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Why Isn’t Telegram End-to-End Encrypted by Default (2017)

telegra.ph/why-isnt-telegram-end-to-end-encrypted-by-default-08-142021127 points145 commentscited by 11Security & Privacy details

I've been getting this question more often this year. It's based on the wrong assumption that some other popular messaging apps such as WhatsApp are "end-to-end encrypted by default", while Telegram is not. This post is intended to disprove this myth that has been so carefully crafted by Facebook/WhatsApp marketing…

Technical debt is not debt; it’s not even technical

Mark Greville2021127 points140 commentsSoftware Engineering details

Co-authored with Dr Paidi O’Raghallaigh and Dr Stephen McCarthy at Cork University Business School as part of my PhD studies, and originally published by Cutter Consortium’s Business Agility …

Designing a better strcpy

Saagar Jha's website.

Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept

Matt Rickard2021127 points91 commentsCareer & Management details

Forget about the y-intercept; slope is the only thing that matters in the long run.

Elegant Bash Conditionals

Tim Visée2021127 points89 commentsSoftware Engineering details

How to write better bash scripts by replacing if-statements with something much more elegant

Why I Have Settled on XChaCha20+Blake3 for AEAD

I wish systemd logged information about the source of “transactions”

Chris Siebenmann2021127 points77 commentsSystems & Performance details

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…

Why 'Long Rituals' Matter

The Long View2021127 points76 commentsLife, Learning & Writing details

The Long-termist's Field Guide: 1,000 Ideas For The Next 1,000 Years

Was the NE2000 really that bad?

OS/2 Museum2021127 points72 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details

Over the last few months I have been on and off digging into the history of early PC networking products, especially Ethernet-based ones. In that context, it is impossible to miss the classic NE2000 adapter with all its offshoots and clones. Especially in the Linux community, the NE2000 seems to have had rather bad…

Nil in Go is typed in theory and sort of untyped in practice

Chris Siebenmann2021127 points68 commentsProgramming Languages details

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…

Tried Nvidia’s GTX 1080 – still no external GPU on a Pi

Jeff Geerling2021127 points60 commentsHardware & Electronics details

Earlier today I did a livestream on my YouTube channel to attempt using an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 on a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4. As with all my testing, I'm documenting everything I learn in this GitHub issue, which is part of the Raspberry Pi PCI Express Card Database website. It's only been a few hours, but…

The Dawn of Formalized Mathematics

Andrej Bauer2021127 points58 commentsMath & Algorithms details

Here are the slides of my talk “The dawn of formalized mathematics” from the 8th European Congress of Mathematics , which is taking place online and in Protorož, Slovenia, from June 20 to 26, 2021:

My ideal Rust workflow

Amos Wenger2021127 points51 commentsSoftware Engineering details

Writing Rust is pretty neat. But you know what’s even neater? Continuously testing Rust, releasing Rust, and eventually, shipping Rust to production. And for that, we want more than plug-in for a c...

Lessons from a year of AI research

Notion2021127 points46 commentsAI & Machine Learning details

Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.

Fighting cryptojacking and doing good things with content security policies

Troy Hunt2021127 points45 commentsSecurity & Privacy details

If you've landed on this page because you saw a strange message on a completely different website then followed a link to here, drop a note to the site owner and let them know what happened. If, on the other hand, you're on this page because you're

Setting up a Raspberry Pi with 2 Network Interfaces as a simple router

Jeff Geerling2021127 points44 commentsNetworking & Internet details

I needed a very basic 'Internet sharing' router setup with one of my Raspberry Pis, and I thought I'd document the setup process here in case I need to do it again. I should note that for more complex use cases, or where you really need to worry about security and performance, you should use something like OpenWRT…

V7 Unix had no stack size limit, and when Unix acquired one

Chris Siebenmann2021127 points42 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details

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…

The utilization of 44/8: the reason I mapped IPv4 and IPv6

DaKnob2021127 points39 commentsNetworking & Internet details

In the early days, when the Internet was just beginning, back in 1981, radio amateurs were allocated, by what is now known as IANA , an IPv4 block for usage and experimentation by all members of this hobby, internationally. This block was 44.0.0.0/8, which is a huge amount of address space by today’s standards, but…

How to stream media using WebRTC and FFmpeg, and why it's a bad idea

The strange path of accepting how your brain works

Alexander Ellis2021127 points38 commentsLife, Learning & Writing details

I recently read Turing’s Cathedral, a book about the early history of computers, and it largely focused on the life and brilliant times of John von Neumann, who was, to put it simply, a genius. It is both fascinating and disappointing to learn about a brain that works so much better than your own. Fascinating because…

Who Were the Romans, Part V: Saving and Losing an Empire

Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2021127 points32 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details

This is the fifth and final part (I, II, III, IV) of our series asking the question ‘Who were the Romans?’ How did they understand themselves as a people and the idea of ‘Roman’ as an i…

Competitive Analysis for Engineers

Stay SaaSy2021127 points28 commentsTech Industry & Business details

In my experience, most professional software engineers in industry have little to no experience doing competitive analysis. That’s a shame, because competitive analysis is one of the most useful skills that an engineer can have.

Tiny PDP11 on an ESP32

2020 has been a weird year, for everyone around the world. In my specific case, that meant being away from my home in Shanghai, as we were in Europe at the time Covid hit and China did not make it easy to return until somewhere towards the end of the year.

Watertight vector maps from raster images

Matt Zucker2021127 points22 commentsSoftware Engineering details

Or, “how not to GIS”.

Why start a new database conference?

Jamie Brandon2021127 points20 commentsDatabases & Data details

Somehow I am organizing a conference called Have you tried rubbing a database on it?

Neural-control family: what deep learning and control enables in the real world

Guanya Shi2021127 points18 commentsAI & Machine Learning details

With the unprecedented advances of modern machine learning comes the tantalizing possibility of smart data-driven autonomous systems across a broad range of real-world settings. However, is machine learning (especially deep learning) really ready to be deployed in safety-critical systems?

How does your programming language handle “minus zero” (-0.0)?

Daniel Lemire2021126 points207 commentsSoftware Engineering details

The ubiquitous IEEE floating-point standard defines two numbers to represent zero, the positive and the negative zeros. You also have the positive and negative infinity. If you compute the inverse of the positive zero, you get the positive infinity. If you compute the inverse of the negative zero, you get the negative…

Useful and useless code comments

Jim Nielsen2021126 points178 commentsSoftware Engineering details

I’ve been reading John Ousterhout’s A Philosophy of Software Design . At one point in the book, he gives this advice about code comments: Unfortunately, many…

What did Einstein mean by “spooky action at a distance”?

Sabine Hossenfelder2021126 points126 commentsScience & Space details

Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science

Filecoin, StorJ and the problem with decentralized storage (2019)

Random Oracle2021126 points114 commentsDatabases & Data details

Blockchains for everything Decentralized storage services such as Filecoin and StorJ seek to disrupt the data-storage industry, using blockchain tokens to create a competitive marketplace that can …