DevTopics

For decades we’ve been told by security software vendors that to truly delete data from a hard drive, you have to overwrite the data multiple times with different patterns of 0s and 1s.  But now we can file this away with other computer urban legends.

Computer forensics expert Craig Wright and his colleagues ran a scientific study that overwrites hard drive data and then examines the magnetic surfaces with a microscope.  They published their results in Lecture Notes in Computer Science as Overwriting Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping Controversy.

The study concludes that after a single overwrite of hard drive data, the likelihood of being able to reconstruct a single byte is 0.97 percent.  The odds of recovering multiple sequential bytes of data (such as a password or document) are significantly less and would require exact knowledge of where on the hard drive the sensitive data is located.

This means data-wiping software that overwrites data up to 35 times may make you feel better, but it only wastes your time and money.

A much bigger data security hole is to overwrite all copies of the data that’s to be deleted.  This is not a problem if you are wiping an entire hard drive, but if you are trying to delete a single sensitive document, you have to worry about temp files, shadow copies, backups, file fragments, the Windows swap file, etc.

100 million lines of code in your car,
100 million lines of code,
If one of the lines develops a bug…

An article by IEEE indicates that a premium-class automobile “contains close to 100 million lines of software code.”  The software executes on 70-100 microprocessor-based electronic control units (ECUs) networked throughout the body of your car.  Even low-end cars have 30-50 ECUs embedded in the body, doors, dash, roof, trunk, seats, etc.  Software controls just about everything from your brakes to the volume of your radio.

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Microsoft received its 10,000th U.S. patent earlier this month.  This makes Microsoft one of the leading patent filers, though IBM still files the most patents and in 2008 became the first company to issue 4,000 patents in a single year.

“Logging the 10,000th patent really is a testament to all of the innovation that has been taking place,” said Microsoft chief patent counsel Bart Eppenauer.  Although Microsoft maintains its patents are mostly for defense, its huge patent portfolio hasn’t kept it out of the courtroom.  The number of patent lawsuits filed against Microsoft has actually increased significantly in the past few years.

“That increase has come almost entirely from entities that do not produce products,” Eppenauer said.  Most of the patent suits come from “patent trolls” whose primary business function is acquiring patents and suing for royalties.  In those cases, having a large patent collection is of little use since the patent troll has no products of its own for which it can be countersued.  But Microsoft’s patent portfolio has other uses such as licensing its technology to companies such as Novell or bullying Linux.

Microsoft’ has become so prolific filing patents that it dedicated a staff of 100 people including 40 attorneys that focus solely on the 2500-3000 U.S. patent applications the company files each year.

This news bodes poorly for independent software vendors, for whom it is nearly impossible to create original software without violating literally thousands of patents.

Story at CNET

The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) simplifies the creation of extensible applications.  MEF offers discovery and composition capabilities that you can leverage to load application extensions.

MEF presents a simple solution for the runtime extensibility problem.  Until now, any application that wanted to support a plugin model needed to create its own infrastructure from scratch.  Those plugins would often be application-specific and could not be reused across multiple implementations.

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Want insight into the design and development of C#?  Then check out these blogs by key members of the Microsoft C# development team:

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I was having trouble with my computer.  So I called Richard, the 11-year-old next door whose bedroom looks like Mission Control, and asked him to come over.

Richard clicked a couple of buttons and solved the problem.

As he was walking away, I called after him, “So, what was wrong?”

He replied, “It was an ID ten T error.”

I didn’t want to appear stupid, but nonetheless inquired, “An, ID ten T error?  What’s that?  In case I need to fix it again.”

Richard grinned. “Haven’t you ever heard of an ID ten T error before?”

“No,” I replied.

“Write it down,” he said, “and I think you’ll figure it out.”

So I wrote it down: I D 1 0 T

I used to like the little bugger.

Buy this ID10T T-shirt!

Tom Ollar and Jim Bennett have developed a very interesting prototype for a next-generation version of the Visual Studio 2010 IDE.  They present 20 new concepts ranging from the inherently useful (visual stack) to the somewhat silly (remoting eye, an eyeball that indicates your programming partner is connected to the session).

