(I borrowed this idea from Dorothy Surrenders, who has weekend crushes on famous, smart, and/or beautiful women. I, instead, tend to crush on bloggers, and women on the Internet in general!)
This Sunday, my crush is on Joanna Rutkowska, of invisiblethings.org.
Rutkowska is a computer security researcher. Basically, she tries to find ways to break into computers and compromise their security, so that the problems that allowed the break-in can be fixed. She specializes in virtualization exploits.
Her main claim to fame the so-called ‘blue pill’. The blue pill is a small program that takes advantage of the hardware virtualization capabilities in AMD cpus, and causes the operating system to be run inside the blue pill (sort of like the Matrix, get it?), all without the operating system being able to easily stop or detect it. The publication and development of this concept caused a media storm, as it essentially exposed a design flaw in lots and lots of hardware!
I could go on and on about all the amazing things that she’s created and discovered, but as most (non-computer geek!) people would probably get rather confused and/or bored, let me just say:
Joanna Rutkowska = smart, cool, & generally awesome!