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Software obsolescence and security
Pascal Cuoq on 31 December 2012

A couple of months ago, I packed a computer into a brown plastic bag of the kind usually used for trash. I then carried the carefully packed computer down to the basement. Physically, the computer still works. It is still beautiful (it is an iMac G4). It has been with...

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December in Security
Pascal Cuoq on 30 December 2012

Robert Graham, of the blog Errata Security, predicts that “vulnerabilities in Acrobat Reader Adobe Flash and Java today […] will be announced and patched in 2013”. As fate would have it he could safely have included Internet Explorer 8 in his list of software products used by millions to process...

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zlib progress: one comma misused
Pascal Cuoq on 18 December 2012

A few days ago I announced that the world had been using an unverified zlib library for too long and that we were going to fix this. This post is the first progress report. I have found a harmless undefined behavior in zlib and I have learnt something about the...

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Seriously, Go?
Pascal Cuoq on 11 December 2012

I used to be curious about the D programming language. D had been pitched to me as “C done right”. Even before I had time to look at it though someone on StackOverflow was having an issue that stemmed from constant floating-point expressions being evaluated at compile-time with different semantics...

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Formally verifying zlib
Pascal Cuoq on 6 December 2012

In a blog post earlier this year, John Regehr wonders when software verification will finally matter. He means “formal verification”, I am pretty sure. “Verification” is what practitioners of, say, the software development V-cycle have been doing for decades, and it has kept us safe for that long—at least, when...

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