The `ldd` utility is more vulnerable than you think. It's frequently used by programmers and system administrators to determine the dynamic library dependencies of executables. Sounds pretty innocent, right? Wrong! In this article I am going to show you how to create an executable that runs arbitrary code if it's...
Jeff Dean of Google did an excellent keynote talk at LADIS 2009 . Jeff’s talk is up at: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/ladis2009/talks/dean-keynote-ladis2009.pdf and my notes follow:
In Farmington, CT, in fact, the town my cat was named after. Oh yes. That's how much we love that place. Lukasz, Ashok, and Matt will be...
This is the second in a series of posts from the Last.fm engineering team covering the geekier aspects of our recent Last.fm on Xbox LIVE launch. Part one (“The War Room”) is here .
Your browser doesn't seem to support CSS , which this page uses for all styling. Don't be surprised if it looks kinda boring.
Please Note: this was written January 2009 - see the comments for updates and additional information. A lot has changed since I wrote this.
In a conversation at work about the architecture of a new product, someone made an assertion along the lines of, ``then we'd need to use a garbage collector, and that would hurt performance.''
μTP or “micro-Transport Protocol” is a new protocol from BitTorrent, Inc. that is at the heart of the new major release of our popular BitTorrent clients “μTorrent” and “BitTorrent Mainline”. It is going to be available as the default transport mechanism in both μTorrent v2.0 and BitTorrent v7.0. So what’s the big…
Tuning your PostgreSQL database is somewhat of a black art. While documentation does exist on the topic, many people still find it hard to get all the power out of their system. This article aims to help.
The Haiku Project is proud to announce the availability of Haiku R1/Alpha 1, the first official development release of Haiku, an open source operating system that specifically targets personal computing. The purpose of this release is to make a …
One of the FogBugz developers complained that compiling was pretty slow (about 30 seconds), which was leading to a lot of sword fights in the hallway. He asked if it would be OK if someone spent a …
I made a mistake when first publishing this and used the wrong date. Now that I've fixed it you'll have to go to the correct page to see it.
Recently, we were fortunate to host Jeff Rothschild, the Vice President of Technology at Facebook, for a visit for the CNS lecture series. Jeff’s talk, “High Performance at Massive Sca…
I had a call from a new customer last week. They had issues with their MySQL server. Apparently, it was repeatingly crashing, every few hours. To have their production system kept alive, they used …
Jeff Atwood likes referring to his blog post about Hardware is cheap, programmers are expensive . where he writes: "Given the rapid advance ...
Good things sometimes happen to the open source community. Since Facebook acquisition of FriendFeed, a bunch of technologies were released to the wild, including, most notably, a Tornado web server written in Python. The Tornado is touted as a a scalable, non-blocking web server and web…
[EDIT: Minor edits to fix HTML formatting, style, corrected footnote credit, and code indentation the editor kills on every edit.] While l...
