The story of UTF-8 encoding. Rob Pike and Ken Thompson have built a spec and an implementation for Plan 9 OS literally in a couple of days.

#history #text #encoding

Zero-knowledge proof is a big thing in modern cryptography. Here's a post on how to start playing with it right now, without deep and thorough research. Don't expect deep understanding after it, but code samples and further reading links are truly valuable.

#zk #cryptography

Moderately deep dive into what happens when we ask e.g. python to print a hello world for us. Almost every step is described - search for the binary, process fork, dynamic linking, etc. They also describe the tools you can use to inspect all these things.

#linux #os

A bunch of thoughts on what we as software devs could learn from aviation.

#learning #aviation

Check out this story about how John Carmack has achieved smooth scrolling and effective tile redrawing for Commander Keen.

#gamedev #history

Protecting gradle builds from supply-chain attacks. How to validate dependencies, their source, and how to check the gradle wrapper itself.

#gradle #build #cybersec

My man has implemented a toy JVM in Rust. Here you'll find a series of posts with details on .class files, bytecode and other aspects of his rjvm thingy.

#java #jvm #rust

Yet another creative attack. This time the target is laptop keyboard. Keystroke sound is recorded using either a phone lying nearby or during a video call, then a neural net processes them, and voila.

#cybersec #keyboard #sound

Offtop indeed, but this post is quite something. One undergrad student faced many difficulties and complications while trying to conduct an experiment to check some known germanium properties. According to him, these properties turned out to be a big lie. He described the difficulties, method, results, and regrets in the post.

#physics #science

Can't say this one is hardcore, but it's certainly not a light read. On ZKRP (Zero-Knowledge Range Proof). The idea is simple: prove to someone that some number of yours is from a particular interval, without revealing the number itself. They list a number of applications, a bunch of different approaches, plus links to the original works to dig deeper.

#zk #cryptography #math

An explanation of bloom filters. This data structure allows to check if a value is in a set with constant time and small memory overhead. Subject to false positives though.

#cs #datastructure

Well, next time shit hits the fan, you know what to do. Blame Terry. Have you already found yours?)

#humor

Some guy's popularizing HTML tags. Two ideas in essence. 1) HTML is a nice markup lang, machines would be more comfortable parsing it and using the data to learn. 2) No need to invent the wheel, there are a lot of ready to use components that will work nice almost everywhere.

#html #web #ml

Several techniques Android malware uses to protect itself from analysis. My favorite is non-standard APK compression method. Most of the tools weren't able to decompile such archive, API 28+ devices however weren't complaining at all.

#android #cybersec

I often try to encourage simple systems. In this post you'll find thoughts about the problem from a different angle. In short, they say that "simple for other devs" won't really work, so we should aim at "simpler for the user". Even if our user is a dev.

#complexity #code

We saw a toy JVM in Rust recently. Here's a bit more serious and ambitious project - JVM in Go. This post is about method discovery. Also try this page if you decide to dive deeper.

#jvm #go #java

The original idea behind Proof-of-Work was to fight email spam. Small computation puzzle is barely noticeable when you want to send a single message, it becomes rather slow and expensive in case of mass email. It's nice to see that Tor now uses adaptive PoW defence to fight DoS attacks.

#network #tor #cybersec

A nice story about a guy who crafts beautiful wooden computers. Not a bad hobby for retirement, hm?)

#hardware #story

This is insane. 2 minute video. Obtaining personal email address and access to mobile network account by the means of call to support and social engineering.

#cybersec #hack

A little bit about how concurrency and parallelism are done in the realm of Erlang and Elixir.

#elixir #erlang #concurrency