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by stiray 2144 days ago
I think that this might be an typo or at least it has plausible deniability. I have changed my coding style to always put constant on left side just to avoid such an error (such typo gave me a few days of debugging multithreaded code and I have just said "Never again!!" :D)
3 comments

A typo is possible if it had been submitted to normal code review, but hacking into a server to secretly modify code all but rules out an accident.
If you are using gcc you can use the -Wparentheses flag to turn on warnings for this: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Warning-Options.html#inde...
Even with the "typo" corrected, the patch makes no sense. There is no plausible deniability why it should do what it would do. It was definitely a deliberate attack.