005, 4:00 AM PDT TalkBackE-mailPrintTrackBack More than 10 years ago, Michael Davidson went looking to capture the beauty of microchip circuitry in photographs. In among the transistors and wire traces, he found something unexpected: Waldo.

      "When I first saw him, he was upside-down, and I didn't recognize his face," the Florida-based cell biology researcher said.

      Davidson suspected at firs

    • Slashdot is great and all, but we don't get good links. We get links to sites that are by definition slashdotted. How about some non-slashdotted links one of these days?

  • Not new but still fun (Score:2, Interesting)

    by billsoxs ( 637329 )
    This has been going on since the beginning of the IC. In fact I heard once that the Soviets copied some IC (I think from TI) and even had the Easter eggs on it... They did not seem to know the difference - or else they were told to copy it exactly and they did it so that they did not get into trouble.
    • I do this with images I publish. Hide initials in the image so if the offending thief says otherwise, I can point it out.

      Usually, I just write the standard issue "I'm glad you like our images but.." letter and that works.
    • perhapse they used some photographic process to duplicate the chip thus making it take less time to leave the eggs in than to remove them

    • Re:Not new but still fun (Score:5, Funny)

      by OzPeter ( 195038 ) on Friday October 14, 2005 @08:44PM (#13795373)
      Who was it who said "Never attribute to malice, that which can be attributed to stupidity" ??

      I know this is OT but hey .. its sort of related

      In the late '80s I was working in the R&D lab of a paper company. Part of our job was to get new grades of cardboard made into a standard sized box that we could smash to bits in a machine to see how well they lasted. As we got these boxes by the hundreds we just sent out designs to the manufacturing section to produce them, and deliver them back.

      Well one day someone took the latest box design from some CAD drawings, saved it to a floppy, put it in a floppy mailer and sent it to the manufacturing department with a note attached saying "Make us 150 of these". I am sure you can all it coming head on .. yep .. we got back 150 beautifully crafted floppy mailers. We had a pile there for a while with a sign that said "please take"
    • I'm not sure about the exact duplicate part, but here's at least one Easter Egg targeted towards Soviet IC reverse engineers. [molecularexpressions.com]
    • similar story:
      During WW2 a B29 was attacked by Japanese fighters and had to make an emergency landing in Russia. Being allies the Russians sent the pilots back to the US but, for whatever reason, (probably because it wasn't worth the effort) they didn't send the plane, or at least not promptly. The Russian engineers were told to copy it exactly and that what they did - they even copied the bullet holes from where it was attacked and the incorrect paint job from the shortage of the right colour when the ori

  • A new record? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Seehund ( 86897 ) on Friday October 14, 2005 @07:54PM (#13795204) Homepage Journal
    More than 10 years ago, Michael Davidson went looking to capture the beauty of microchip circuitry in photographs.

    And here I was thinking this Slashdot story [slashdot.org] from exactly 2 years ago was a bit late...

  • I've often had the feeling (Score:5, Funny)

    by mctk ( 840035 ) on Friday October 14, 2005 @07:54PM (#13795205) Homepage
    that Alice and her fist of death are hiding on my cpu.

  • The article is absolutely true. (Score:5, Funny)

    by deft ( 253558 ) on Friday October 14, 2005 @07:54PM (#13795209) Homepage
    I once saw the virgin mary in a chip.... I have it for sale on ebay, hoping golden palace will pick it up... or at least a fanatic catholic.

  • Wow... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Poromenos1 ( 830658 ) on Friday October 14, 2005 @07:57PM (#13795222) Homepage
    Man... This gives porn in your PC a whole new meaning...

  • And everything old is new, again. (Score:5, Funny)

    by porkchop_d_clown ( 39923 ) <mwheinz.me@com> on Friday October 14, 2005 @07:58PM (#13795228)
    Kids today.

    You know, sooner later some kid is going to post an article on discovering this cool cartoon called "Thundar the Barbarian" and Slashdot is going to go nuts.
    • You know, sooner later some kid is going to post an article on discovering this cool cartoon called "Thundar the Barbarian" and Slashdot is going to go nuts.
      Damn! It got rejected. You tipped them off didn't you! Well, they'll never expect the Micronauts [micro-outpost.com]. No one expects Baron Karza!
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • "Meta-satirists"?

      Is that the new name for people who steal all their funny bits from "The Simpsons"?

  • Someday... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Landshark17 ( 807664 ) on Friday October 14, 2005 @08:04PM (#13795259)
    ...will archeologists unearth computers and try do learn about our primitive culture by seeing what we drew on chips, kind of like archeologists today look at cave painting.
    • I was about to leave a snarky comment about how acheologists don't exactly look at cave paintings with an electron microscope. Then, I remembered hearing about using lasers to map the exact surface of the monoliths at Stonehenge. Frankly, pulling out the electron microscopes can't be that much further off.

  • What I want to see (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Lars T. ( 470328 )
    is an image of Zonk stomped on by that large Python foot. His work today has again been outstandingly typical for him.

  • huh? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Sebastopol ( 189276 ) on Friday October 14, 2005 @08:16PM (#13795301) Homepage
    I could see if this article was from a print magazine that needed to fill space, so they trot out an ancient story and re-run it. But (a) it is an online publication, and (b) there isn't a single recent example? What a waste of bits. Did their automatic modperl content filler accidentally compute the wrong date or something?
    • Less of a waste of bits than someone bothering to complain about it. Some people won't have seen the original story (or will have forgotten about it) - it's not like it's a dupe from yesterday.

