Blue Screen of Death

The Blue Screen of Death (also known as a stop error, BSoD, bluescreen, or Blue Screen of Doom) is a colloquialism used for the error screen displayed by some operating systems, most notably Microsoft Windows, after encountering a critical system error which can cause the system to shut down to prevent damage.

Bluescreens on NT-based Windows systems are usually caused by poorly-written device drivers or malfunctioning hardware. In the Win9x era, incompatible DLLs or bugs in the kernel of the operating system could also cause bluescreens. They can also be caused by physical faults such as faulty memory, power supplies, overheating of computer components, or hardware running beyond its specification limits. Bluescreens have been present in all Windows-based operating systems since Windows 3.1; earlier, OS/2 and MS-DOS suffered the Black Screen of Death, and early builds of Windows Vista displayed the Red Screen of Death after a boot loader error.

The term "Blue Screen of Death" originated during OS/2 pre-release development activities at Lattice Inc, the makers of an early Windows and OS/2 C compiler. During porting of Lattice's other tools, developers encountered the stop screen when NULL pointers were dereferenced either in application code or when unexpectedly passed into system API calls. During reviews of progress and feedback to IBM Austin, Texas, the developers described the stop screen as the Blue Screen of Death to denote the screen and the finality of the experience

Variations of blue in culture

Fashion

• Dark clothing for males such as dark blue business suits have become much more popular since about 1995^{[citation needed]}, as opposed to the pastel coloured business suits worn in the 1970s by major leaders in such institutions as the United States Congress (the vast difference in the clothing worn in the 1970s as opposed to the 2000s can be readily seen by looking at a videotape of the Watergate hearings).

Drawing of police officer

Law Enforcement

• Police normally wear dark blue or, sometimes, medium blue uniforms (However, the New Age philosopher Alan Watts suggested in the 1960s that police ought to wear baby blue uniforms.).

Sexuality

• In the bandana code of the gay leather subculture, wearing a medium blue bandana means one is into the fetish of having sex with someone who is wearing a police uniform.^[19]
• In Russian, the word for light blue, голубой, can be used to mean 'homosexual'.^[20]

Sociology

• Dark blue represents knowledge, power, integrity, and seriousness. In Western civilization, those in the upper classes in high places of political or economic power often wear dark blue suits. Ordinary members of the working class (especially those who work in the computer industry) often refer derisively to these management functionaries as the suits.^[21] This terminology is also used in the television industry--the network executives are often referred to by the creative people (actors, directors, and screenwriters) as the suits.^[22]
• In historical atlases published in Germany, light blue is traditionally used as a colour to represent Germany, as opposed to pink for England, purple for France, and light green for Russia

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Microsoft.co.uk succumbs to SQL injection attack

A hacker successfully attacked a Web page within Microsoft Corp.'s U.K. domain on Wednesday, resulting in the display of a photograph of a child waving the flag of Saudi Arabia.
Jeremy Kirk
Fri, 29 Jun 2007 13:00:00 UTC
A hacker successfully attacked a Web page within Microsoft Corp.'s U.K. domain on Wednesday, resulting in the display of a photograph of a child waving the flag of Saudi Arabia.
It was "unfortunate" that the site was vulnerable, said Roger Halbheer, chief security advisor for Microsoft in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, on Friday.
The problem has since been fixed. However, the hack highlights how large software companies with technical expertise can still prove vulnerable to hackers.
The hacker, who posted his name as "rEmOtEr," exploited a programming mistake in the site by using a technique known as SQL (Structured Query Language) injection to get unauthorized access to a database, Halbheer said. The site took SQL queries of a particular form, embedded in URLs (uniform resource locators), and passed them to a database. By embedding a query with an unexpected form in the requested URL, the hacker prompted the server to return error messages, Halbheer said.
From those error messages, a hacker can get an idea of how the database is structured and refine a SQL query that the database will process as an instruction to insert, rather than retrieve, data. Eventually, the hacker found the right combination and inserted a link to an external Web site into the database.
That meant when the normal Web page was called into a browser, the database would download data from an external link. In this case, it was two photos and a graphic, a screen shot of which is available on Zone-H.org, which tracks hacked Web sites.
There are two ways to avoid this style of attack. First, the database should not be allowed to return error messages, Halbheer said. Secondly, the Web application should have validated the URL the hacker entered and rejected ones that should not be processed, he said.
If a programmer makes a mistake, "the bad guy can leverage it," Halbheer said.
SQL injection attacks are on the rise, overall, since valuable data is held within databases, said Paul Davie, founder and chief operating officer of Secerno Ltd., a security vendor that develops technology to protect databases from SQL attacks.
"I don't think Microsoft are unique in this respect and shouldn't be held up as particularly slipshod," Davie said. "This could have happened to practically anybody."

Planet Earth

Earth is the third planet, and 93,000,000 miles (150,000,000 km.) from the sun. It is estimated to be over 4.5 billion years old.

The planet rotates once every 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4.09 seconds. It makes one full revolution around the sun every 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes, and 9.45 seconds. Earth's axis is tilted at a 23.5° angle.

Earth has a total surface area of 196,800,00 square miles. Approximately 57,300,00 square miles, or 29% of the total surface area is land. Water covers approximately 139,500,000 square miles, or 71% of the total surface area.

