DDJ, October 2007
Computer Security


FEATURES

AI: It's OK Again!
Michael Swaine
Over the last half century, AI has had its ups and down. But for now, it's on the rise again.

Visual Cryptography and Bit-Plane Complexity Segmentation
Daniel Stoleru
Bit-Plane Complexity Segmentation lets you embed large amounts of data in images.

Inside the Windows Vista Disk Encryption Algorithm
Mohamed Abo El-Fotouh and Klaus Diepold
To protect the confidentiality of data on hard disks, Windows Vista uses Bitlocker Drive Encryption, which is based on the AES-CBC + Elephant diffuser algorithm.

Memory-Aware Components
Kirk J. Krauss
In an ideal world, your programs gracefully handle out-of-memory conditions and keep running. But in the real world...

Software and the Core Description Process
Josh Reed
PSICAT is an open-source, cross-platform Java tool for creating, viewing, and editing geological core description diagrams.

Logging In C++
Petru Marginean
Logging is a critical technique for troubleshooting and maintaining software systems. Petru presents a C++ logging framework that is typesafe, thread-safe, and portable.


COLUMNS

Effective Concurrency
Herb Sutter
A "critical section" is a region of code that executes in isolation with respect to some or all other code in the program.

The Agile Edge
Scott W. Ambler
Scott argues that Agile is a discipline that requires discipline.


DEPARTMENTS

Hmmmm
Jonathan Erickson
To everyone's delight, it's back-to-school time.

Alia Vox
James Reinders
James shares his 8 rules for parallelization on multicore processors.

Developer Diaries
edited by Michael Swaine
Good tools and strong teams lead to top-notch software development projects.

Developer's Notebook
compiled by the DDJ Staff
New development products and new releases of existing ones.

Conversations
Deirdre Blake
Matt Moynahan defines on-demand security and examines the binary-code versus source-code analysis in terms of security.

Swaine's Flames
Michael Swaine
Here are Michael's candidates for Microsoft's greatest hits of 2007.