Questões de Inglês - Sinônimos | Synonyms para Concurso

                                  This (Illegal) American Life

      My parents came to New York City to make their fortune when I was a baby. Irresponsible and dreamy and in their early 20s, they didn't think things through when their visa expired; they decided to stay just a bit longer to build up a nest egg.

      But our stay got progressively longer, until, when I was 6, my grandfather died in South America. My father decided my mother and I should go to the funeral and, with assurances that he would handle everything, sat me down and told me I'd have a nice visit in his boyhood home in Argentina, then be back in America in a month.

      I didn't see him for two years.

      We couldn't get a visa to return. My father sent us money from New Jersey, as the months of our absence stretched into years. Finally, he met someone who knew "coyotes" - people who smuggled others into the U.S. via Mexico. He paid them what they asked for, and we flew to Mexico City.

      They drove us to the Mexican side of the border, and left us at a beach. Another from their operation picked us up there and drove us across as his family. We passed Disneyland on our way to the airport, where we boarded the plane to finally rejoin my father.

      As a child, I had thought coming back home would be the magical end to our troubles, but in many ways it was the beginning. I chafed at the strictures of undocumented life: no social security number meant no public school (instead I attended a Catholic school my parents could scarcely afford); no driver's license, no after-school job. My parents had made their choices, and I had to live with those, seeing off my classmates as they left on a class trip to Canada, or packing to go off to college, where 1 could not go.

      The year before I graduated from high school, Congress passed the amnesty law of 1987. A few months after my 18th birthday, I became legal and what had always seemed a blank future of no hope suddenly turned dazzling with possibility.

      When I went for my interview at the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the caseworker looked at me quizzically when he heard me talk in unaccented English and joke about current events. Surely this American teenager did not fit in with the crowd of illegals looking to make things right.

      At the time, I was flattered. His confusion meant I could pass as an American.

                                  (Newsweek, October 2f 2008. Page 12.)

A professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has claimed to have developed software that can find and fix certain types of software bugs within a matter of minutes. Normally when a potentially harmful vulnerability is discovered in a piece of software, it usually takes nearly a month on average for human engineers to come up with a fix and to push the fix out to affected systems. The professor, however, hopes that the new software, called Fixer, will speed this process up, making software significantly more resilient against failure or attack.

Fixer works without assistance from humans and without access to a program’s underlying source code. Instead, the system monitors the behavior of a binary. By observing a program’s normal behavior and assigning a set of rules, Fixer detects certain types of errors, particularly those caused when an attacker injects malicious input into a program. When something goes wrong, Fixer throws up the anomaly and identifies the rules that have been violated. It then comes up with several potential patches designed to push the software into following the violated rules. (The patches are applied directly to the binary, bypassing the source code.) Fixer analyzes these possibilities to decide which are most likely to work, then installs the top candidates and tests their effectiveness. If additional rules are violated, or if a patch causes the system to crash, Fixer rejects it and tries another.

Fixer is particularly effective when installed on a group of machines running the same software. In that case, what Fixer learns from errors on one machine, is used to fix all the others. Because it doesn’t require access to source code, Fixer could be used to fix programs without requiring the cooperation of the company that made the software, or to repair programs that are no longer being maintained.

But Fixer’s approach could result in some hiccups for the user. For example, if a Web browser had a bug that made it unable to handle URLs past a certain length, Fixer’s patch might protect the system by clipping off the ends of URLs that were too long. By preventing the program from failing, it would also put a check on it working full throttle.