Archive for 28th September 2004
“JPEG of Death” spotted — Patch NOW!
Bad guys have apparently begun exploiting the security hole that can take over a Windows machine simply by displaying an image. This vulnerability requires patching both the OS and Microsoft Office.
Casting Blame On The Air-Control Outage
Several news sites are beginning to parrot the meme that the root cause of last week’s outage of air-control in the Southwest US is Windows Server 2000′s “design” to shut down every 49.7 days “to prevent a data overload.“ This isn’t true. This is almost certainly referring to the GetSysUptime() function, which returns a 32-bit integer telling how long in milliseconds the system has been up (1000 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 49.710269618055555555555555555556 = 0xFFFFFFFF). Every 50 days or so, the GetSysUptime() function rolls over and starts at 0.
“…To avoid this automatic shutdown, technicians are required to restart the system manually every 30 days.” This is an all-too-believable system response to a minor software defect. How long would it take to change even a broad dependence on a 32-bit response? A few tens of work-hours?
This V1aKr.A Isn’t Doing It For Me
Half the Viagra sold over the Internet is fake, according to British scientists. In other news, the budget department of the University of London is very gullible when it comes to funding requests. I’m expecting money for my “Correlation of loneliness to sexual desire in Internet-using housewives,” study any day…
FlexWiki: Another MS Project Goes Common Public License
FlexWiki, a Wiki project by Microsoft Program Manager David Ornstein, has moved from GotDotNet to Sourceforge and changed to a Common Public License. This is the third project after WiX and WTL that MS has placed on SourceForge. Clearly, Microsoft lawyers have worked their way through the CPL and found it acceptable. Whether “floodgates will open” or we’ll just see a trickle of projects, it’s good to see.
I joined the FlexWiki mailing list a while back, wondering if I could add Tablet PC inking to it. My first take is that the document structure isn’t quite what you want for an ink-based Wiki. The big wrench in the “Ink Wiki” plan is that text recognition can only occur on machines running the Tablet PC version of Windows XP, making Search significantly more difficult to pull off.
