6 ms·

Careful with that Buffer

152 points by Aloha 12y ago

jrapdx3 12y ago
Wow, that's both sad and funny. A bit of a time capsule, though when the pressure is on is there ever a team that wouldn't have that kind of interaction? In a couple of past projects I was involved with, email had been sent around among "team" members that by comparison makes those old MS messages look pretty tame. I plan not to leak potentially embarrassing emails, at least while some of the individual authors are still around, but keeping info safe requires an effort to make sure it really is secure. The article does show the need to be careful when constructing things and make sure there are no leaks. Maybe that's more easily said than done.
hamburglar 12y ago
poor erikl...
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
0x0 12y ago
Wasn't this the case with older compilers not zeroing padding space too?
- Kronopath 12y ago
  Hell, old compilers? Even modern compilers don't do that. I once fixed a bug that occurred because someone was doing a memcmp() between two structures to check if they were the same, and it was returning false because some of the padding between variables differed between the two. This was in C++ in a modern version of Visual Studio.
  - 0x0 12y ago
    That's not so unreasonable within the process' own heap. I was thinking more about padding inside .exe files on disk with the risk of redistributing that - either from nonzeroed drive slack or from random memory at build time (ms-dos/win95?)
RexRollman 12y ago
That site is pretty interesting. There are some interesting articles about older PC unixes on there as well.
rip747 12y ago
Every time I read something about OS/2, I'm just waiting to see one of my old friends from IBM Boca Raton names pop in there. Man I loath of those days again. What a great bunch of people to work with. I loved it there and to this day LOVE OS/2.
- yuhong 12y ago
  Yea, the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco is one of my favorite topics and I do have bad opinions against MS for it.
stewsnooze 12y ago
Can someone please add Eugene to the end of the title?
- Kiro 12y ago
  Eugene?
  - philh 12y ago
    It's a reference to a Pink Floyd track: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careful_with_That_Axe,_Eugene http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careful_with_That_Axe,_Eugene
mherdeg 12y ago
The "kill him with hammers" stuff is from a 1988 Dave Barry column, reprinted at e.g. http://articles.philly.com/1988-02-17/news/26239559_1_crates-household-bills http://articles.philly.com/1988-02-17/news/26239559_1_crates...
msarnoff 12y ago
In addition, there are numerous games that shipped with random plain text (including uncompiled source code) in their binary images: http://tcrf.net/Category:Games_with_uncompiled_source_code http://tcrf.net/Category:Games_with_uncompiled_source_code http://www.pagetable.com/?p=28 http://www.pagetable.com/?p=28

152 points by Aloha 12y ago

Wow, that's both sad and funny. A bit of a time capsule, though when the pressure is on is there ever a team that wouldn't have that kind of interaction? In a couple of past projects I was involved with, email had been sent around among "team" members that by comparison makes those old MS messages look pretty tame. I plan not to leak potentially embarrassing emails, at least while some of the individual authors are still around, but keeping info safe requires an effort to make sure it really is secure. The article does show the need to be careful when constructing things and make sure there are no leaks. Maybe that's more easily said than done.

hamburglar 12y ago

poor erikl...

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

0x0 12y ago

Wasn't this the case with older compilers not zeroing padding space too?

Kronopath 12y ago
Hell, old compilers? Even modern compilers don't do that. I once fixed a bug that occurred because someone was doing a memcmp() between two structures to check if they were the same, and it was returning false because some of the padding between variables differed between the two. This was in C++ in a modern version of Visual Studio.
- 0x0 12y ago
  That's not so unreasonable within the process' own heap. I was thinking more about padding inside .exe files on disk with the risk of redistributing that - either from nonzeroed drive slack or from random memory at build time (ms-dos/win95?)

RexRollman 12y ago

That site is pretty interesting. There are some interesting articles about older PC unixes on there as well.

rip747 12y ago

Every time I read something about OS/2, I'm just waiting to see one of my old friends from IBM Boca Raton names pop in there. Man I loath of those days again. What a great bunch of people to work with. I loved it there and to this day LOVE OS/2.

yuhong 12y ago
Yea, the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco is one of my favorite topics and I do have bad opinions against MS for it.

stewsnooze 12y ago

Can someone please add Eugene to the end of the title?

Kiro 12y ago
Eugene?
- philh 12y ago
  It's a reference to a Pink Floyd track: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careful_with_That_Axe,_Eugene http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careful_with_That_Axe,_Eugene

mherdeg 12y ago

The "kill him with hammers" stuff is from a 1988 Dave Barry column, reprinted at e.g. http://articles.philly.com/1988-02-17/news/26239559_1_crates-household-bills http://articles.philly.com/1988-02-17/news/26239559_1_crates...

msarnoff 12y ago

In addition, there are numerous games that shipped with random plain text (including uncompiled source code) in their binary images: http://tcrf.net/Category:Games_with_uncompiled_source_code http://tcrf.net/Category:Games_with_uncompiled_source_code http://www.pagetable.com/?p=28 http://www.pagetable.com/?p=28