Durable Design (2017)
It seems like small thing, but it’s an engineering detail I’ve always had a lot of respect for.
Investigating the Galileo Satellite Navigation System Outage with a LimeSDR
You may have already heard that the Galileo EU satellite navigation constellation is out of service since last Thursday July 11th. Currently the Galileo constellation status page shows that the status of most Galileo satellites is not usable because of a service outage. The satellites not affected by this outage are…
What I've learned sending proposals to conferences
This year I sent out quite a few proposals to the majority of mobile conferences in Europe. Some ignored me, the others replied with automated rejections. However, some accepted and it was fun. Here is what I've learned on the way.
Adventures in WhatsApp DB – extracting messages from backups, with code examples
Getting your messages without giving a third party your credentials and data
Writing a lunar lander game for an actual lunar lander
As it’s the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landings, I thought this would be a great opportunity to live code a demonstration of using my new compiler to write a simple lunar lander game… but first, I’m going to port the compiler to generate code for an actual lunar lander. Yes, my target platform is the…
Building a “Simple” Distributed System – Formal Verification
In the last post , we described a protocol that should satisfy the requirements and invariants established in the first post . Today we will look at formal verification with TLA+. Formal verification is just another (niche) tool in the toolbox. Some tools require more skill than others to use. So
Taleb is wrong about IQ
Investigation of Talebs claims about IQ using real data.
Thoughts on Modern C++ and Game Dev
There's nothing here. The Internet is far too dangerous right now. The blog may return in future, if I get around to it.
How to liberate a Chromebook
Google is about as open as a clam. Over the holidays, I found a Chromebook that Samsung had given me to evaluate about six years ago and which had been gathering dust ever since. Coincidentally, Laura’s sister Annie had just told me that she needed a laptop. Hmm… Well, there was no way I was going to give her a Google…
How I use my Raspberry Pis to help me work on with my side projects
Undeniably, Raspberry Pi has revolutionised the way we use computing technology in our lives. In addition to being energy efficient, a Raspberry Pi is a single board computer that does not take up …
Modern garbage collection: Part 2
A look at what the newest generation of Java GCs can do
Where Have All the Angels Gone?
Angel investing plummets 81% as institutional seed dominates startup funding. New data shows dramatic shift in early-stage venture capital from 2010-2018.
How to fight the surveillance economy
Stop supporting data harvesting business models by picking alternative services and ad channels. Also, please don’t share this on Facebook.
Mitigating a DDoS on Mastodon
<p>TLDR:</p> <!-- raw HTML omitted --> <p>This will mainly be a story into how I experienced and reacted to my first real-time attack. As you may or may not ...
I stopped using Intercom
This post has been on the back of my head for a couple of years now. I think we actually switched-off Intercom in 2016 or so… But the reasons should still stand now, or might even be stronger. Of course, things might have shifted, so please forgive me if some features are totally different by…
10 Years SeL4: Still the Best, Still Getting Better
A week ago, on 29 July, we at Trustworthy Systems celebrated seL4 Freedom Day, the 5th anniversary of the open-sourcing of seL4. Furthermore it was seL4’s 10th birthday – the annive…
Fingerprinting iPhones
This clever attack allows someone to uniquely identify a phone when you visit a website, based on data from the accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer sensors. We have developed a new type of fingerprinting attack, the calibration fingerprinting attack. Our attack uses data gathered from the accelerometer…
China Spying on Undersea Internet Cables
Supply chain security is an insurmountably hard problem. The recent focus is on Chinese 5G equipment, but the problem is much broader. This opinion piece looks at undersea communications cables: But now the Chinese conglomerate Huawei Technologies, the leading firm working to deliver 5G telephony networks globally…
“Origins of the Apple human interface” lecture – an annotated transcription
The lecture was delivered by Larry Tesler and Chris Espinosa in 1997 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
Shell Completions in Rust
If you've ever hit the tab key while typing commands in the shell, you are familiar with the value of shell completions. Bash has some default completion behavior, which is why you can type hel<TAB> and end up with help . It is also possible to add additional completion scripts which define the completion behavior for…
PostgreSQL 11 Reestablishes Window Functions Leadership
PostgreSQL 11 offers the best OVER clause support among its competitors, true procedures, and improvements in FETCH FIRST and XML.
Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
The lat/lon floating point delusion
This morning I had a shower for 6.11686718 minutes. For breakfast I had 189.41576911 ml of fruit juice, followed by 75.24902503 g of muesli topped with 36.55668786 ml of milk and 15.44171338 g of yogurt.