Stories about: Xor

A concise history of silly Internet traditions

Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. Previously we have spoken to Alfred v. Aho of AWK fame, S. Tucker Taft on the Ada 1995 and 2005 revisions, Microsoft about its server-side script engine ASP, Chet Ramey about his experience maintaining Bash, Bjarne Stroustrup of C++ fame, and to Charles H. Moore about the design and development of Forth. In this interview, Computerworld ventures down a less series path and chats to Don Woods about the development and uses of INTERCAL

A spate of Beijing Olympic phishing e-mails have been discovered which install Trojans via a Microsoft Office vulnerability.

In the 19th century, British mathematician Charles Babbage invented the "difference engine," a mechanical computer that had an enormously complex arrangement of levers, ratchets and gears. Had this prototypical chunk of steampunk machinery ever been completely built, it would have weighed several tons.

Some of high tech's biggest names - Microsoft, HP and Intel among them - are starting to embrace a technology called network coding in an effort to boost throughput, scalability and efficiency of everything from content distribution to wireless networks.

It was 1996, the bandwidth between Australia and the rest of the world was miserable, and Andrew Tridgell had a problem. He wanted to synchronize source code located in Australia with source code on machines around the world, but sending patches was annoying and error-prone, and just sending all the files was painfully slow. Most people would have just waited a few years for trans-Pacific bandwidth to improve; instead Tridgell wrote rsync, the first known instance of content-based addressing (also known as content-addressed storage, or compare-by-hash), an innovation which eventually spread to software like BitTorrent, git, and many document storage products on the market.

A Trojan has been discovered that attempts to evade detection by sending stolen data back to its criminal creators using the ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) back channel.

Some RAID implementations have no resilience at all - RAID 0, or "data striping", is the classic example. Others have absolute resilience - RAID 1, or "data mirroring", keeps an exact copy of the data on disk A on a second disk, B, in case A should turn up its toes.