Quel vecchio baco di WinRar. Ma proprio vecchio, eh?

Money quote: "WinRAR, a Windows file compression program with 500 million users worldwide, recently fixed a more than 14-year-old vulnerability that made it possible for attackers to execute malicious code when targets opened a booby-trapped file.

The vulnerability was the result of an absolute path traversal flaw that resided in UNACEV2.DLL, a third-party code library that hasn’t been updated since 2005. The traversal made it possible for archive files to extract to a folder of the archive creator’s choosing rather than the folder chosen by the person using the program. Because the third-party library doesn’t make use of exploit mitigations such as address space layout randomization, there was little preventing exploits."

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/nasty-code-execution-bug-in-winrar-threatened-millions-of-users-for-14-years/

Senza una lira, una svanzica, un euro. Niente. Cashless

Money quote: "It is very difficult already today to find an establishment where they accept cash. You have to be ready to pay by card or by the mobile application Swish."

https://interestingengineering.com/sweden-how-to-live-in-the-worlds-first-cashless-society

La fine del futuro: la morte del Mriya: la tragedia nella tragedia

Money quote: "In a hangar a few miles away rested the world’s largest airplane, so special that only one was ever built. Its name is Mriya, pronounced Mer-EE-ah, which in Ukrainian means The Dream. With its six jet engines, twin tail fins and a wingspan nearly as long as a football field, Mriya hauled gargantuan amounts of cargo across the world, mesmerizing crowds wherever it landed. It was an airplane celebrity, aviation enthusiasts say, and widely beloved. It was also a cherished symbol of Ukraine."

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/22/world/europe/ukraine-airplane-russia-war-mriya.html

Una storia come non ne avevo mai letto. Incredibile: il libro che è affondato con il Titanic e poi è bruciato nel blitz.

Money quote: "A contemporary of that opinion was King Edward VII's librarian at Windsor Castle, Sir John Fortescue. He was among the first to be offered the chance to buy the Omar but declined, later describing it as "the most eminent failure, perhaps, that I ever saw", a work he found "absolutely inappropriate, ineffective and insignificant, and to me personally a positive distress"."

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-57683638

Se a un certo punto la paranoia vi brucia definitivamente il cervello e non vi fidate più neanche della Wayback machine dell'Internet Archive, fear no more: ecco la risposta autarchica per definizione. Codice sorgente e tutto il resto.

Money quote: "ArchiveBox takes a list of website URLs you want to archive, and creates a local, static, browsable HTML clone of the content from those websites (it saves HTML, JS, media files, PDFs, images and more)."

https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox

Learning by doing. È la regola di alcuni settori, ad esempio quello aerospaziale. Ma vale anche per il software. Così, per fare un altro esempio, per capire bene bene come funziona Git forse si potrebbe riscriverlo...

Money quote: "This article is an attempt at explaining the Git version control system from the bottom up, that is, starting at the most fundamental level moving up from there. This does not sound too easy, and has been attempted multiple times with questionable success. But there’s an easy way: all it takes to understand Git internals is to reimplement Git from scratch.

It’s not a joke, and it’s really not complicated: if you read this article top to bottom and write the code (or just clone the repository — but you should write the code yourself, really), you’ll end up with a program, called wyag, that will implement all the fundamental features of git: init, add, rm, status, commit, log… in a way that is perfectly compatible with git itself. The last commit of this article was actually created with wyag, not git. And all that in exactly 503 lines of very simple Python code."

https://wyag.thb.lt/

Un linguaggio di programmazione per fare arte con la matematica

Money quote: "Curv is a programming language for creating art using mathematics. It's a 2D and 3D geometric modelling tool that supports full colour, animation and 3D printing."

https://github.com/curv3d/curv

Avete bisogno di qualche bella immagine surreale per il vostro web? Search no more...

Money quote: "Each illustration offers the possibility of limitless interpretations and uses and everyone can give it its own meaning.

It depends only on each one's creativity and free spirit."

https://absurd.design

Un gioco da tavolo fatto con una profonda base etica. Sugli uccelli

Money quote: "Aiming to design a game with scientific integrity, Ms. Hargrave pulled data on North American birds from eBird, a citizen-science project managed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. She also made use of the lab’s All About Birds website, as well as Audubon’s online guide."

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/science/wingspan-board-game-elizabeth-hargrave.html

È arrivato il momento che giochiamo tutti a Dwarf Fortress

Money quote: "Dwarf Fortress, the famously complex and often inscrutable colony simulation, is coming to Steam and itch.io. The new version will be published by Kitfox Games, a Montreal-based independent studio, and will include graphics, music, sounds, and Steam Workshop integration. An ASCII-based mode will still be available in this new version, and development of the original game will continue unabated."

https://www.polygon.com/2019/3/13/18263905/dwarf-fortress-steam-graphics-workshop

E poi: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/

Lo Slack per gli influencer? Si chiama Discord

Money quote: "Sara Dietschy, a YouTuber with nearly half a million subscribers, set up a Discord server for her fans six months ago after she noticed other YouTube stars offering them. “It’s basically a free and easy way to have a Slack with your community,” she said. But, she said, “Slack is for you to be productive at work. Discord is pretty much the opposite,” she said."

