The Old New Thing

Crackpots in computer security: The neighbors are looking at me weird

The security team gets all sorts of email to report security issues. Nearly 200,000 each year. And of course the reports vary in quality greatly. The ones I'm fascinated by are the crackpots. IMMEDIATE HELP NEEDED, PHONES  PHONE NUMBERS DELETED, EM XXXXXXXX@ GMAIL,HOTMAIL,LIVE,AOL.YAHOO. IM ALMOST POSITIVE HE IS USING BLUETOOTH.  ...

Hardware backward compatibility: The firmware that missed one tiny detail

The person responsible for the floppy disk driver in Windows 95 also was responsible for the low-level CD-ROM drivers. (Not to be confused with the CDFS file system, which was handled by the file system team, not the hardware driver folks.) And I remember a story about one particularly strange CD-ROM drive. This drive was produced by a ...

One small silver lining of moving Boeing headquarters to Chicago

In 2001, Boeing moved their corporate headquarters from Seattle to Chicago. This resulted in much wailing and consternation in Seattle, where Boeing had been since its founding in 1915. But every cloud has a silver lining. Seattle is the home of Boeing's passenger jet division, and the presence of corporate executives had added an extra layer...

The commutative law for postage and its limitations

The college professor who carried on a letter exchange with a kind pensioner who proved that the speed of light could be exceeded told me of another letter exchange, this time with another professional mathematician. The letter came from England, and it accompanied some sort of document or artifact that the correspondent wanted the college ...

What is the lpClass member of SHELLEXECUTEINFO used for?

A customer reported problems launching the default Web browser with the function: This fails with . If you don't pass the flag and leave , then the function will try to figure out what your refers to, looking at the file extension, looking for the file on the , and if all else fails, trying some autocorrection. In this case, the ...