The Weekly Weird - 2019-11-22

Skorgu

2019-11-22 14:00

Why was Galileo (Europe's GNSS constellation) down? Clocks.
Do car seats expire? Nobody knows.
Arctic Vaults: not just for seeds anymore.
"The sea of stars was filled with the serenity of a million little birds."
"glob invalidates scores of chemical analyses" is today's surprising sentence.
Oh Wikipedia, you never fail to amuse.
That is a weird looking bird.

The Weekly Weird - 2019-11-01

Skorgu

2019-11-01 14:00

After a long and winding road, OpenSSH is getting U2F support!
Now we know why the hobbits couldn't take the eagles to Mordor: roaming fees. (Yes, I know I'm the eight millionth person to make this joke, shut up)
I still feel like "1" is the wrong number of engines on an airplane but "yeah, it'll land itself" is a pretty cool feature. It apparently squawks 7700 and talks shit to the tower and recommends pulling the chute if that's the only other option. Mind you there's autoland and then there's autoland.
Speaking of, scaling activities to "how many times more dangerous than commercial aviation" is enlightening.
James Mickens ("I HAVE NO TOOLS BECAUSE I’VE DESTROYED MY TOOLS WITH MY TOOLS") is now a tenured Harvard professor.
We programmers beat ourselves up about how bad we are at, well, everything and generally feel that Real Engineers are better. This is true, but remember that even mature engineering practice screws up. Sometimes it's caught in time and sometimes it's not. Sometimes we know what not to do and do it anyway.
Sadly related, remember that written procedures are immediately obsolete.
Go unfork(2) yourself.
Firewalled? Have DNS? iodine. Have HTTP? wstunnel.

The Weekly Weird - 2019-10-25

Skorgu

2019-10-25 14:00

From the unexpected-headlines department: Stuart Little leads art historian to long-lost Hungarian masterpiece and Some of the UKs phone number infrastructure relies on Yahoo Groups.
It's time for the next big game show: Can you cURL? (h/t rasputin)
Finally, some attention to locking down all the other computers in your computer.
Naming things is hard. "Pwnagotchi" makes it look easy.
I mentioned the causal-profiling app coz earlier and only now ran into this nice video that introduces both it and another neat performance tuning tool, Stabilizer.
Continuing Rust's theme of "know more at compile time", "Floorplan eliminates 55 out of the 63 unsafe lines of code: 100% of the unsafe lines of code pertaining to memory safety".
SPOOKY SPACE SOUNDS

The Weekly Weird - 2019-10-11

Skorgu

2019-10-11 14:00

So, uh, you can just give anyone an abitrarily large tax bill, huh? (h/t Matt Levine). Decentralized Denial of Service? Traffic Magnification via IRS? I love it.
What more appropriate measure of the zeitgeist could there be than an OS designed for global collapse?
Prohibited from wearing masks? Project your own! (technically SFW but...)
You know you can't treat floats like numbers, right?
If your password takes 29 years to crack, you're doing it right. Turns out those UNIX guys were pretty smart.
Yet another book on async in rust.
Usable tooling for automatic proof of specifications in Rust: pdf, code. The annotations look quite usable, really.
I paid for 4 2 wheels, make 'em all drive.
Look, this is basically an ad for the service mentioned but it might be useful if you want to set up multi-factor auth without re-learning what PAM stands for and locking yourself out.

The Weekly Weird - 2019-09-27

Skorgu

2019-09-27 14:00

I know the path there is fraught but man, I wish I were a tenured biologist so I could get paid to give octopuses drugs, watch them sleep, make up words like kleptogenesis, and phrases like "DIY gene therapy" (!!!!!).
Quantum physics is really weird.
perf is so powerful it's tempting to think we already have all the tools we need to make programs faster but any social scientist will tell you that imitating a longitudinal study with a cross-sectional one is ... hard. Social scientists will also tell you that getting IRB approval for sedating most of a rowing team to see who's not pulling their weight is even harder. One day there will be ethics on doing the same to computer programs but until then, let's enjoy causal profiling. Yes, you can (sort of) use it on rust code.
From the unevenly-distributed-future department: I recall at least two far-future scifi stories where being unable to call for help because of accidental unconsciousness were major plot points and now we've gone ahead and just blown that whole genre out of the water.
I miss screensavers. I do not miss any of the reasons we needed screensavers of course.

