Joel sent me this email:
(no, I’m not being faked by a virus).
Check your C:\ folder, and see if you have a Junko.txt there. It’s a rather interesting file; we thought it may’ve been dropped there by Windows Update, but one of my co-workers says he’s been seeing it for months. “Delete it, it comes back. Make it Read Only and Windows will start crashing…”, he says.
I especially enjoyed the interspersed…um…comments.
Reminds me of the time when I inadvertently left logging code in an executable as it went into production, creating a multi-gig log file and crashing a customer’s server.
-Joel I…who’d blog about it, but doesn’t have a blog.
I wrote back:
Hmm… don’t have it. Must be I keep my computer more secure than yours.
I started searching my local HDs for it, but I decided I didn’t want to search thru all 760 GBs of my local disks… I constrained it to the C:\
It’s certainly not in my root.
Joel replied:
Here, have mine.
-Joel I
He attached the following file:
1a 1b 1c 1d 1e 1f 1g 1h AAAACCCCCKKKKK!!!!!!!!!! 1a 1b 1c 1d 1e 1f 1g 1h AAAACCCCCKKKKK!!!!!!!!!! 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1b 1c 1d 1e 1f 1g 1h AAAACCCCCKKKKK!!!!!!!!!! 1a 1b 1c 1d 1e 1f 1g 1h AAAACCCCCKKKKK!!!!!!!!!! 1a 1b 1c 1d 1e 1f 1g 1h AAAACCCCCKKKKK!!!!!!!!!! 1a 1b 1c 1d 1e 1f 1g 1h AAAACCCCCKKKKK!!!!!!!!!! 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1a 1b 1c 1d 1e 1f 1g 1h AAAACCCCCKKKKK!!!!!!!!!! 1a 1b 1c 1d 1e 1f 1g 1h AAAACCCCCKKKKK!!!!!!!!!! 1a 1b 1c 1d 1e 1f 1g 1h AAAACCCCCKKKKK!!!!!!!!!! 1a 1b 1c 1d 1e 1f 1g 1h AAAACCCCCKKKKK!!!!!!!!!! 1a
Most intriguing… I’m starting to think that those bozos (I mean this in the kindest and most flattering possible way) over at X_Software_Company need to pay more attention to their security, especially with that valuable code base sitting on their HDs. 
Update: Joel replies:
One request, though: any chance you could replace “[X_Software_Company]” with “X” or something like that? Paint me paranoid, but…hey, I *am* paranoid about stuff being forever accessible via search engines.
Update: junko.txt solved!
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