My browser crashed while trying to download some rather large files overnight.
AGAIN.
This time I got irritated so I clicked the bubble, read the directions, and made the fucking “error” go away.
I know the files are safe, but the “oooooh, scary!” warnings make me think that when I come home tonight there will be a pile of ashes where my hard drive used to be.
I’m being slightly paranoid, right?
No, you’re not. Put “DEP vulnerability windows” (without the quotes) into your favourite search engine and beware.
Which browser are you using?
DEP is a mechanism to keep programs from performing buffer overflow exploits. Theres a chance a badly coded add-on is causing this, so you should definitely do some kind of virus scan to be sure.
Just for completeness sake, data execution protection (DEP) is the Microsoft term for a function supported by features that Intel and AMD added some years ago to their processors. From 2004, both Windows (via XP SP2) and Linux have had support for the processor functionality, and both also have software-only versions for old processors.
It allows the operating system to mark data regions of memory as non-executable, preventing buffer overrun bugs from becoming exploits. Some older software, particularly drivers, used [dubious, IMO] techniques that conflict with DEP, causing errors during normal operation.
It’s possible for a well-behaved application to have problems with DEP (usually called the ‘NX bit’, for ‘No eXecute’, or W^X, for ‘Write XOR* eXecute’, outside of MS-land) if it generates its own code on-the-fly, as with Java applications being run by older versions of the HotSpot VM: The VM would actually generate machine code just in time from the bytecode, write it to memory, and execute that machine code instead of interpreting the bytecode over and over. Modern versions of the VM no longer have a problem with the NX bit.
*(XOR is a logic function, eXclusive OR, that means ‘one or the other but not both’.)