alt Hacker NewsDecompression is equivalent to executing code for a specialized virtual machine. It should be possible to automate this process of finding "small" programs that generate "large" outputs. Could even be an interesting AI benchmark.
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bikeshaving • last Friday at 11:52 PM
My guess is this is a subset of the halting problem (does this program accept data with non-halting decompression), and is therefore beautifully undecidable. You are free to leave zip/tgz/whatever fork bombs as little mines for live-off-the-land advanced persistent threats in your filesystems.
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Many of them already do this. [0]
It is a much easier problem to solve than you would expect. No need to drag in a data centre when heuristics can get you close enough.
[0] https://sources.debian.org/patches/unzip/6.0-29/23-cve-2019-...