Re: xkcd: CrowdStrike

On Thu, 25 Jul 2024 16:35:18 -0500, Lynn McGuire
<lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:
>

On 7/24/2024 6:19 PM, Scott Dorsey wrote:

Paul S Person  <psperson@old.netcom.invalid> wrote:

>
I saw an article where Microsoft was blaming the EU for forcing them
to allow 3rd-party access to the Kernal, which they claim is what
enabled the update to do bad things. If that is true, they may have a
point.

 
There is always third-party access to the kernel.  In the Windows NT days
before Microsoft had figured out 1960s-style memory protection, any program
in user space could make changes to the kernel.  And sometimes they
accidentally did.
 
What the EU forced Microsoft to do was to DOCUMENT the kernel so that
people could more reliably get third-party access.
--scott

>
There have always been back doors into the DOS, Win16, Win32, and Win64
kernels.  I document some of those on my website:
   https://www.winsim.com/diskid32/diskid32.html

>
I still have my Undocumented books (DOS, PC, Windows) and, somewhere a
very popular in its day list of IRQs that I downloaded at some point.
>
/Undocumented Windows/ pointed out that, as Windows evolved (this was
mostly about the 16-bit versions), Microsoft re-organized the APIs it
provided but left a stub in the original DLL to transfer the call to
whatever DLL it was now in.
>
I once used that to demonstrate that even a system that was clearly
designed could have "junk DNA" (superfluous code) in it.
>
This, of course, was back when "junk DNA" was Proof Positive against
people being designed.
>
Now there is no "junk DNA"; indeed, the difference between Man and
Monkey appears to be all about the former "junk DNA", which kind of
blows a hole in gene theory, as the non-genes appear to be more
important than the genes in some respects.
--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"