Geoff Chappell - Software Analyst
This site had 24,560 visits in September 2022 from 16,317 unique visitors.
The list below is of document pages that were each viewed at least 100 times in the month. Ranks in parentheses are from August 2022. Faded titles are just index pages which I presume are viewed only or mainly on the way to others, especially while moving from one Table of Contents (TOC) to another. One of those index pages is just the skimpiest of placeholders, pending my writing an introduction, which I likely never will get round to. The TOCs are omitted entirely, as is the banner page, since none of these are meant to be seen independently of a document page.
I never know what to make of an old, old page suddenly getting hundreds of readers. When my write-up of a kernel-mode driver from the Stuxnet worm was new in October 2010, it got only 224 views that month and 107 the next. This month, out of the blue, it gets 638! Of course I’m happy to be reminded of it. I’m even quite proud of the write-up. It was by my possibly misguided estimation easily the most detailed of any public write-up of anything about Stuxnet at the time. Do not miss the irony, though, that it would not even have helped get me employed as a security researcher.
Actual joy this month comes from seeing 542 visits to one of my 2018 write-ups about the remaining capability for using one’s own kernel-mode drivers on one’s own computers without having to get them signed by Microsoft. Again, this is easily the Internet’s most detailed analysis of its subject. The joy is that it finally overtakes the decades-old write-up about getting 32-bit Windows to use memory above 4GB. One has been creeping up in readership as the other’s has been falling (surprisingly slowly).
This month’s statistics have an example of a difficulty presented by moving a popular page. I make no secret of not much liking that catalogue pages and others of no distinction are among the site’s most read, but in no way do I regret the catalogue of what the kernel may write to the event log about power management. Even for my own purposes, even just as a computer user, I find this catalogue useful—enough that last month I gave it an updating and revision. But I also moved it. The 323 visits shown below are for its new location. There were also 319 visits to the old location, but how many of those got the old page (before the new was uploaded) and how many got redirected to the new?