The C Standards process over the last few decades has addressed both optimization and pointer type safety largely through a concept called “undefined behavior”. The idea is that instead of positive rules for what compilers and programmers can do, the
Right to private jet ski use while collecting disability
New York authorities said the warrants led to the indictments of firefighters, police officers, and civil servants on disability fraud charges. The Facebook data, which included user photos and videos, showed employees who claimed they were disabled performing a variety
Droning on about computer security
Good grief. The US military’s unmanned Predator and Reaper drones are continuing to fly remote missions overseas despite a computer virus that has infected their US-based cockpits. Government officials are still investigating whether the virus is benign, and how it
Security news
The lesson of this story is that even (particularly?) computer security companies cannot put up with the inconvenience of standard security precautions. Greg Hoglund’s nightmare began on Super Bowl Sunday. On Feb. 6 the high-tech entrepreneur was sitting in his
Security for dummies – a lesson for smart grid
WASHINGTON — Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations. Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed
Deterministic multithreading
An interesting paper appearing in ASPLOS proceedings provides a “deterministic” locking method Kendo enforces a deterministic interleaving of lock acquisitions and specially declared non-protected reads through a novel dynamically load-balanced deterministic scheduling algorithm. The algorithm tracks the progress of each
Marine One Blueprints via Pirates Bay
Goodness. The US blueprints for Marine1 show up in Iran. “What appears to be a defense contractor in Bethesda, Md., had a file-sharing program on one of their systems that also contained highly sensitive blueprints for Marine One,” Boback said.
Mobile device security and President Obama
Obama’s fighting hard to keep his Blackberry President Barack Obama will have a beloved BlackBerry — and maybe a second, more secure smartphone-like device — with him in the White House. The president has been adamant about continuing to use
Updated Dijkstra vs Perlis (really, DeMillo)
See below.
Dijkstra versus Perlis (updated)
Dijkstra wrote: He [Perlis] published a very obnoxious paper arguing against a mathematical approach to programming cite The paper by De Millo, Lipton and Perlis starts as follows: Many people have argued that computer programming should strive to become more like mathematics.