* Posts by rwessman

5 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2019

The US government wants developers to stop using C and C++

rwessman

Conversion is not an option

My company has (literally) millions of lines of C/C++. Conversion would take years and introduce so much instability that it would be impractical.

Instead, we’ve invested in memory checking tools. It’s not perfect, but it’s better that turning the code base upside down.

Google Cloud shows it can break things for lots of customers – not just one at a time

rwessman

Not quite

Er, that was “Yogi Berra” (the human) who said that. ‘Yogi Bear” and Boo Boo were cartoon characters.

Dell customer order database of '49M records' stolen, now up for sale on dark web

rwessman
FAIL

Nothing sensitive?

I got the email as well. I had to laugh when it declared that my physical address was not sensitive.

The day I took down the data centre- I mean, the day I saved the day. Right, boss?

rwessman

Re: That's interesting

That trick never works. Years ago at a former company, there was a disk maintenance tool with the potential to be very destructive if used incorrectly. In fact, it would issue a "Are you sure? (y/n)" prompt twice.

To which customers wrote wrappers like:

dpmaint << END

y

y

END

Did you hear the one about Cisco routers using strcpy insecurely for login authentication? Makes you go AAAAA-AAAAAAArrg *segfault*

rwessman

Re: I'm thinking...

It's probably a lack of code review. In my experience, these kinds of bugs occur frequently in in-house code as well. I've been telling developers to not use strcpy() for years.