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

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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