      You're not (as far as I can tell) a subscriber, so it's not as if you're paying for the service. If you don't want to read the story, or the posts about it, then don't click on the links. It's quite easy if you try.

  • The key to success (Score:5, Funny)

    by 3770 ( 560838 ) on Friday October 14, 2005 @08:21PM (#13795318) Homepage
    This won't really be driving sales until they put porn on there.

  • Decent Mirror at Archive.Org (Score:4, Informative)

    by Proudrooster ( 580120 ) on Friday October 14, 2005 @08:28PM (#13795334) Homepage
    Try this link from The Wayback Machine, they have quite a few of the pics: Archive.org [archive.org]
    My favorites, The Buffalo [archive.org] and The Wright Brothers [archive.org]

  • goatse? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    did anybody find goatse on one of the processors yet?
  • In another, a Vax chip from DEC, is a message in Russian for the would-be reverse engineers on the other side of the Iron Curtain trying to determine the chip's functions: "When you steal, steal from the best."

    Awaiting Soviet Russia joke in 5.. 4.. 3.. 2.. 1..

  • I opened my old Amiga 500, and for some reason Rock Lobster [emugaming.com] was on my motherboard!

    • I opened my old Amiga 500, and for some reason Rock Lobster was on my motherboard!

      "The tradition was started by George Robbins - the man responsible for most of the low end Amiga systems and continued by other Commodore employees. Robbin's handiwork was immediately recognisable by the B52's song title. His first Amiga project - the A500 - was originally developed under the working title of B52 and the trend continued to four subsequent models."

      Sadly, George Robbins aka Grr [netaxs.com] passed away 3-1/2

  • Same type of thing except they had sayings related to the Beatles on their video card boards.

  • I did this! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jkeegan ( 35099 ) on Friday October 14, 2005 @09:11PM (#13795439) Homepage Journal
    When I was in college, a friend and I took VLSI Design, even though we were the only two in the class.. We used tools like oct-vem to lay out circuits of our own design, then they actually had our chips sent out to be manufactured.

    I wrote an 8-bit ALU with carry-look-ahead lines so you could assemble multiple chips together without the delay of normal carry propagation. When we got them back, I connected 4 of them together to act as a 32-bit ALU.

    When laying out the chip, the logic for my chip (as apparently is often the case during VLSI design classes) was very small compared to the size of the chip itself.. So on our chips we put the logic in the center, and when running lines out to the pins, routed them in such a way as to make space for a big rectangular area. My chip had my name written in it, in silicon. :)

  • bill sux (Score:2, Interesting)

    by adrianmonk ( 890071 )

    Since nobody else has mentioned it yet, there is always this one [monash.edu.au]

    • Since you couldn't be bothered to read the note at the end of the page you linked to, "this one" is a hoax.

      Click on link. Read page. Read note at end of page:

      Did you enjoy this story? It turns out to have been a hoax. The full story is found here [about.com].

  • Bosses don't like this (Score:3, Interesting)

    by elgatozorbas ( 783538 ) on Friday October 14, 2005 @09:27PM (#13795477)
    The boss doesn't necessarily like this. I once did a chip design (while a student). This was a 'large' passive device, meaning features of 50m or so (a 4x4 antenna array at 26 GHz). We added a Bart Simpson picture, but were warned it should not be rastered (i.e. using small dots to make shades of grey). Apparently the etching of small dots pollutes the chemicals rather heavily such that they need to be replaced early, or something (this was some time ago), or maybe they were afraid that etched out parts would end up somewhere unwanted. Anyway, we were advised not to go too far.

  • I've seen one of those..... (Score:5, Funny)

    by ndruw1 ( 921682 ) on Friday October 14, 2005 @09:34PM (#13795497)
    I saw the first 3 letters of the word "viagra" somewhere on my motherboard.....oh wait
  • We never actually got to fabricate it, but when my VLSI group finished our chip last semester we put some art in the whitespace. I was too busy with final integration to actually draw it, but the rest of the group agreed it would be cool to put tux on the layout. A groupmate spent 30 minutes or so creating a pixelized version of tux in the Metal 3 layer. We also have names & school logo on the right and a trombone ASCII art on the left (the multiplier was a little long so we had plenty of whitespace)
  • Here
    http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu.nyud.net:8090/creature s/index.html [nyud.net]

    Everything isn't cached yet, I think.
    Dogbert is, Diet Slice is. Haven't checked anything else.

  • Feynmann's text (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Spy der Mann ( 805235 ) <spydermann.slash ... minus physicist> on Friday October 14, 2005 @11:06PM (#13795761) Homepage Journal
    This might be a little off-topic, but hey, this is slashdot. We need to have an interesting link on funny stories once in a while.

    Feynmann's text on nanotechnology - viewed with a microscope. [nanotech-now.com]
  • Why not make a new topic like...

    Internet Super-Stars

    and post all the interesting sites worth re-posting, under it. Whatever. Just stop the dupes unless there are updates. Hey look NEW PICS ON HOTORNOT.COM!!!
  • I used to work for a company that made flight and vehicle simulators. The image database designers and developers used to leave various messages a certain altitude below the end of the main airport runways.

    One day we had a customer checking out their aircraft sim and after a test flight and perfect landing, they were confronted by a bunch of rather 'crude' (shall we say!) messages between two of the design team because we'd left the altitude interlocks off and they had 'sailed' the aircraft just the right d
  • "All your base are belong to us."
  • Are still cool, like in this case.

    So seeing it again in 07 for the newcomers isnt all that bad.
  • The text of the "Fine Print" on the Aspen HP chip [fsu.edu] appears as a "standard Disclaimer" at this website [fiction.net], anong others.

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