My pleasure! It's nice to see so many people reacting positively to the post.

Android is currently more or less a disaster in terms of updates and security fixes. To people used to "apt-get upgrade" and "unattended-upgrades", the situation is laughable - you buy a phone and you know from the start you will get (maybe) one update to the next version of the OS - if you're lucky. After that, you're left in eternal limbo - an easy target for exploits and all sorts of malware.

Android Treble may finally help with this disaster - but for now, those of you that can, should try LineageOS.

> In any case, kudos to ttsiodras(?)

Thanks - that is indeed my handle nowadays. Though when I opened my Slashdot account back in my Uni days I went with 'ttsiod' - our mainframe (I believe it was called "Cyber"?) could only accommodate a maximum of 6 or 7 letter login names :-)

Blogged about it 2 years ago:

http://users.softlab.ntua.gr/~...

The server...

• - costs me, energy-wise, only about 3-3.5W
• - is always accessible even though I have a dynamic IP (via free DNS providers)
• - has a Lighttpd web server so I can share things with the world
• - has an Exim mail server, so I can receive mail over (E)SMTP, store it in my house, and read it over SSH/mutt
• - can be SSH-ed into, which allows me to Wake-On-LAN my main desktop, whenever I need access to it
• r- uns long running web downloads (e.g. wget/rtorrent) from within screen-ed sessions, and shares them over Samba to my house-bound devices (e.g. watch movies from my Android tablet)
• - SSH is exposed over sslh in my HTTPS port (bypassing several firewall limitations in various places - cough, work, cough) etc.

It also required soldering to access the board's serial port - all in all, very useful tinkering :-)

Based on @ShanghaiBill's solution, I wrote a solver and simulation in Python (that also fixes ShanghaiBill's buggy pinning of "him.rock" to 0.5 - the player could in theory, choose to play rock at more than 50% probability). Use Pypy for speedy execution - I uploaded the code to GitHub: https://github.com/ttsiodras/R...

My Speccy was the gateway to a life of IT (I ended up becoming a software engineer, and part-owner of a startup). Will always feel grateful to the designers of the 8-bit micros that started all this...

Oh, and I still remember my first hack - dissassembling JetPac and finding the POKE that gave me infinite lives. Now *that* was fun :-)

HeapCheck, Electric fence, Dmalloc and all memory debuggers in general, are basically replacing the allocation functions in the executable with their own version.

The "extra" stuff that the patent proposes, is a BOOLEAN flag, that HeapCheck functions would check upon entry (at runtime) - therefore allowing the developer to control (ON/OFF) the machinery at runtime. For example, the substitute allocation function can check a registry setting, to decide whether the functionality is on or off, and a separate utility GUI can toggle this registry setting on/off (I believe Microsoft's PageHeap has something exactly like that).

So tell me, do you REALLY consider this addendum - a boolean flag, for pitty's sake - enough "innovation", to warrant the term "invention"? Patentable "invention"?

Er... let me get this straight:

You are actually arguing... that adding a boolean flag, controlled at runtime - a BOOLEAN flag! - constitutes enough... innovation, to make this... a completely new invention, worthy of patenting?

That is, if the allocation function checks e.g. a registry setting upon entry, and a GUI application simply sets this registry entry to True/False.... then suddenly the contribution is so enormous, to warrant the label of "new invention"?

Really? Are you serious?

I am a coder, not a lawyer - and from reading the patent's claims, I can see only one thing that was not in HeapCheck, but which DID exist in Electric Fence: the ability to enable heap checks at runtime, without recompilation. Electric Fence allowed one to do that via LD_PRELOAD, so I am sorry, but I stand by what I said - I can see nothing in there that didn't exist in either Efence or my HeapCheck.

I only take an issue with your last paragraph - I certainly didn't leave the code in a graveyard, I released it with an open source license, so that anyone could use it and make his life a bit better. The fact that 10 years later, someone else has now patented the ideas in Electric Fence and HeapCheck, and can now sue me and everyone else using it, is what got me mad (hence the "trolls" comment).

The method, invented by either Bruce Perens or someone before him - we are into 1993 or earlier here - and implemented by me (in 2001, under Win32) and I am sure by many others, is about placing an inaccessible page (4K) right before or after your just malloc-ed region. This way, if the user code reads or writes beyond the boundary, an exception is raised. In the case of my implementation, the "before" or "after" was a compile-time switch. In the case of Bruce Peren's Efence, it was an environment variable. Having that in mind, can anyone see any improvements in any of the claims?

Run Firefox4 and Chrome9 on your machine, and report back... :-)