February 12th, 2009
I’m starting a new Internet radio show, Security Break Live. Starting tomorrow at 11:00 Central, and every two weeks after that, I’ll be hosting a half-hour call-in Internet radio show discussing data security topics.
Tomorrow’s topic is “ATM fraud in broad daylight,” and for the occasion I’ll be dissecting the various ways that Bad Guys try to steal your credit/debit card information in order to seal your money, and most importantly, how to defend against it!
Each week I’ll be joined by a guest co-host. Tomorrow’s guest will be John Quain, New York Times columnist and frequent contributor to a number of tech publications, including PC Magazine.
The best part - it’s a call-in show! Call tomorrow between 11:00 and 11:30 - 646-929-2482 - and ask anything. Hecklers welcome! 
Posted in PhoneFactor, Security, Technology, two-factor | No Comments »
February 5th, 2009
I read a study about high-fructose corn syrup today, after being amazed by another article I read about how they make the stuff. (The Wikipedia entry has a lot to say too.)
Here’s the kicker: at least some HFCS has a higher mercury concentration (0.56 ppm) than most* fish you eat. So, if you’re someone who shouldn’t be ingesting much mercury, HFCS is probably a bad idea too. Don’t take my word for it, though, read the study.
There are two processes for producing HFCS, and one of them generally leads to undetectable levels of mercury, but unfortunately, you can’t find out what you’re getting just by reading the ingredients list. And while 0.56ppm is the worst sample they found, again, you can’t tell you’re not getting that level too.
Contrast that to fish: most people watching their mercury intake know which kinds of fish to avoid and which are safe. There are recommendations on how often you should eat which kinds of fish. With HFCS-containing products (which, by the way, is soooooo many things), it’s simply a blind guess.
It wasn’t immediately obvious that the FDA regulates mercury levels in HFCS, although it looks to me like they didn’t even know about it until this study.
So, the bottom line is that if you’re on a mercury-restricted diet, you should at least think about this issue.
[*Details: the study detected a concentration of 28µg mercury per 50g HFCS (or, 0.56 ppm) in the worst sample. Compare to the FDA's list of mercury levels in fish.]
Posted in General nonsense | No Comments »
January 14th, 2009
After a ton of time essentially off the Internet radar, mostly doing PhoneFactor stuff, I’m starting to get re-engaged with the online world. It having been a couple of years since the Web 2.0 (r)evolution, and since I started blogging, I thought I’d take a fresh look at some of the sites that seem to have survived and start, you know, using them again.
Stuff I’m starting to use again, in no particular order:
- Facebook has begun mushrooming on me, as it seems to have a habit of doing
- Twitter is surprisingly addictive, and might actually succeed in making me use fewer words
- del.icio.us was always interesting, to me anyway
- Plaxo is the biggest surprise to me; its original use (keeping track of contacts?) is still surprisingly good.
- LinkedIn is the only “social” site that strikes me as useful, as opposed to merely entertaining
And, of course, I’m still occasionally blogging here.
I have a few new projects cooking, a couple of which will be launching in the next week or two. Watch this space!
Tags: General
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
September 30th, 2008
Wow, who knew. Well, apparently everyone else. Sigh…
Posted in WDK, Windows | Comments Off
September 30th, 2008
If you own a driver that makes assumptions about what processor you’re executing on at any point, you may want to re-think that strategy.
It has been possible in the past to assume that, if you’re running at DISPATCH_LEVEL on a given physical processor, you can get away with less locking if you do per-processor data structures. It makes sense: you are guaranteed to be the only thread in your code on that CPU until you’re done, since you can only be preempted by threads > DISPATCH_LEVEL, and your DPC will pick up where it left off once the system returns to DISPATCH_LEVEL. With a per-processor queue or other data structure, accesses from DISPATCH_LEVEL are guaranteed to be atomic.
Well, for reasons that will become clear over the next few months, that strategy is no longer possible. There may be cases in future versions of Windows that allow different physical processors to be assigned the same processor ID. That means that two different threads running at the same time on different processors might wind up colliding on the same queue.
Of course, this also implies that data structures that were once assumed to be per-processor exclusive (i.e. singletons) will no longer necessarily be so. If you’re using processor number as a key that you assume is globally unique, e.g. managing some initialize-once data or something, you will need to re-think your architecture.
If you don’t generally deal with processor numbers, none of this matters to you. For those that do, however, if you do anything "smart" with processor numbers, you may have some re-thinking to do.
Posted in WDK | Comments Off
September 29th, 2008
Ken, Soren, and I are at DDC 2008 this week. So far, the talks have been great, as is the weather. If you’re around, drop one of us a line.
-Steve
Posted in WDK | Comments Off
September 29th, 2008
Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off
April 14th, 2008
It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything, but I promise this is going to be worth it:
http://www.youtube.com/phonefactor
Thanks to Dan Leafblad for doing all the hard work to pull this together. And Shame on Evan Conway for making me wear a conehead hat. It looks… well… just watch the video…
Posted in Positive Networks | No Comments »
October 23rd, 2007
I’ve been hearing little anecdotes about Win7 for months now, but Ars has one of the better articles I’ve seen so far. Interesting:
Traut runs a team of about 200 software engineers at Microsoft that is responsible for the core kernel scheduling, memory management, boot sequence, and virtualization technology such as Virtual PC and Virtual Server. The latter technologies are becoming more and more important as servers get more powerful and gain more and more CPU cores, and it was clear from the demonstration that Microsoft is placing significant effort into integrating virtual machine technology into everything that they do.
As I’ve written before, I think a focus on (high-scale) multi-core will be a key to the OS’s success going forward. Anyway, check out the video linked from the article.
Posted in Windows | No Comments »
October 19th, 2007
Intel is phasing out single-core desktop processors. The end of the end of an era!
UPDATE: Ken covered this a while ago regarding a similar decision by AMD.
Posted in Programming | No Comments »