Technology

In June 2000, US President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair unveiled what amounted to a "rough draft" of the deciphered complex makeup of human genetics, an essential milestone to cracking the genetic code that makes up human life.

Last week, we published a discussion of the vmsplice() exploit which showed how the failure to check permissions for a read operation led to a buffer overflow within the kernel. Subsequently, a linux-kernel reader pointed out that the article stopped short of a complete explanation: this is not an ordinary buffer overflow exploit. This article picks up where the last one left off and describes how the vmsplice() exploit makes use of this buffer overflow to take over the system. When vmsplice() is being used to feed data from memory into a pipe, the function charged with making it all happen is vmsplice_to_pipe(), found in fs/splice.c. It declares a couple of arrays of interest:

Heading a start-up after leaving his position as head of Microsoft Game Studios, Ed Fries thought that he might be able to sell 10,000 units of his product -- personalized online game figurines -- the first year.

When this was being written, distributors were working quickly to ship kernel updates fixing the local root vulnerabilities in the vmsplice() system call. Unlike a number of other recent vulnerabilities which have required special situations (such as the presence of specific hardware) to exploit, these vulnerabilities are trivially exploited and the code to do so is circulating on the net. The author found himself wondering how such a wide hole could find its way into the core kernel code, so he set himself the task of figuring out just what was going on - a task which took rather longer than he had expected.

In the US, Morrisville State College's deployment of 802.11n WLAN has been covered in an attempt to study the challenges facing early enterprise adopters of 11n.

Imagine the last time something in your house broke - a cup or plate, a bracket, a door handle, a component in an electrical appliance or mechanical device, a hinge, a switch - the list can go on and on. But instead of tossing the entire device out, or heading to the local hardware or electrical store to find an often costly replacement, imagine if you could recreate that object or component in your home on a 3D printer. Now imagine if the 3D printer you use to make that part could recreate itself as well.

Having an RFID tag in your Nike shoes, or affixed to your license plate sticker, or even embedded in your driver's license may seem bizarre.

It doesn't take a genius to catch on to the fact that in IT, innovation is a mandate. Push the envelope of what's possible, or find yourself relegated to wayside. But, to borrow a favored David St. Hubbins Spinal Tap aphorism, there's a fine line between clever and crackpot when it comes to making good on technological breakthroughs in the enterprise.

He spoofed the HR director's work phone number, then the number of that guy's boss, before moving up to a vice president, and finally, the CEO. Says he had no choice, and that "this thing that I did is bad and should be outlawed."

Ever wonder what that cop is doing in his cruiser that's parked behind your car with lights flashing -- while your heart is pounding and you're searching for your license and registration?

If you want a demonstration of the speed at which the technology industry works these days just consider Sharp's thin TVs. The first time we heard about them was when the company unveiled prototypes in the middle of last year. At that time Sharp talked vaguely about them hitting the market sometime before the end of the decade. They seemed a little way away.

Seattle's Swedish Medical Center, a three-hospital campus with more than 7,000 employees and annual revenues of US$1 billion, was mired in paper.

The WIMP human-computer interface may have an uninspiring name, but Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointing devices have dominated computing for some 15 years. The keyboard, mouse and display screen have served users extraordinarily well.

LAN technology recently passed a milestone -- it's been around for 30 years, some of them tumultuous. But while the LAN seems ubiquitous now, there are those who think its future may be more troubled than its past.