Amnon

I don't see where the spiral comes in. The following rule is simpler:

(1) Begin at the variable name, read from left to right, then go back to the name and read from right to left.

(2) Give precedence to expressions in parentheses.

For example: char (fp)( int, float * )

The innermost expression is (* fp). Nothing to the right of the fp. so read to the left: "* ", it's a pointer. Next, we go right and see an arguments list, so it's a pointer to a function taking these arguments. Go back to where we started and read right to left: Pointer to a function taking (int,float *) that returns a pointer to char.

The first time I saw the vuvuzela mentioned in a humorous context it was funny. However, it was used in every joke for the past two weeks. It's starting to be as annoying as the vuvuzela sound.

I tried it in Visual Stdio and noticed this font has ligatures. as between f and i in the word "specified". It looks horrible in a fixed width font since the other letters are separated from each other. Additionally, somehow Visual Studio treats the letter pair as a single letter, so you can only select or erase the pair as whole. Not very usable.

Just wondering, what's the solution to the riddle at the end? The test function sets up the input, calls the routine, and then compares its output to the desired output. There doesn't seem to be a place for error there.

Right, he never said that Israel should be wiped off the map. He just said that an anonymous state whose capital is Jerusalem should vanish.

EDIT: that was a reply to the apologetic section of the article the OP linked to. Reading further you get a link to Iran's president website [1] which contains plainer words by Ahmadinejad .

[1] http://www.president.ir/en/?ArtID=10114

So, in essence, the post shows that you can always transform a for loop into a fold call (you can emulate the loop's mutable variables with function arguments). But I don't think the result is better in any sense than the original, imperative, style.

Summary of the article: AV software hook into Windows system calls. When user-mode calls a kernel function, the AV hook handler first checks that the arguments comply with the security policy. If they do, it passes the arguments to Windows in order to execute the call. However, another user-mode thread can change the data between the time of the check and the execution. The AV will see valid data, but Windows itself will act upon the malicious data.

This is a vulnerability in AV software, not in Windows. If the attack succeeds the system remains just as secure as other operating systems which don't have AV.

How can the attack be prevented? I guess in the same way that the kernel itself prevents such attacks (after all, the kernel has its own checks, which presumably can't be bypassed). There's probably a way to make memory pages read-only for the duration of the system call, so the data can't be changed.