Category Archives: News

Shared items and notes from my feeds and browsing. Subscribe as feed.

Myths and legends in high-performance computing

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Fun. It's basically just standing in front of the hype cycles going "really?" but it's nice to see them compiled.
Comments
Posted in News | Leave a comment

Surprising Consequences of macOS’s Environment Variable Sanitization

Source: Hacker News

Article note: That is a very un-UNIX-like behavior Apple has imposed.
Comments
Posted in News | Leave a comment

CDC File Transfer

Source: Hacker News

Article note: My brain was looking at it trying to fit "CDC"=Centers for Disease Control? Control Data Corporation? Cult of the Dead Cow? Composite Device Class? But no, this overload is "Content Defined Chunking," which smells sort of like a more sophisticated rsync style rolling hash with variable block size. I think the got project is a more general tool with the same basic model, but this is oddly proven code since it was tooling for the now-expensively-failed Stadia infrastructure. It's a neat direct application of a neat algorithm.
Comments
Posted in News | Leave a comment

Tilck – A Tiny Linux-Compatible Kernel

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Nifty. Comments about other kernel projects are fun too.
Comments
Posted in News | Leave a comment

Shift Happens: a Book About Keyboards

Source: Hacker News

Article note: This sounds _delightful_.
Comments
Posted in News | Leave a comment

4 electrical substations vandalized in Washington, leaving thousands without power

Source: The Week: Most Recent Home Page Posts

Article note: Uh-oh, the genuinely difficult problem we've done basically nothing about in the decade or so since it got undeniable is starting to take off. (now, am I talking about securing substations or the proliferation of right wing domestic terrorists most likely responsible for attacking them? Hint:it's both.)

Four electrical substations were vandalized in Washington state on Sunday, the Pierce County Sheriff's Office said Monday.

Tacoma Public Utilities reported that two of its substations were vandalized on Christmas morning, with outages affecting roughly 7,300 customers southeast of Tacoma. Around noon on Sunday, Puget Sound Energy reported that one of its substations was vandalized at about 2:30 a.m., and nearly 7,700 customers had lost power. The fourth substation was vandalized shortly after 7 p.m., with emergency dispatchers receiving a call about a fire at a Puget Sound Energy substation in Graham.

All of the substations are in South Pierce County. Sheriff's officials said in each case, someone broke into the fenced area around the substations and damaged the equipment in order to cause a power outage.

Over the last month, there have been six attacks on electrical substations in Washington and Oregon. In early December, tens of thousands of customers in Moore County, North Carolina, were without power after someone "opened fire" on two substations, damaging the equipment, Moore County Sheriff Ronnie Fields said. This "wasn't random," he added.

In January, the Department of Homeland Security warned that domestic extremists "have developed credible, specific plans to attack electricity infrastructure since at least 2020." There are more than 6,400 power plants and 450,000 miles of transmission lines in the United States, The Associated Press reports, and a law enforcement official told AP the extremists "feel that disrupting the electrical supply will disrupt the ability of government to operate. And secondly, by conducting attacks against the communications and electrical infrastructure, it will actually accelerate the coming civil war that they anticipate because it will disrupt the lives of so many people that they will lose their faith in government."

Posted in News | Leave a comment

Haiku R1/beta4

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Always exciting to see the BeOS lineage continue. The Haiku folks have done some really lovely engineering the the original spirit over the years.
Comments
Posted in News | Leave a comment

The Rise of User-Hostile Software (2021)

Source: Hacker News

Article note: It's a good description of the problem of software-as-value-extraction, which has become even more true in the year since it was written. As noted, it's "software prioritizing the vendor" more than the developer, but I think there is an interesting aside about software prioritizing the developer (as in the implementing programmer) in the old Wirth's law lazy but high-overhead dev tools argument. Or the self-justifying whims of UX "designers" situation. I'm not sure that the suggestions at the bottom are realistic, as the top HN comment notes, it's a Collective Action Problem and right now the only way out is open source.
Comments
Posted in News | Leave a comment

LastPass users: Your info and password vault data are now in hackers’ hands

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: Putting lots of sensitive user data in internet-connected silos is never a good idea. For passwords, use KeePass or something where you have a proper locally-encrypted DB, and sync that through a normal file-syncing tool (Seafile, Syncthing, Dropbox...whatever).
Calendar with words Time to change password. Password management.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

LastPass, one of the leading password managers, said that hackers obtained a wealth of personal information belonging to its customers as well as encrypted and cryptographically hashed passwords and other data stored in customer vaults.

The revelation, posted on Thursday, represents a dramatic update to a breach LastPass disclosed in August. At the time, the company said that a threat actor gained unauthorized access through a single compromised developer account to portions of the password manager's development environment and "took portions of source code and some proprietary LastPass technical information." The company said at the time that customers’ master passwords, encrypted passwords, personal information, and other data stored in customer accounts weren't affected.

Sensitive data, both encrypted and not, copied

In Thursday’s update, the company said hackers accessed personal information and related metadata, including company names, end-user names, billing addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers, and IP addresses customers used to access LastPass services. The hackers also copied a backup of customer vault data that included unencrypted data such as website URLs and encrypted data fields such as website usernames and passwords, secure notes, and form-filled data.

Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Posted in News | Leave a comment

Linux’s strcmp() for the m68k has always been broken

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Looked for the fun old platform, stayed for the "Everything is subtle when you get close enough." Kernel char being presumptively unsigned on all platforms (-funsigned-char) will be ...fun... for the large amounts of code primarily worked on x86 where char is signed in the ABI.
Comments
Posted in News | Leave a comment