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Intercepting Zoom's encrypted data with BPF
How to use Rust and BPF to intercept the data sent and received by programs that use OpenSSL.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,290 posts.
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Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
Adventures in vintage computers and retrogaming. Includes articles on classic games and obsolete computers.
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Decision Table Patterns
Decision tables are easy, simple, and powerful. You can teach them in five minutes and write one in half that time. You can look at a table and understand what it’s saying, see if it matches your problem, and check for design flaws. So it’s kinda weird that there’s basically nothing about them online. I wrote an…
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Letsencrypt, the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Letsencrypt is a pretty neat concept: free secure certificates for web servers, in order to increase the adoption of HTTPS across the web. The basic idea is that certificates should be free, that the barrier to install them should be as low as possible and that updating certificates should be automated. It protects…
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Assange Hearing Day 8
The great question after yesterday’s hearing was whether prosecution counsel James Lewis QC would continue to charge at defence witnesses like a deranged berserker (spoiler – he would), and more importantly, why? QC’s representing governments usually seek to radiate calm control, and treat defence arguments as almost…
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Go modules have a v2+ problem
Go has a problem. Go modules place a strange naming requirement on modules version 2 or greater. Module names on modules v2+ must end in the major version ala …/v2 , and communication of this rule has been weak. It's non-obvious, and the community at large does not understand it.
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Sync vs. Async Python: What Is the Difference?
Have you heard people say that async Python code is faster than "normal" (or sync) Python code? How can that be? In this article I'm going to try to explain what async is and how it differs from…
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Classes are a way of writing higher order functions
Joe and I recently kicked off a re-read of SICP . I can say that it is the most interesting textbook I have gone through. Imagine, you begin with just 4 or 5 constructs, and you end up building algebraic equation solvers, circuit simulators, and even logic programming languages. Because you start off with such few…
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Hacking Ethernet out of Fibre Channel cards
This story, like another in the past , started as an eBay purchase that I would soon regret. I was scrolling through my favorite eBay supplier when I found a listing titled Job Lot Of Roughly 350 Various Network Cards . This of course piqued my interest. Some close photo inspection identified a whole load of cards in…
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Assange Hearing Day 7
CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH This morning we went straight in to the evidence of Clive Stafford Smith, a dual national British/American lawyer licensed to practice in the UK. He had founded Reprieve in 1999 originally to oppose the death penalty, but after 2001 it had branched out into torture, illicit detention and…
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Why Bayesian Stats Needs Monte-Carlo Methods
Bayesian statistics rely heavily on Monte-Carlo methods. A common question that arises is “isn’t there an easier, analytical solution?” This post explores a bit more why this is by breaking down the analysis of a Bayesian A/B test and showing how tricky the analytical path is and exploring more of t
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Non-Posix File Systems
Operating systems and file systems have traditionally been developed hand in hand. They impose mutual constraints on each other. Today we have two major leaders in file system semantics: Windows and POSIX . They are very close to each other when compared to the full set of possibilities. Interesting things happened…
1036
Vitamin D, part 3 – The Evidence
Vitamin D deficiency is linked to cancer, heart disease, respiratory infection, stroke, diabetes, and death. It might seem reasonable that we should all be taking this supplement.
1037
The Treachery of Image Files
I have recently come into possession of a series of exquisite miniatures which I pray are worthy of your esteemed attention. While my employers are familiar with your unusual tastes , they also appreciate your desire for privacy- this showing was arranged with the utmost discretion, I assure you.
1038
Archiving URLs (2019)
Archiving the Web, because nothing lasts forever: statistics, online archive services, extracting URLs automatically from browsers, and creating a daemon to regularly back up URLs to multiple sources.
1039
Ad Fraud on LinkedIn
LinkedIn Ads are awash in mistaken clicks and bot traffic that make the platform's value extremely dubious, according to a new study from RMG.
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GDPR Violation: Scribd acquires PII on 500M users in a deal with LinkedIn
TL;DR: If you have a LinkedIn account, you were signed up to SlideShare automatically without your knowledge or consent. Your account including all your personal information will be sold to ScribD …
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Assange Hearing Day 6
I went to the Old Bailey today expecting to be awed by the majesty of the law, and left revolted by the sordid administration of injustice. There is a romance which attaches to the Old Bailey. The name of course means fortified enclosure and it occupies a millennia old footprint on the edge of London’s […]
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URL query parameters and how laxness creates de facto requirements on the web
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Understanding Convolution in Deep Learning (2015)
Convolution is probably the most important concept in deep learning right now. It was convolution and convolutional nets that catapulted deep learning to the forefront of almost any machine learning task there is. But what makes convolution so powerful? How does it work? In this blog post I will explain convolution…
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Optimize Onboarding
A guide to scaling product & engineering teams from $0 to past $100M ARR
1047
Doom Eternal – Graphics Study
A graphics study of Doom Eternal
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Which GPUs to get for deep learning
Here, I provide an in-depth analysis of GPUs for deep learning/machine learning and explain what is the best GPU for your use-case and budget.
1049
Alien Signals
Memories of long-ago Sunday nights on the road.
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Things I Learned to Become a Senior Software Engineer
Everything I learned to become a senior software engineer. From good skills to have, to dealing with difficult engineering problems.