Introducing Richard Lindberg

By Richard Lindberg, aka RiBiNiN, CastleCops Staff Writer
August 12, 2006

CastleCops exists largely because operating systems and applications contain bugs and vulnerabilities. They can be made to do strange and often malicious things.

Who is at fault for this waste and outright theft? I’m afraid I am. I am an application programmer. I have worked under artificial schedules and under-defined projects my whole career. I, or somebody in the next cube wrote that program that you have to defend yourself from.

You know when I first heard about the Y2K problem? In 1966, that’s when. It was routinely ignored in designs although I heard it brought up, and as I gained some seniority, I brought it up. Yet in my company it was 1999 before it was really addressed. I, and my fellow application programmers throughout the industry let it happen.

And don’t get me started on buffer overflows. There is no excuse at all for buffer overflows. This has been a problem since Grace Hopper was a girl. I was debugging buffer overflows even before I heard about Y2K.

So what I am going to write about is good programming practice. Saving time by taking your time. Learning from both the mistakes and experience of others. Not re-inventing the loop.

I will be presenting code for C, PHP, ASP and C++. Maybe a little CSS if feature creep develops. I don’t know for sure, because I haven’t finished defining this project.