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If changing a setting requires administrator privileges in the first place, then any behavior that results cannot be considered a security hole because in order to alter the setting, attackers must already have gained administrative privileges on the machine, at which point you've already lost the game. If attackers have administrative privileges,...

Last time, we left off with a promise to discuss ways your program can be Internet-facing without your even realizing it, and probably the most common place for this is the command line. Thanks to CIFS, files can be shared across the Internet and accessed via UNC notation. This means that anybody can set up a CIFS server and create files like , an...

Not every code injection bug is a security hole.

Yes, there are plenty of scripting languages that are much better than boring old batch. Batch files were definitely a huge improvement over back in 1981, but they've been showing their age for quite some time. The advanced age of boring old batch, on the other hand, means that you have millions of batch files out there that you had better not br...

Sometimes you're better off keeping your fool mouth shut. The other day I got a piece of email requesting that I look at a crashed system because the tester believed it was another instance of bug 12345. While that may very well have been the case, bug 12345 was a kernel pool corruption bug in the object manager, something of which I kno...

The Microsoft Knowledge Base is filled with product support tips, but be careful to understand the scope of those tips. Generally speaking, information provided in the Knowledge Base exists for troubleshooting purposes, not for program design. That's why each article lists specifically which operating system it applies to: There is no guarantee th...

While it's true that there's an awful lot of overclocking out there, it's also true that not everything that looks like overclocking actually is. Last Thanksgiving, I helped one of my relatives upgrade their computer by scavenging parts from another unused computer (installing more memory and replacing a broken CD drive). When I took the front pa...

One of the suggestions for addressing the network compatibility problem was to give up on fast mode and have a new "fast mode 2". (Equivalently, add a flag to the server capabilities that means "I support fast mode, and I'm not buggy.") This is another example of changing the rules after the game is over, by adding a flag to work around d...

One suggestion for addressing the network compatibility problem was returning an error code like which means "Um, the server ran into a problem. Please start over." This is basically the same as the "do nothing" option, because the server is already returning an error code specifically for this problem, namely, . Now, sure, that error doesn't act...

One of the big complaints about Explorer we've received from corporations is how often it accesses the network. If the computer you're accessing is in the next room, then accessing it a large number of times isn't too much of a problem since you get the response back rather quickly. But if the computer you're talking to is halfway around the world,...