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A comment on Why Van Halen's contract calls for the removal of all brown M&Ms. Parent comment

Re:Why Van Halen's contract calls for the removal of all bro... by basugasubaku on Wednesday August 05, 2009 @08:54PM (#744586)
A canary is also a random value placed on the stack so the program can detect a buffer overflow. If the canary has been overwritten the program can terminate before malicious code is executed. I suspect a significant portion of Hacker News users is familiar with this terminology regardless of where they learned English.
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Re:Why Van Halen's contract calls for the removal of all bro... by Steve0 on Thursday August 06, 2009 @04:08AM (#745022)
Bit off-topic, but the Rsync project als has a canary for when things go wrong: http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt
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Re:Why Van Halen's contract calls for the removal of all bro... by sachinag on Wednesday August 05, 2009 @09:12PM (#744610)
As a non-programmer, I had no idea that this usage was so widespread. That's actually rather cool, and I'm going to ping my editor to add it to the reference books.
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