69,558 karma · joined January 13, 2008
Formerly at kCura/Relativity, security. I do application penetration testing for hire these days. Happy to chat about application security, programming, and ham radio. My conversations about agriculture are not that interesting.
Security: https://ciexinc.com/ Of particular interest are the solarwinds articles at https://ciexinc.com/blog/solarwinds/index.html Old very fun projects: https://ciex-software.com
“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.”
Beware the anxiety industrial complex.
A NASA article: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-curiosity-rover-detects-...
Science article: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/alkanes-mars: So why didn't these newly announced larger molecules show up then?
That's because this time the samples got a different treatment (two cycles of strong heating) before the mass spec analysis.
I like the hard-earned lessons that are often taken away from such sessions.
While nowhere on the scale of this story, I helped a fellow student while I was at the University where his program was outputting highly bogus numbers from punched card deck input. I ultimately suggested that he print out the numbers that were being read by the program and presto the field alignments were off. This has now become my first step in debugging.
During a co-op stint during my EE degree program was at a pulp bleach plant in Longview Washington. They were implementing instrumentation of various metrics in the bleach tower. The engineers told of a story about one of their instruments to measure flow or temperature or acidity. The instrument was failing but the manufacturer couldn't find any flaw, shipped it back. The cycle repeated several times until one of the engineers accompanied the instrument to the repair lab. The technicians were standing the instrument on its side, not flat as it was in the instrument rack back at the plant. Lying it flat exposed the error.
Another bug sticks in my mind from reading Coders At Work by Peter Seibel. Guy Steele is telling about a bug Bill Gosper reported in the bignum library. One thing caught is eye was a conditional step he didn't quite understand. Since it was based on the division algorithms from Knuth: "And what caught my eye in Knuth was a comment that this step happens rarely—with a probability of roughly only one in two to the size of the word." The error was in a rarely-executed piece of code. The lesson here helped him find similar bugs.
While three of us were building a compiler at Sycor, we kept a large lab notebook in which we wrote brief release notes, and a one-line note about each bug we found and fixed.
My most recent bug was a new emacs snippet was causing errors in eval_buf. Made no sense, so ultimately decided to clear out the .emacs.d directory and start over. There were files that were over 20 years old--I just copied the directory when I built a new machine.
If you take the Empire Builder from Chicago towards the northwest, one of the trains goes through North Dakota at night.
Every farm in the area has one of those mercury vapor lights in the yard, which are visible for tens of miles. If you sit in the scenic car then, you will see one of those farmstead perhaps every hour. It is very not populated.
Locked reads must be paired with locked writes, and the CPU's bus interface enforces this by forbidding other memory accesses until the corresponding writes occur. As none are forthcoming, after performing these bus cycles all CPU activity stops, and the CPU must be reset to recover
Quickly figured out that power was out and the weird sound was neighbors sitting on their front stoop talking.
Abrash spent hours tracking down exact conditions needed to produce the bug, which would result in parts of a game level appearing unexpectedly when viewed from certain camera angles.
Few of us can replicate their energy and resourcefulness.
Why does everyone who sits behind a computer long to be out in the fields or workshops?
My flip answer to that is that they haven't spent their youth on a farm, worrying about a hailstorm that wipes out the entire wheat crop for the year, or you lose 25% of your cattle herd to a recently diagnosed virus diarrhea. My grandparents were homesteaders who at some point in their life lived in houses with dirt floors.
The fact of life was that due to technology, the productivity of the American farm increased by almost two orders of magnitude during my Grandfather's lifetime. This meant that a tractor that my dad purchased when I was about 3 for the equivalent of 1500 bushels of wheat cost about 9000 by the time I went to college.
Thus, the economics of a family farm, or sole dude wanting to get away from the computer and grow something is painful.
A couple of kids that do an excellent job of building a homestead are the couple behind the youtube channel Ambition Strikes. They call at an off-grid homestead, but through their unbounded energy and creativity have created their own substantial mini-grid. I have a lot of respect for them and what they have done.
The article notes It is difficult to think of any field more forcibly disentangled from any sort of understanding of the impact of your labor than the majority of positions in tech. This is discussed in some detail in the book "Stiffed" by Susan Faludi. She discusses the community nature of the naval shipyards, in which everyone apparently was connected meaningfully to their work and the workers around them. She contrasts that with the workers in aerospace whose work is so abstract that it was hard for a professional working there to describe to their kids what exactly they do all day.
The rims of the micro-burrows contain 1 µm wide contours
If you are wondering what a terranes is, this might help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrane
Article in the journal Cell: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)00254-5 (One of the shorter titles for journal that I have seen.)
The technique involves hidden Markov model (HMM) in a particular model named cobraa.
Lacking precise timestamps for detailed analysis, the research team developed an innovative method to synchronize video time using satellite trajectories and star field analysis. This innovative approach allowed them to determine the exact occurrence times of the sprites and link them to their parent lightning discharges.
The paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00376-024-4143-5
Another video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtSuicGXil4
Here are some things that counter this:
https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~adrian/731-sp04/readings/Ptacek-N...: A paper that rocked the security industry at the time.
Tptacek also was cofounder of Matasano, now part of NCC; also cofounder of Latacora.
More info: https://sockpuppet.org/me/
Also the co-author of https://cryptopals.com/, https://microcorruption.com/login.
The author of https://www.latacora.com/blog/2018/04/03/cryptographic-right..., https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/01/15/against-dnssec/, https://sockpuppet.org/stuff/dnssec-qa.html,
These are about what I call hard-core security, hardly insanely niche, and hardly lacking critical knowledge.
Often it takes several penetrations via compromised/replaced clients to get the message through.
Just look at all the discussions about why browser-based javascript encryption is problematic.
The paper is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.04009.
I've been long fascinated by odd astronomical items like this, particularly since I heard Joe Taylor play an audio tape of various frequencies that quasars pulsed at.