Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Delicious Links 2006-04-19

caskey's del.icio.us bookmarks for 2006-04-19

  • Sex cues ruin men's decisiveness --
    The Proceedings of the Royal Society B study found they were more likely to accept unfair offers than men not been exposed to the alluring images. The suggestion is that the sexual cues distract the men's thoughts, preventing them from focusing on thei
    Tagged as: article evolution news paralipsis psychology research society

Friday, April 14, 2006

Why IIS on Win32 Fails

System call depths in Win32 vs. POSIXThe pictures to the right from Richard Stiennon's post on Threat Chaos show the paths of the system calls used by IIS on Win32 and Apache on POSIX to service a single HTTP request. This pictures demonstrates, fundamentally, why IIS on Win32 is simply a bad engineering choice when it comes to security.

Every system call, every transition across the user/operating system boundary is an opportunity for the userspace program to exploit a potentially unknown hole in the underlying O/S. Why someone would choose to use an environment like this one is beyond me.

Richard Stiennon put it quite succinctly:

Windows has grown so complicated that it is harder to secure. Well these images make the point very well. Both images are a complete map of the system calls that occur when a web server serves up a single page of html with a single picture. The same page and picture.

Evergreen DN-2000

Evergreen DN-2000 mp3 playerEveryone is a twitter about the Evergreen DN-2000, which brings the no-frills mp3 playback possibilities down to a rock bottom JPY999 price. Frankly, USD 8.50 is pretty cheap for an mp3 player, however the catch is that you supply your own storage in the form of an SD card. Even at USD50-100/GB, that's far from a strictly el-cheapo mp3 player.

What I do like about this sort of design is that the storage should be separate from the player. I still come across my old mp3 player from the turn of the century and lament its paltry 32MB of storage despite having a pleasing industrial design. One can only hope that this is indicative of things to come in the mobile device industry--standardized, removeable storage media. Of course, the iPod shuffle has things a little backwards but it is a step in the right direction.

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Ian's Not So New Knot

Double slipped reef knot
Ian Fieggen has taken it upon himself to rename the simple double-slipped reef knot as the Ian Knot. While it's always nice to see someone take an interest in the ancient art of knot tying, what infuriates me is when someone creates new terms for something that they have no business claiming rights over.

I don't doubt that Ian has documented a clever way of tying a double-slipped reef knot in a small number of passes, however if you examine his two 'recommended' knots on his list of shoelace knots page you will find nothing new under the sun. His Ian Knot is in no way different than the same knot the majority of us use to tie our shoes every day and his so calledIan's Secure Shoelace Knot is nothing more than a double-slipped surgeon's knot.