version page 2 - Dave's Blog

Most existing DRM attempts to only allow the user to access the DRM'ed content with particular applications or with particular credentials so that if the file is shared it won't be useful to others. A better solution is to encode any of the user's horrible secrets into unique versions of the DRM'ed content so that the user won't want to share it. Entangle the users and the content provider's secrets together in one document and accordingly their interests. I call this Blackmail DRM. For an implementation it is important to point out that the user's horrible secret doesn't need to be verified as accurate, but merely verified as believable.

Apparently I need to get these blog posts written faster because only recently I read about Social DRM which is a light weight version of my idea but with a misleading name. Instead of horrible secrets, they say they'll use personal information like the user's name in the DRM'ed content. More of my thoughts stolen and before I even had a chance to think of it first!

Cool and (relatively) new methods on the JavaScript Array object are here in the most recent versions of your favorite browser! More about them on ECMAScript5, MSDN, the IE blog, or Mozilla's documentation. Here's the list that's got me excited:

some & every

Does your callback function return true for any (some) or all (every) of the array's elements?

filter

Filters out elements for which your callback function returns false (in a new copy of the Array).

map

Each element is replaced with the result of it run through your callback function (in a new copy of the Array).

reduce & reduceRight

Your callback is called on each element in the array in sequence (from start to finish in reduce and from finish to start in reduceRight) with the result of the previous callback call passed to the next. Reduce your array to a single value aggregated in any manner you like via your callback function.

forEach

Simply calls your callback passing in each element of your array in turn. I have vague performance concerns as compared to using a normal for loop.

indexOf & lastIndexOf

Finds the first or last (respectively) element in the array that matches the provided value via strict equality operator and returns the index of that element or -1 if there is no such element. Surprisingly, no custom comparison callback method mechanism is provided.

The following code compiled just fine but did not at all act in the manner I expected:

BOOL CheckForThing(__in CObj *pObj, __in IFigMgr* pFigMgr, __in_opt LPCWSTR url)
{
    BOOL fCheck = FALSE;
    if (SubCheck(pObj))
    {
        ...

bool SubCheck(const CObj& obj);

Did you spot the bug? As you can see I should be passing in *pObj not pObj since the method takes a const CObj& not a CObj*. But then why does it compile?

It works because CObj has a constructor with all but one param with default values and CObj is derived from IUnknown:

CObj(__in_opt IUnknown * pUnkOuter, __in_opt LPCWSTR pszUrl = NULL);

The lesson is unless you really want this behavior, don't make constructors with all but 1 or 0 default parameters. If you need to do that consider using the 'explicit' keyword on the constructor.

More info about forcing single argument constructors to be explicit is available on stack overflow.

I wanted to ensure that my switch statement in my implementation of IInternetSecurityManager::ProcessURLAction had a case for every possible documented URLACTION. I wrote the following short command line sequence to see the list of all URLACTIONs in the SDK header file not found in my source file:

grep URLACTION urlmon.idl | sed 's/.*\(URLACTION[a-zA-Z0-9_]*\).*/\1/g;' | sort | uniq > allURLACTIONs.txt
grep URLACTION MySecurityManager.cpp | sed 's/.*\(URLACTION[a-zA-Z0-9_]*\).*/\1/g;' | sort | uniq > myURLACTIONs.txt
comm -23 allURLACTIONs.txt myURLACTIONs.txt

But in my effort to learn and use PowerShell I found the following similar command line:

diff 
(more urlmon.idl | %{ if ($_ -cmatch "URLACTION[a-zA-Z0-9_]*") { $matches[0] } } | sort -uniq) 
(more MySecurityManager.cpp | %{ if ($_ -cmatch "URLACTION[a-zA-Z0-9_]*") { $matches[0] } } | sort -uniq)