There was a question about which of these vulnerabilities were found by researchers, as opposed to troublemakers. The answer was most, if not all of them, but it made me realize one additional point I hadn’t mentioned. Unlike the prototypical buffer overflow vulnerability, exploiting features is very reliable. Exploiting something like shellshock or imagetragick requires no customized assembly and is independent of CPU, OS, version, stack alignment, malloc implementation, etc. Within about 24 hours of the intial release of shellshock, I had logs of people trying to exploit it. So unless you’re on about a 12 hour patch cycle, you’re going to have a bad time.
https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/features-are-faults-redux
We Can Do Better Than SQL
The questions we often hear are “Why create a new query language?” and “What’s wrong with SQL?”. This post contains answers to both.
https://www.edgedb.com/blog/we-can-do-better-than-sql/
Docker Protects a Programming Paradigm That We Should Get Rid Of
Why Google Duplex Might Make My Design Job Redundant
Ever since they were invented, computers have been weird and hard to use. The history of technology have been a constant battle towards making them more human.
https://thenextweb.com/podium/2019/06/29/google-duplex-gui-ai-design/
Life is Fractal, But Markets are Square
When humans wield their power in the world, they are limited by the linear nature of their thinking. The best example of this linearization is the top-down planning of modern suburbs. Contrast this with how nations and states emerged in a bottom-up fashion.
https://invertedpassion.com/life-is-fractal-markets-are-square/
FPGAs Have the Wrong Abstraction
What is an FPGA? I don’t think the architecture community has a consensus definition. Let’s entertain three possible answers…
https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~asampson/blog/fpgaabstraction.html
The Boring Genius Of How Atrium Kills Legal Busy Work
Law firms have little incentive to build or buy software that will save their lawyers time because they often bill clients by the hour. Tasks like tracking down legal documents, extracting key information and drawing up hiring offers or funding term sheets add up to make lawyers expensive, even if they’re constantly repeating mindless busy work. That’s why legal startup Atrium is so exciting — even though it’s developing tech that might seem boring on the surface. After raising $75 million from Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst while growing to 400 clients, today Atrium is announcing its first customer-facing products.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/20/atrium-startup-lawyer/
Feynman’s Lost Lecture: The Motion of Planets Around the Sun
This is the story of how Feynman’s lost lecture came to be lost, and how it came to be found again. In April 1992, as Caltech’s archivist, I was asked by Gerry Neugebauer, the chairman of the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy, to go through the files in Robert Leighton’s office. Leighton was ill and had not used his office for several years. Marge Leighton, his wife, had told Neugebauer that it was all right to clean out the office – she’d already collected her husband’s books and personal effects. I could take what I wanted for the archives, and the division would dispose of the rest.
http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/563/2/Goodstein.pdf
Feynman’s Breakthrough, Disregard Others!
The word was “Disregard!” “That’s what I’d forgotten!” he shouted (in the middle of the night). “You have to worry about your own work and ignore what everyone else is doing.” At first light, he called his wife, Gweneth, and said, “I think I’ve figured it out. Now I’ll be able to work again!”
https://stepsandleaps.wordpress.com/2017/10/17/feynmans-breakthrough-disregard-others/
I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup
It seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don’t really think sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit what you don’t regard as crimes, but rather as conventions. You forgive a conventional duel just as you forgive a conventional divorce. You forgive because there isn’t anything to be forgiven.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
John DeHope 