billpg

"You need to choose an access PIN."

"How about (digits)?"

"You can't use that one. Someone else has already chosen that."

"Wait, now I know someone else's PIN code. I could use that and it'd be logged under their name."

Then it isn't a personal identification number. We should call them PANs, or Personal Authentication Number.

If you'll excuse me, I need to go fight some windmills.

Anyone else seeing this?

"This server couldn't prove that it's annas-archive.org; its security certificate is from *.hs.llnwd.net. This may be caused by a misconfiguration or an attacker intercepting your connection."

Because of the risk of auto-linkification, I'm of the opinion that browsers should put the entire dot-zip domain into the this-is-dangerous realm with big scary warnings if anyone follows a link. (Or at least any file downloads.)

If you were to ask me to write some code to convert an int64 into ascii decimals, I'd start with a 20 character buffer (because int64 will never need more), loop to populate the buffer with ascii decimal digits from the lowest significant end, then once the loop has finished and we know how many digits, copy the buffer into its place.

I'd love to told that this method in the article is actually significantly more efficient than my possibly naïve approach.

Is the moment of birth defined down to the second? The process of giving birth seems more like a process (to this lay person who failed high school biology) rather than a strict binary not-yet-born/born.

Question asked, question answered...

What is a second? (johndcook.com)

An Unreasonable Amount of Time (allenpike.com)

"The insurance companies don't have medical training either."

Remember that.

"1.1 System Requirements. This version of GW-BASIC requires MS-DOS version 3.2 or later."

Does Windows 10 count as "or later"?

I feel the main problem with email is that it isn't default-deny. When I set up a mailbox, no-one should be able to send me messages until I pre-approve the sender.

I look forward to my not-techie heirs learning the difference between 301 and 302 redirects.

I would caution against using the C pre-processor, unless you're very careful indeed.

    {"data": 
    #include "/home/myservice/secrets.json"
    }

If you are going to put comments in your JSON, please use the /* */ style.

It is often useful to express a JSON object as a single line of text. Comments that start from a symbol ("#" or "//") and continue to the end of the line can't be joined into a single line of text without throwing away the comments. /* */ is distinct by having an explicit end-of-comment symbol that allows meaningful text afterwards.

I once used `SELECT TOP 1` ... `ORDER BY NEWID()` to pick a record from a table of millions.

Millions of UUIDs generated! All so one would randomly be picked as the lowest valued and the attached record returned. Such a waste!

Given that .zip is now a TLD, I completely support not automatically linkifying things that might be links.

(If you used "https" and made it a full URL, that's different.)

Can I opt out of receiving letters from this service please?

I'm interested in an answer. Is there a way, by design, to run code from an untrusted source in a restricted manner? So the worse the code could do is call me rude names.

You could, but this website's better.

"We build this city on rock..."

"That's a good place to build a city."

"... and roll."

"We're doomed!"

If I followed this link, would I end up on a list?

I remember when QNX was going to be the OS for the first post-Commodore Amiga machines. Fun times.

I'm old.

Anyone remember "Hacker Monthly"? Years ago it was a monthly PDF with nicely laid out copies of popular articles that had been highly voted on here.

There's been times I've seen the HDD light blinking and I've thought to myself "You're running remote-desktop right now. Why do you need the hard disk so much?"

"Test two values for equality, but this time we mean it."

I get the feeling we only need 16 or so control characters. We could use those slots for more printable characters instead.

What's that? Doing that would break every single program that uses ASCII? Darn it.

My ISP gave me a new IPv6 router and everything was given a globally routable IPv6 address without my having to do any of that stuff.

I do remember it was a large 2D barcode. Like QR but with a square in the middle. (AZTEC?)

I was trying random barcodes I had lying around to test my own component. The one with the zero byte happened to be a large one they had added to my passport when I visited the USA. It had "US-VISIT" printed next to it in big letters.

The device was a rugged industrial handheld device with a screen and a camera, designed for mailrooms and warehouses. This was around 20 years ago and I remember the OS (including the barcode component) was completely bespoke and it ran without any process protections. This meant that the barcode would crash the whole device and you had to perform a hard reset.

I once reported a bug to a barcode decoding library, reporting that it crashed when the barcode contained a zero byte. They responded that they wouldn't fix it because barcodes aren't supposed to contain zero bytes.

"But it crashed. That's bad. I can't stop people scanning bad barcodes."

In case anyone needs it: https://web.archive.org/web/20240306134340/https://legend.oc... (The most recent snapshots look like a bad redirect.)

Anyone else getting this?

The connection for this site is not secure legend.octopuslabs.io uses an unsupported protocol. ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH