Mark Russinovich: From Winternals to Microsoft, On Windows Security, Windows CoreArch

Posted By: Charles | Mar 23rd, 2007 @ 3:21 PM | 120,466 Views | 36 Comments

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If you write code on Windows or like to know what goes on under the hood in Windows, then you've no doubt heard of Mark Russinovich. He's an OS kernel expert and a co-founder of Winternals; a company that produced must-have operating system and development utilities for Windows (Winternals is now a Microsoft subsidiary as we purchased them in July, 2006. Yay!).

Mark is now a Technical Fellow in Windows and is a member of the Windows Core Architecture team (you met some of the other big brains on the CoreArch team last year).

Here we talk frankly about Mark's history, his coming to Microsoft, Windows security, what the CoreArch team does, what his role is, etc. Tune in.

Tags: Architecture, Kernel, Mark Russinovich, MS Personalities, OS, Reliability, Security, UAC, Windows Vista

Rating:

jhu

Great interview! Mark, you're my hero!

TimP

Great interview so far (still watching). Any reason it was cut at around 31:02?

Charles
Welcome Change

Yes. I made a few edits in this video. I know it's rare for me to do this, but in this case I had to.

C

EDIT: I am a terrible editor. Jeez... I'm not sure why I made the first chop where I did. Oh well. So it goes.

danielhyam

Good interview. Vista internals , system calls and UAC explained well.
Awsome.

TimP

After watching the whole thing, I have to agree with the other comments that this is a fantastic video. Mark explains everything crystal clear. I really liked the explanation of the different user roles.

Charles
Welcome Change

I remember now. At 31-something in the interview I made a rude comment about Apple relating to their ads which target Vista UAC in a Matrix kind of way and felt it appropriate to remove it.

Mark's lessons on Vista's fundamental security model was much more interesting.

C

CaptainOblivious

Charles,

Just my 2 cents worth.

One of the best interviews you have done.

Good work.

Xaero_Vincent
Sexy me

Good interview.

Mark described alot of complicated stuff in human language.

kettch

Charles wrote:

Mark's lessons on Vista's fundamental security model was much more interesting.

Indeed.

However, you made my head spin trying to think about how a system could by architected that would do away with the admin/standard user concept. It's a very easy thing to say, but practically turns computer science on it's head.

I totally understand why you guys didn't use the name of the idiot company that tried to rootkit everybody, but that was really when I got into reading Mark's blog. He's a good writer, and it was like reading some sort of techno-thriller mystery.