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/how-discord-went-mainstream-influencers/584671/

Rovinarsi il piacere dei videogiochi e di procrastinare tutto in un colpo solo: un videogioco con cui si fanno liste TO-DO

Money quote: "Loresome is a productivity and self-improvement app that combines the fun of playing games with the motivation of using a TODO list."

https://loresome.com

Far fuori la plastica dalla nostra vita. Si può

Money quote: "Let’s tackle the hardest part first: your kitchen. If you look around, you’ll see that most food comes in plastic. It’s the cheapest material on the market, so brands use it to package food and families often use Ziploc bags, Saran wrap, and Tupperware to store it. But there are ways around it."

https://www.fastcompany.com/90312169/a-totally-achievable-relatively-painless-guide-to-cutting-plastic-out-of-your-life

Tsunami. Anzi, dopo lo tsunami.

Money quote: "Here is a list of Japanese words. Tsunami. Pronounced “tsoo-nah-mee.” Translation: “harbor wave.” E. Pronounced “a-ay.” Interrogative. Translation: “What?” Hayaku. Pronounced “hi-yah-koo.” Translation: “hurry.” Hashitte. Pronounced “hah-shht-ay.” Imperative. Translated to English: “Run.”"

https://longreads.com/2019/03/11/after-the-tsunami/

Professioni singolari: calligrafo

Money quote: "Most of the actual text of Mira calligraphae monumenta is taken from the Bible—the “lorem ipsum” graphic filler used in those times. The dizzying circular text on a page featuring a pair of pears and a seashell is actually the Lord’s Prayer squeezed into an area the size of a quarter, dexterously rendered with a bird-quill pen and runny ink. Bocskay used the same tools as other scribes of his day, but he had the advantage of experience. Having been born into a noble family in Croatia, he learned to read and write at an early age. This allowed him to develop his calligraphic skill so much that he could support himself and his family on it. Even as handwritten books were going out of fashion, elites such as emperors still had the appetite—and budget—for them."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/illluminated-manuscript-calligraphy-guide

Illustratori per la Nasa immaginano la vita in ambienti orbitali completi

Money quote: "In the 1970s the Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill, with the help of NASA Ames Research Center and Stanford University, held a series of space colony summer studies which explored the possibilities of humans living in giant orbiting spaceships. Colonies housing about 10,000 people were designed and a number of artistic renderings of the concepts were made."

https://publicdomainreview.org/collections/space-colony-art-from-the-1970s/

Marci fin dalle fondamenta, e anche nei dettagli più secondari

Money quote: "A few days ago, Microsoft made the source code of their Windows Calculator publicly available. Calculator is an application that has traditionally shipped with every Windows version. A number of Microsoft projects went open-source over the recent years, but this time the news was covered even by non-IT media on the very first day. Well, it's a popular yet tiny program in C++. Despite its size, we still managed to find a number of suspicious fragments in its code using the PVS-Studio static analyzer."

https://habr.com/en/company/pvs-studio/blog/443400/

Uno spazietto che va in vendita: se cercate un piccolo ambiente dove lavorare in maniera creativa, potrebbe essere quello che fa per voi

Money quote: "Rudolph designed 23 Beekman place as a spatially rich and very personal vision of the possibilities of architecture. It was both intimate and Piranesi-like, soaring and layered: an orchestration of interlocking spaces. It was Rudolph’s design laboratory, where he would constantly change, try out, and experiment with new variations - a composition of rich textures and reflective materials that caught the light in magical ways. No less than 17 levels could be counted which, pinwheel-like, floated harmoniously and lead from one luminous experience to the next."

https://www.paulrudolphheritagefoundation.org/news-of-the-prhf/2019/2/9/rudolphs-personal-laboratory-at-23-beekman-place-on-the-market

Finalmente è arrivato "Top Gun: Maverick" - La mia stratopica recensione Fumettologica

https://fumettologica.it/2022/05/top-gun-maverick-recensione-film/

L'invenzione dell'interruttore della luce

Money quote: "Castiglioni’s switches, which almost became a European standard for table lamps, possessed a discreetly humble subservience, always present but not listening—and so quite unlike the potentially prying eyes and ears of the various Nests and Homes, which are no longer the equivalent of domestic staff that could keep ‘little secrets’. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day plays on this question of how subservient characters in the background of domestic life interact with the foreground, and the notion of the unreliable narrator, and interpreting a story from a limited ‘dataset’. Given the butler motif is frequently reached for by designers of the smart home—including by me, in my weaker moments—we might do well to re-read Ishiguro’s novel."

https://www.readingdesign.org/let-there-be-light-switches/