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QuickTime .MOV + Toshiba + Vista = BSOD
Question Guy writes "Apple QuickTime is involved in a troubling problem that doesn't seem to be addressed by any of the major software and hardware manufacturers involved. On Toshiba machines, such as the Protege Tablet M400s, with Windows Vista installed, opening a locally stored QuickTime .MOV causes instant bluescreen. All other video functions seem to be working in other video playback types — even streaming .MOVs work — and there is little to no 'buzz' on the Net that might push any of the parties to investigate or to play nice together (Microsoft for Vista, Intel for the GMA945 chipset, Toshiba for their custom tablet software, Apple for QuickTime). Help, anyone?"
No, it couldn't... If you're running as an unprivileged user, the software you run shouldn't possibly be able to crash your OS.
Drivers can, and bugs in the OS can. User-run programs can only (accidentally) trigger one of those... in which case, that's a DoS exploit in the system.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Perhaps Microsoft will be in a little bit more of a hurry when the hackers figure out what is causing the BSOD from Vista and work it into the next custom malware?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We know that Apple is not the problem because an application should never be able to invoke a BSOD, no matter how poorly written.
Here is an example of an idiot trying to look smart. Have you bothered to have someone look at the memory dump? What was the stop code? Did you check the event logs?
The fact is, it could be ANY of the three things mentioned or NONE of them. It could be an anti virus filter driver. It could be a memory access violation in Kernel Mode memory. It could have absolutely nothing to do with Vista or QT or even the Toshiba's drivers. It could be that the author is just stupid.
I'm leaning in the direction that this author is simply ignorant but since he felt he should write an article and place blame with minimal evidence to support his claim, he falls solidly in the stupid category.
The only fact that the author has presented is that he had a BSOD when using QT on Vista on Toshiba hardware when playing a local file. That only gives you suspects. A lawyer should know better. I've had occasions where customers swore up and down that one product was causing a BSOD and the memory dump pointed squarely at another product. Rarely (on XP) did I ever see a memory dump that actually pointed the finger at Windows. More often than not, I've seen memory dumps caused by filter drivers used by anti virus.
Perhaps Mr Fishkin should write more about being a lawyer because he damn well doesn't know much about computers.
There is nothing inherently safe about liberty. That's why so many people died protecting it.
They claimed it was impossible for an application to cause a BSOD so there couldn't be anything wrong with Mozilla.
OK, so Mozilla had a resource leak. Clearly there was also a kernel or driver bug, because a BSOD is a kernel crash.
Isn't a corner stone of "stable" and "reliability" in an modern OS the inability of any app to cause failure by sucking up all resources?
um let me run this scenario by you. you're finishing up your long 226 legal brief in Microsoft word. you go to click file save, but the directory you are saving to has 400 files. windows does some internal file processing and starts eating up the final 10k of available physical memory. swapping begins to occur until your sound card that was playing your favorite midi throws an error because windows did not feed data in time. the sound card drive freaks out, and returns a failure to the midi app. the midi app, not prepared for this, starts an infinite loop eating all of your available memory. eventually you overflow the stack and your windowing system is hosed.
you shake the mouse and click repeatedly hoping to unfreeze the computer. you hit control alt delete, nothing happens. you reset the computer silently hoping word's autosave worked for once.
now, my question to you.. is the above story what you are implying is happening here? (answer this question honestly before you continue)
because that is what happened back in Windows 3.1. Since the creation of modern operating systems, we have learned to take advantage of advanced hardware and separate each application into its own memory space (see: Intro to Operating Systems at your local community college). Thus, a single application should NOT take down your entire system. If an application is causing a BSOD and there is no funky kernel-mode hardware access going on.. the fault is on the hardware or OS (to include drivers as well). Period.
If you wish to debate this, remember that I may have just found a way to compromise your system.