While it's true the function can be used to check whether a particular security descriptor grants access to a token, you need to be aware of where that security descriptor came from. If the security descriptor came from another machine (for example, if you got it by calling and passing the path to a file on a network share), calling the function...

On the Media picks up on the Harper's Magazine article Debbie Does Salad and chats with Frederick Kaufman, the article's author, on the curious similarity between the way cooking shows and pornographic films present their subject matter. Cooking shows target the 18–35 male, even though these people are unlikely to be cooks themselves. The...

The marriage of convenience is alive and well, not that is really a surprise to anybody. I found interesting this story on how some young members of the US military are getting married for purely economic reasons. By getting married, he would get a housing stipend and permission to move off-base. And as his legal wife, she would get health cove...

Earlier, I discussed which window style bits belong to whom. One detail of this that I neglected to emphasize is that since the lower 16 bits of the window style are defined by the class, you can't just take styles from one class and apply them to another. For example, you can't create a button control and pass the style expecting to have the te...

On FAT drives, the directory that stores files in the Recycle Bin is called , but on NTFS drives, its name is . Why the name change? The FAT and NTFS Recycle Bins have different internal structure because NTFS has this thing called "security" and FAT doesn't. All recycled files on FAT drives are dumped into a single directory, whereas recycled fi...

If you dare, spend eleven minutes of your life watching the most painfully compelling mockumentary on the lives of two basement fantasy role playing gamers. (via Chris Williams.)

Of course we don't find this out until somebody tries. (Google cache for a limited time only.)

Because the program isn't actually corrupted. Sort of.

The and functions allow you to specify whether you want to want for any or all of the handles (either by passing or by passing , accordingly). But you never want to wait for all handles. Waiting for all handles means that the call does not return unless all the handles are signalled and a window message meeting your wake criteria has arrived. S...

Stephen Tolouse (known around Microsoft as "stepto", pronounced "step-toe") from the Microsoft Security Response Center reminisces about Windows 95 RTM. Stephen mentions that "the build numbers were artificially inflated to reach 950". There's actually a technical reason for this inflation, which I intend to write about when I have the time to ...