chrisreedy - Slashdot User

Adobe Download Manager Installing Software Without Consent 98

Posted by timothy on Friday February 19, 2010 @06:31PM from the plus-one-invitation dept.

"Not all is worth cheering about as Adobe turns 20," writes reader adeelarshad82, who excerpts from a story at PC Magazine's Security Watch: "Researcher Aviv Raff has found a problem in ADM (Adobe Download Manager) and the method through which it is delivered from adobe.com. The net effect of the problem is that a user can be tricked into downloading and installing software using ADM without actual consent. Tonight Adobe acknowledged the report and said they were working on the issue with Raff and NOS Microsystems, the company that wrote ADM."

Comment Getting in over your head (Score 1) 836

by chrisreedy on Sunday November 15, 2009 @02:37PM (#30107304) Attached to: Are You a Blue-Collar Or White-Collar Developer?

As someone who spent a lot of years observing software projects gone bad ... I prefer someone with a four year degree because they have a better chance of knowing when they are in over their head. Some examples: Trying to build a mini-compiler without understanding anything about parsing, yacc, lex, etc. Trying to build a special purpose DBMS without understanding DB theory.

Submission + - New Linux kernel flaw allows null pointer exploits (threatpost.com) 6

Submitted by Trailrunner7 on Friday July 17, 2009 @10:54AM

Trailrunner7 writes: A new flaw in the latest release of the Linux kernel gives attackers the ability to exploit NULL pointer dereferences and bypass the protections of SELinux, AppArmor and the Linux Security Module. Brad Spengler discovered the vulnerability and found a reliable way to exploit it, giving him complete control of the remote machine. This is somewhat similar to the magic that Mark Dowd performed last year to exploit Adobe Flash. Threatpost.com reports: "The vulnerability is in the 2.6.30 release of the Linux kernel, and in a message to the Daily Dave mailing list Spengler said that he was able to exploit the flaw, which at first glance seemed unexploitable. He said that he was able to defeat the protection against exploiting NULL pointer dereferences on systems running SELinux and those running typical Linux implementations."

Comment Practical Programmer: Inspections (Score 1) 345

by chrisreedy on Saturday June 13, 2009 @05:58PM (#28322787) Attached to: Are Code Reviews Worth It?

You should check out this reference: (Apologies, you need access to the ACM Library to read the article) http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=299161. Robert Glass discusses this exact issue. The article offers some references to research done using alternative approaches to inspections.

Comment An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers (Score 1) 630

by chrisreedy on Sunday February 08, 2009 @09:32PM (#26778393) Attached to: Mathematics Reading List For High School Students?

A book I enjoyed as the text for Freshman seminar when I was in college was Niven and Zuckerman (now Niven, Zuckerman, and Montgomery) "An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers". This book might be a stretch for a good high school senior math student. But, it has a lot of interesting material and doesn't require any college level math as a pre-requisite. Besides, who doesn't like Number Theory.

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