One interesting concept is the “mini,” shown in the photo at left.  Before you say “not another diagramming standard!” note that the “mini” DebugDiagrammer is pluggable and can be replaced with UML or your own custom diagrammer.  The intent is to visualize objects, not classes.  The “mini” acts as a thumbnail showing the working internals of an object.

I’m a sucker for next-generation user interfaces.  I love watching movies like Johnny Mnemonic and Minority Report to ogle their futuristic UIs.  But I believe that future interfaces will be more simple and less cluttered, similar to what we’re seeing emerge on the iPhone.  The days of “command smorgasbords” — layers upon layers of menus, toolbars and panels — will eventually give way to simple, malleable interfaces that provide just the information and controls you need at any one time to perform your task.

Read the Code Project article and download a prototype

Microsoft may ship Windows 7 on PCs by September, said Compal president Ray Chen at an investor’s conference.  Compal builds personal computers for Acer, HP and other major PC vendors.  The news matches rumors that Microsoft hopes to release Windows 7 well ahead of the holidays.  This would give Microsoft some time to hopefully iron out some of the initial bugs and avoid the major embarrassment it saw with people downgrading back to XP because Vista simply wouldn’t work.

Microsoft spokeswoman Amelia Agrawal maintains the company’s official position that Windows 7 will ship within three years of Vista, which means by early 2010.  This estimate is presumably conservative to avoid embarrassment in the event of an unexpected delay, as happened repeatedly with Vista, which shipped more than two years after its original scheduled date.  Microsoft has acknowledged an expedited testing phase for Windows 7 that includes just one public beta and one release candidate before shipping.  But so far Windows 7 has been relatively stable in testing.

Microsoft is under significant pressure to release Windows 7 this year to offset the first significant declines in Windows revenue in Microsoft’s history.  These declines are the result of the global recession, plus continued reluctance by both consumers and enterprises to adopt Windows Vista.  Windows 7 is said to improve the user interface and performance, especially on hardware with more modest specifications.

The decline of western civilization is now complete.  The #1 app for the iPhone is iFart, the digital equivalent of a whoopie cushion.  The software sold $10,000 worth on its first day.  And since no good deed goes unchallenged, there are over 75 farting apps now available for the iPhone.

And just when you thought that things couldn’t get any stinkier, InfoMedia, which developed iFart Mobile, filed a legal complaint in Colorado District Court against Air-O-Matic, makers of the rival “Pull My Finger” app.  Apparently Air-O-Matic sought $50,000 from InfoMedia for using the terminology “pull my finger” in a news release and YouTube promo video.  Air-O-Matic also asked Apple to remove iFart from the iPhone App Store, but Apple told the companies to work it out themselves.

So InfoMedia decided to take the matter to court, claiming that the term “pull my finger” is common English slang and a “descriptive phrase” and therefore not covered by trademark.

The RAND Corporation has published a book called “A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates.”  Here’s a brief description:  “Not long after research began at RAND in 1946, the need arose for ‘random numbers’ that could be used to solve problems of various kinds of experimental probability procedures.  These applications, called Monte Carlo methods, required a large supply of random digits and normal deviates of high quality, and the tables presented here were produced to meet those requirements.  Still the largest published source of random digits and normal deviates, the work is routinely used by statisticians, physicists, polltakers, market analysts, lottery administrators, and quality control engineers.”

If the mere existence of such a book isn’t funny enough, check out the user reviews found on Amazon.com:

almost perfect, October 26, 2006  By a curious reader

Such a terrific reference work! But with so many terrific random digits, it’s a shame they didn’t sort them, to make it easier to find the one you’re looking for.

Sloppy., July 27, 2005  By B. MCGROARTY

The book is a promising reference concept, but the execution is somewhat sloppy. Whatever algorithm they used was not fully tested. The bulk of each page seems random enough. However at the lower left and lower right of alternate pages, the number is found to increment directly.

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