The Paradox of the Question, :).
Programming Satan’s Computer, (PDF). Old but gold!
Great Art Explained, (Youtube). Gems.
I need to care about and be touched by what I read. I can’t care about a book that has nothing to contribute to the wisdom project.
— Susan Sontag
FragAttacks: Security flaws in all Wi-Fi devices, design and implementation flaws.
That’s Not My Burnout, thoughtful and elegantly captured.
Different nations speak of the many possible relationships to money when they speak: The French “gain” money (gagner), the English “earn” it, the Americans “make” it, the Russian “works” for it (работать), and in my mother tongue, we “look for” it (keres).
— Ernö Rubik, Cubed: The Puzzle of Us All
Kill the Newsletter, newsletter-to-RSS service. Can be self-hosted even. Newsletters never worked for me.
Cloudflare:Cryptographic Attestation of Personhood. Nice, especially the use of WebAuthn Registration phase for this, sidestepping potential privacy concerns.
Reflections on Trusting Trust by Ken Thompson (1984) and a variation that played out in real life. Diverse Double-Compiling: proposed as a practical way around this “root of trust” problem. However, I do wonder when the need for a ‘trusted’ compiler will become too-strong of a requirement. Maybe time to build the Noah’s Ark of trusted software?
The OceanMaker, 9:40 minutes of storytelling about hope, sorrow, greed and redemption wrapped into a nice animation.
Om Mallik interviews Nitin Sawhney, hooked.
The featherweight website, inspiring.
I wasn’t sure why anyone should be so eager to hand the keys to society over to people whose primary qualification was curiosity.
— Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley: A Memoir
Writing in the Age of Distraction, sage advice from Cory Doctorow, way back from 2009.
Newsletters, an enormous rant. Drives home the point in more ways than one.
After Minimalism, a counter point on minimalistic (architectural) design. Destructive Minimalism, “when removal is mistaken for reduction.”
“I just think that sometimes it’s cheaper to pay.”
“I don’t care whether it’s cheap, but whether it’s just.”
“Justice can be expensive.”
“And injustice as well.”
— Meša Selimović, Death and the Dervish (1966)
Zanzibar: Google’s Consistent, Global Authorization System, USENIX ATC ‘19.The engineering of implementing ACLs at Google scale.
A Crucial Estimate Relived (1964), Sheman Kent’s post-mortem analysis of “his greatest mistake”, the prediction three weeks before the Cuban missile crisis that Russia would be unlikely to station missiles in Cuba that could reach the US. A great introduction to intelligence analysis as well as a good example of how to analyse and think through a failure.
Death of a Hypothesis, “destruction of an interesting hypothesis is often as important a part of our trade as its confirmation.”.
You must be prepared to act on your dreams, just in case they do come true.
— Bill Strickland
Why can’t we divide by zero?, a nice refresher.
I think that comedy is the quintessential human reaction to the fear of death.
— Umberto Eco (2008)
Beaumarchais vs. Lepaute, evidence of all the necessary mistakes.
Is There Meaning to Life? Jordan Peterson, Rebecca Goldstein, William Lane Craig (2018). Some good intellectual maneuvering on display.
ACID: My Personal “C” Change, “C is a powerful, simple, and important member of ACID.”
A Flowchart of Philosophical Novels, lots to chew on. Some of them have found a place in my growing pile of to-read books.
Breaking GitHub Private Pages for $35k, nice exhaustive writeup.
Toward a More Coercive Cyber Strategy, by James Andrew Lewis. The hawks of cyber warfare are circling.
Routing the technical interview, now that was one heck of a solution!
tmpout.sh/1/ old-school BBS style zine.
The Environmental Cost of CryptoArt, oh my!
Recovering a full PEM Private Key when half of it is redacted, interesting crypto analysis. Never share private key material, even if partially redacted.
Fail-fast Is Failing… Fast!, by Pat Helland. Metastability and distributed systems.
Welcome to Minerva, my attempt at collecting things that catches my interest, that makes me think (a link blog, dare I say?), after a long break.
The blog is powered by Trivium engine created by Leah Neukirchen
No guarantees on update frequency. Quality over quantity. No comments either.
Onward.
(…) die Eule der Minerva beginnt erst mit der einbrechenden Dämmerung ihren Flug.
— Georg Friedrich Hegel (1972)
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