Buffer overrun starboard ahead ...

Server Unavailable ... That was the message on my fancy new VoIP phone, when Blaster hit. Nothing worked that afteroon in the company I as at that day. No network, no phone, no nothing. Business stood still. Since then, we know that sloppy written C/C++ programs are the root of all evil, or at least of buffer overruns and other security problem. Therefore managed programming environments like our beloved .NET (and the where everything starts with the letter J) were created -- partially with the hope that these security problems would soon be a thing of the past.

Now, we're writing the year 2 after Blaster, Doom and all the others ... and the Free Standards Group is agreeing on a binary C++ standard for interoperability between Linux distributions --- WOW, that sounds like COM for Linux. Well, I sure hope that the hordes of open source programmers will scrutinize all these newly written lines of C++ code to make sure that come 2007 we don't have a flashback of the security problems we had with Windows apps in 2002. Have fun reading the source code to all your C++ Linux apps, because it will be a few more years before they standardize on a more secure programming environment or does anybody know if the standard requires the equivalent of the security features of the Visual Studio C++ compiler, i.e. /GS and / RTC ?