The Weekly Weird - 2019-09-20

Skorgu

2019-09-20 14:00

How does China feed itself? (h/t Mike)
Why are so many datacenters in a row? 19th century politics of course.
You might be a Cardinal, literally a Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae cardinalis and not know about it.
From the best subreddit (frequented by the CEO of ULA): I am building a meme satellite. No confirmation that it's the same as this satellite but come on.
When did the PDP10 (yes, that PDP10, the one cancelled in 1983) stop being used commercially? Nope. Nope. Still nope. Waaay more nope than you thought. You too can poke around. More and even more PDP10 miscellany.
If we don't build a space elevator somewhere in my lifetime I will be very disappointed. Cambridge and Columbia are on it. At least we're manufacuring something up there.
Aaaarrgghhh brains are so dumb. So dumb.
From the neo-lovecraftian-background-chyron department: Trampoline mirror may push laser pulse through fabric of the Universe. What could go wrong.
Scylla continues to impress: DynamoDB-compatible layer for their cassandra implementation.
How much should you charge for your niche product? A surprisingly deep analysis determines that the answer is probably "more".
Unicode is completely insane.

The Weekly Weird - 2019-09-06

Skorgu

2019-09-06 14:00

You know how you can't be forced to testify against your spouse? New Mexico disagrees.
With sufficient thrust, water towers fly just fine.
SPACE CRIME
From the disaster-movie-chyron-roll department: "Large Underwater Observatory Disappears Without a Trace, Baffling Scientists" (h/t Mike).
You are coiling your cables wrong
I don't have much to say about carbon nanotube processors but I wonder if being able to use a free ISA like RISC-V and run actual programs makes these kind of one-offs more appealing?
Laser welded ceramic are just cool words.
Rust in the kernel, Erlang in rust, wasm in Postgres, rust and wasm on the blockchain.

The Weekly Weird - 2019-08-16

Skorgu

2019-08-16 14:00

The ambient danger level of being on the internet at all is horrifying enough but nothing compared to being worth spending a 0-day on.
Fly the plane, not the technology.
Is this the first NSFW bluetooth vulnerability?
Planning on camping? These pretty graphs might help you decide when, where and how to do it.
Wouldn't it be nice if companies would just let you install a wifi sniffer inside their office buildings? Warshipping is the catchy new name for a not-new attack vector.
Look, all the good jokes have been taken. Your clever bobby tables license plate will just cause you grief. I can't guarantee that apparrel won't also come to a bad end but at least you'll be stylish.
Most of civilization (such as it is) relies on the asymmetric difficulty of analysis. As the cost to gather data goes to zero, so we discover that there is nowhere to hide and nothing is safe.

The Weekly Weird - 2019-08-02

Skorgu

2019-08-02 14:00

The thing about complexity is that the harder you pretend it doesn't exist, the more horrific it inevitably ends up when you have to bolt it back on.
Note also that avoiding Fully Featured Operating Systems for tiny, embedded ones just means the inevitable security vulnerabilities are harder to update.
From the too-good-to-be-true department: v.
Want to feel old?
You may not be aware that you can write whatever you want as the "city" on a letter without affecting deliverability. This is extremely obvious if you live in Queens.
The International Potato Center (yep) has determined that those delicious tubers will grow on Mars just fine.
"Gold, Anxiolytics and Myrrh" doesn't really have the right ring to it.
A planet so hot, iron vaporizes. Still preferable to the subway in August.
250 pages of How To Launch A Big F...alcon Rocket.
From the somehwo-not-actually-scifi department: Nuclear Bullets. They are exactly what they sound like.

The Weekly Weird - 2019-07-26

Skorgu

2019-07-26 14:00

A strong contender for the scariest pair of words in the English language has got to be "Bluetooth Pacemaker" (not that the previous stack was necessarily better). At least they're not plutonium powered anymore.
Back in the mists of time, when the Internet was dewy-eyed with optimism, 640k really was enough for everyone, we still thought that connecting people was good, and IP addresses flowed like water, a smidge of IP address space was set aside for amateur radio use. 44/8 was...not consistently made use of and its governance was always a bit fuzzy. Recently, folks noticed that some of those 16 million addresses had been split out. It turns out that Amazon made a deal. This has not been received with unmitigated positivity by the community.
Remember that the cloud is just other people's ransomware-locked computers.
Adversarial street signs and ... lumps?.
I guess the global game of sanctions-chicken has one positive outcome: RISC-V chips from China.
The best minds of our generation are bio-engineering hair farms.
Specifically mindful meditation is not better than sham meditation. However, even sham meditation generated 'significant increases in mindfulness dispositions and critical thinking scores'. I am not sure how to evaluate this information. (h/t Mike 1).
Something something anime catgirls (sfw, h/t Mike 2).
The PinebookPro ($200 Arm laptop) is up for preorder.
Major downside to commercial software: sudden dectoupling of license costs.
"Have you tried turning the plane off and then back on again?"