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Category: The Book

You have the right… to reverse engineer

You have the right… to reverse engineer

This NYTimes article about the VW diesel issue and the DMCA made me think about how, 10 years ago next month, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) almost kept Mark Russinovich from disclosing the Sony BMG Rootkit. While the DMCA provides exceptions for reporting security vulnerabilities, it does nothing to allow for reporting breaches of… integrity. I believe that we need to consider an expansion of how researchers are permitted to, without question, reverse engineer certain systems. While entities need a…

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Farewell, floppy diskette

Farewell, floppy diskette

I never would have imagined myself in an arm-wrestling match with the floppy disk drive. But sitting where I did in Windows setup, that’s exactly what happened. A few times. When I had started at Microsoft, a boot floppy was critical to setting up a new machine. Not by the time I was in setup. Since Remote Installation Services (RIS) could start with a completely blank machine, and you could now boot a system to WinPE using a CD, there…

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My path forward

My path forward

Note: I’m not leaving Seattle, or leaving Directions on Microsoft. I just thought I would share the departure email I sent in 2004. Today, August 6, 2014 marks the tenth anniversary of the day I left Microsoft and Seattle to work at Winternals in Austin. For those who don’t know – earlier that day, Steve Ballmer had sent a company-wide memo entitled “Our path forward”, hence my tongue-in cheek subject selection. From: Wes Miller Sent: Tuesday, July 06, 2004 2:32…

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Job titles are free.

Job titles are free.

“The Sunscreen song”, which is actually named “Everybody’s Free (to Wear Sunscreen)”, by Baz Luhrmann, has been a (potentially odd) source of wisdom for me since it came out in 1998, just a few years after I graduated from college. I listen to the song periodically, and try to share it with my kids who, at 9 and 13, don’t yet “get” it. The words of the song aren’t those of the artist, and they aren’t Kurt Vonnegut’s either, regardless of what urban…

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