>> On the right hand side of almost every BBC news article it has a section 
>> labelled "RELATED INTERNET LINKS" :-)  A lot of BBC articles a pretty 
>> dumbed down, so I often visit the related links for more details.
>
> I see the links, but I don't see anything remotely related to this story.

Are you looking at the same article that you posted the link to?  See 
attached images for what I saw and clicked on:

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Attachments:
Download 'image1.png' (99 KB) Download 'image2.png' (26 KB)

Preview of image 'image1.png'

Preview of image 'image2.png'

>> I see the links, but I don't see anything remotely related to this story.
> 
> Are you looking at the same article that you posted the link to?  See 
> attached images for what I saw and clicked on:

I just see a long list of links to various homepages. No links to a 
specific article.

Is there any way of determining that the article you're looking at is 
the particular one they were writing about? Or are we just going on 
coincidence?

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> I just see a long list of links to various homepages. No links to a 
> specific article.

But you can reasonably expect an item highlighted in the BBC website to be 
on the MS security blog recently...

But yes, the BBC should post the link to the actual article for further 
details and not just to a list of security related articles.

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Invisible wrote:
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7784908.stm

"""
"I cannot recommend people switch due to this one flaw," said John Curran, 
head of Microsoft UK's Windows group.
"""
No, of course you can't.

> Oh, that's nice. But does anybody have *any clue* specifically which 
> problem they're on about?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/29/AR2005122901456.html

Looks like another image processing buffer overflow.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
   see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.

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Darren New wrote:

> """
> "I cannot recommend people switch due to this one flaw," said John 
> Curran, head of Microsoft UK's Windows group.
> """
> No, of course you can't.

Shocker.

> Looks like another image processing buffer overflow.

At times like this, I find myself wondering. About two things.

1. If the entire system was written in some "safe" language, would we 
still have 45 buffer overflow flaws per week reported?

2. How much slower would the whole contraption be? (I'm guessing it 
would make Vista look *fast*...)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> 1. If the entire system was written in some "safe" language, would we 
> still have 45 buffer overflow flaws per week reported?

No. Pretty much by definition.  You might still have holes, but they'd be 
different holes.

> 2. How much slower would the whole contraption be? (I'm guessing it 
> would make Vista look *fast*...)

It would be about 30% faster.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
   see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.

Post a reply to this message

>> 1. If the entire system was written in some "safe" language, would we 
>> still have 45 buffer overflow flaws per week reported?
> 
> No. Pretty much by definition.  You might still have holes, but they'd 
> be different holes.
> 
>> 2. How much slower would the whole contraption be?
> 
> It would be about 30% faster.

Right. So you're telling me that if you wrote an OS and all the 
associated large-scale applications in a "safe" language, it would be 
more secure, and run faster (and obviously take drastically less time to 
develop).

And people still write all OS and application software in C because...??

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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On 16-Dec-08 21:48, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>>> 1. If the entire system was written in some "safe" language, would we 
>>> still have 45 buffer overflow flaws per week reported?
>>
>> No. Pretty much by definition.  You might still have holes, but they'd 
>> be different holes.
>>
>>> 2. How much slower would the whole contraption be?
>>
>> It would be about 30% faster.
> 
> Right. So you're telling me that if you wrote an OS and all the 
> associated large-scale applications in a "safe" language, it would be 
> more secure, and run faster (and obviously take drastically less time to 
> develop).
> 
> And people still write all OS and application software in C because...??
> 
because the manager is from a completely different field and tried to 
catch up with the state of the art by reading K&R.

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> > 2. How much slower would the whole contraption be? (I'm guessing it 
> > would make Vista look *fast*...)

> It would be about 30% faster.

  If it would indeed by 30% faster, that would only be a sign that the
current codebase sucks. (Of course being MS, that would hardly surprise
anyone.)

  If the codebase sucks, it means the programmers are incompetent. Would
a change in programming language make them less incompetent?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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andrel <a_l### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> > And people still write all OS and application software in C because...??
> > 
> because the manager is from a completely different field and tried to 
> catch up with the state of the art by reading K&R.

  Of because the vast majority of libraries out there you need to write
something like an OS are written in C.

  Also C is conveniently low-level so that you can quite accurately access
asm and hardware directly.

  Do languages like Haskell even support inline asm, linking to asm routines,
or accessing hardware directly (other than with wrappers around existing
C libraries)?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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