As pointed out in the article, the program must use gethostbyname() on a name supplied by the attacker.
A much more mitigating factor is that the bug is only exercised if the name looks like a numerical id, and according to their search most software first checks this using inet_aton() and only calls gethostbyname() if this fails, thus avoiding the bug.
I have yet to have one such buffer overflow bug in my code
Yea, right. You know the authors of this function probably thought that too. They had no counter examples until now, just like you and your code.
strncpy will not overflow the buffer provided you pass the size of the buffer (if you don't pass the size of the buffer, *none* of the safer functions are going to help). It's problem is that it will not write a nul at the end of the buffer, thus reading will read right off the end. It also wastes a huge amount of time filling the unused part of the buffer with nul.
strlcpy is far, far better and does pretty much what is wanted.
However in this case they really did try to figure out if the buffer would overflow, so neither strlcpy or strncpy should be needed. They did the calculation wrong, claiming it needed 4-8 bytes less than it really did.
Look what popped up today:
- There is a snowstorm and the officials shut the city down. Everyone complains that shutting the city down was unnecessary, I mean sure we got a few feet of snow & all, but it wasn't like it was an emergency or anything, nobody even got killed or stranded..
As any sysadmin will tell you, when your job involves preventing disasters, do it too well and people will wonder why they needed you at all.
Will the EFF be the ones who apologize to the families of those killed by attacks that could have been stopped?
Really? Do tell. What are these attacks that have been stopped by mass surveillance and could not have been stopped by good old-fashioned detective work?
Terror attacks are rare in the United States. They are remarkable precisely because they are rare. This is why anti-terrorism powers are overwhelmingly used to investigate non-terrorism offences, and the vast majority of terrorist attacks foiled are ones that they made up.
But "0" being "absolute 0" is what sets it apart.
Well, sort of. There's also the Rankine scale. On it, 0 is also the absolute lowest temperature (0K = 0R), but the units are the same size as Fahrenheit degrees.
The only place I've seen it used is in old rocket propulsion texts and similar non-SI thermodynamics stuff.
Sure, (almost) anyone can code, just like (almost) anyone can string words together on a page. That's a bit different from being able to write a readable story (let alone novel), or construct a useful program.
I wouldn't trust an architect who didn't know how to lay bricks, but even less would I trust a bricklayer to design a house.
That said, to paraphrase Heinlein, everyone should know how to lay a brick, hammer a nail, write a paragraph and code a program; specialization is for insects.
Twitter was given a subpoena, not a secret warrant, so there was nothing preventing them from notifying the account owners. And they lost that appeal.
Which phone is that? Motorola already announced Lollipop 5.0 support for the Moto X, G, E and Droid lines
Phones with 512MB can, however, be upgraded to KitKat 4.4, which reduced the minimim required RAM back to 512MB.
More speed is great, I'm sure users will be happy.
The dual rendering engine, less so. I know backwards compatibility is pretty important to Microsoft, but now they have twice as much web-facing code to maintain - all the legacy IE MSHTML stuff as well as the new EdgeHTML code - and thus twice the zero-days to cope with. Perhaps this is the lesser of two evils, but it's certainly not ideal.
What are the chances that a vendor that declines to update 4.3 to 4.4 would be willing to do an update for a 4.3.x if Google bothered to do it.
I think it smells bad, but trying to target users with vendors holding back 4.4 but willing to do another 4.3.x update is tricky. This is why google moved toward moving stuff in a more modular fashion: to get the ability to update relevant portions without demanding the vendor get in the middle.
It's a little too C++-ish for my tastes [...]
I have the opposite problem: Qt isn't C++ enough for my tastes. As a general rule, you can't program both in Qt and in modern C++ in the same program. Not without an insulation layer, anyway.
There is a Modula-3?
Indeed there is, and it is an extremely influential language. Java 1.0 is pretty much Modula-3 semantics with a C syntax.
"The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception a neccessity." - Oscar Wilde
