The Old New Thing

August 10, 2006 - The Old New Thing

Space scientist James Van Allen (1914–2006)

August 10, 2006 Aug 10, 2006 08/10/06
Raymond Chen
Discoverer of the Van Allen radiation belts and one of the TIME magazine men of the year for 1960 James Van Allen died yesterday. (What a coincidence. What are the odds that the person to discover the Van Allen radiation belts would also be named Van Allen?) I never met the man, but I met his granddaughter. She has an amazing facility with ...

One way people abused hooks in 16-bit Windows

August 10, 2006 Aug 10, 2006 08/10/06
Raymond Chen
We saw last time how windows hooks were implemented in 16-bit Windows. Even though the was an opaque data type that should have been treated like a handle, many programs "knew enough to be dangerous" and took advantage of the fact that the was just a pointer to the previous hook procedure. The most common way of abusing this knowledge ...