About Me
I love building things.I have co-founded four startups, assembled and managed teams of developers and delivered products that millions of people use every day.Some bits of trivia:Remember that pinball...
View ArticleBetter Bit Mixing - Improving on MurmurHash3's 64-bit Finalizer
Austin Appleby's superb MurmurHash3 is one of the best general purpose hash functions available today. Still, as good as it is, there are a couple of minor things about it that make me uneasy. I want...
View ArticleQuicksort with Hungarian Folk Dance
This is brilliant (and finally explains the music that plays from my computer every time I call a sort function!)
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SPRUCE - A Way of Thinking About Software
Analyzing and comparing software can be a complex task and I needed a way to break it up into components to avoid being overwhelmed by the details. These six top-level categories help keep me...
View Article.Net's Sort Is Not Secure. Don't Use It. Here's a Better One.
.Net's Array.Sort (up to at least version 4.0) has serious weaknesses:1. It is insecure and using it makes you vulnerable to a malicious attacker. .Net uses an ordinary quicksort with the pivot...
View ArticleVote for fixing .Net's sorting security vulnerability
Several people suggested reporting this to Microsoft. Good idea. If you feel it is important to fix this you can vote for it at the following link:Bug: .Net's sort is not secure and is vulnerable to an...
View ArticleQuicksort: Is picking a pivot at random secure?
Eric offered this suggestion:Another way to harden quicksort is to select the elements used in the pivot calculation randomly. This makes it nearly impossible for an attacker to cause worst case...
View ArticleLINQ sorting is also vulnerable
This is a follow-up post to .Net's Sort Is Not Secure. Don't Use It. Here's a Better One.A reader asked if LINQ's sort has the same vulnerability. I added tests for sorting an array using LINQ's...
View ArticleAmazon Fire Phone
I can finally reveal the reason for letting my blog lie dormant for so long. I've been fully occupied (and then some) working on a secret project at Amazon: the Fire phone. This is the message I sent...
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World's Nerdiest Glasses
Here I am modeling our "idealized head tracker" glasses for the Fire phone announcement:We built these in the early days of developing our head tracker. You can see three small IR lights mounted on the...
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