The highest temperatures on Earth have reached 136° F (58° C) at Al Asisiyah, Libya. Temperatures of - 128° F (-89° C) have been recorded at Vostok station in Antarctica.

The atmosphere is a thin, gaseous layer of air that envelops the planet. Its inner layer is called the troposphere and reaches only 11 miles above sea level. It contains most of the planet's air, which consists of nitrogen (78%) and oxygen (21%). The stratosphere, or outer layer, stretches 11-30 miles above sea level and contains ozone (O3). Ozone filters out most of the sun's harmful ultraviolet radiation.

More than 99% of earth's atmosphere is less than 50 miles (80 km.) high. However, particles of the atmosphere are found 1,000 miles (1,600 km.) in space above the planet's surface.

Source : blueplanetbiomes

Religion

• Blue in Hinduism: Many of the gods are depicted as having blue-coloured skin, particularly those associated with Vishnu, who is said to be the Preserver of the world and thus intimately connected to water. Krishna and Ram, Vishnu's avatars, are usually blue. Shiva, the Destroyer, is also depicted in light blue tones and is called neela kantha, or blue-throated, for having swallowed poison in an attempt to turn the tide of a battle between the gods and demons in the gods' favour.

• Blue in Judaism: In the Torah,^[11] the Israelites were commanded to put fringes, tzitzit, on the corners of their garments, and to weave within these fringes a "twisted thread of blue (tekhelet)".^[12] In ancient days, this blue thread was made from a dye extracted from a Mediterranean snail called the hilazon. Maimonides claimed that this blue was the colour of "the clear noonday sky"; Rashi, the colour of the evening sky.^[13] According to several rabbinic sages, blue is the colour of God's Glory.^[14] Staring at this colour aids in mediation, bringing us a glimpse of the "pavement of sapphire, like the very sky for purity", which is a likeness of the Throne of God.^[15] (The Hebrew word for glory.) Many items in the Mishkan, the portable sanctuary in the wilderness, such as the menorah, many of the vessels, and the Ark of the Covenant, were covered with blue cloth when transported from place to place.^[16]

• Blue in Islam: In verse 20:102 of the Qur’an, the word زرق zurq (plural of azraq 'blue') is used metaphorically for evildoers whose eyes are glazed with fear, as if the sclera is filmed over with a bluish tint.

• Blue in Christianity: This colour in some traditions is sometimes associated with the clothing of heavenly figures, most commonly (especially in the Catholic tradition) that of Saint Mary. Ironically, it also has connections with the deadly sin of lust.

Etymology and definitions

The modern English word blue comes from the Middle English, bleu or blwe, which came from an Old French word bleu of Germanic origin (Frankish or possibly Old High German blao, "shining"). Bleu replaced Old English blaw. The root of these variations was the Proto-Germanic blæwaz, which was also the root of the Old Norse word bla and the modern Icelandic blár, and the Scandinavian word blå, but it can refer to other non blue colours. A Scots and Scottish English word for "blue-grey" is blae, from the Middle English bla ("dark blue," from the Old English blæd). Ancient Greek lacked a word for blue and Homer called the colour of the sea "wine dark", except that the word kyanos (cyan) was used for dark blue enamel.

As a curiosity, blue is thought to be cognate with blond, blank and black through the Germanic word. Through a Proto-Indo-European root, it is also linked with Latin flavus ("yellow"; see flavescent and flavine), with Greek phalos (white), French blanc (white, blank) (borrowed from Old Frankish), and with Russian белый, belyi ("white," see beluga), and Welsh blawr (grey) all of which derive (according to the American Heritage Dictionary) from the Proto-Indo-European root *bhel- meaning "to shine, flash or burn", (more specifically the word bhle-was, which meant light coloured, blue, blond, or yellow), whence came the names of various bright colours, and that of colour black from a derivation meaning "burnt" (other words derived from the root *bhel- include bleach, bleak, blind, blink, blank, blush, blaze, flame, fulminate, flagrant and phlegm).

In the English language, blue may refer to the feeling of sadness. "He was feeling blue". This is because blue was related to rain, or storms, and in Greek mythology, the god Zeus would make rain when he was sad (crying), and a storm when he was angry. Kyanos was a name used in Ancient Greek to refer to dark blue tile (in English it means blue-green or cyan).^[3] The phrase "feeling blue" is linked also to a custom among many old deepwater sailing ships. If the ship lost the captain or any of the officers during its voyage, she would fly blue flags and have a blue band painted along her entire hull when returning to home port.^[4]

Many languages do not have separate terms for blue and or green, instead using a cover term for both (when the issue is discussed in linguistics, this cover term is sometimes called grue in English).

Blue

Blue is a colour, the perception of which is evoked by light having a spectrum dominated by energy with a wavelength of roughly 440–490 nm. It is considered one of the additive primary colours. On the HSV Colour Wheel, the complement of blue is yellow; that is, a colour corresponding to an equal mixture of red and green light. On a colour wheel based on traditional colour theory (RYB), the complementary colour to blue is considered to be orange (based on the Munsell colour wheel).^[2] The English language commonly uses "blue" to refer to any colour from navy blue to cyan. The word itself is derived from the Old French word bleu.

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