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Retweet of dangoodin001

2015 Mar 23, 5:55
We know where you’ve been: Ars acquires 4.6M license plate scans from the cops. Fantastic reporting by @cfarivar http://ars.to/1LShUdc 
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Retweet of TheAtlantic

2015 Mar 20, 4:03
A new 3-D printer pulls fully formed objects out of liquid at 100 times the speed http://theatln.tc/199X3VM  pic.twitter.com/cMb6HSthL7
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Retweet of bhalp1

2015 Mar 19, 6:57
Sometimes when I'm writing Javascript I want to throw up my hands and say "this is bullshit!" but I can never remember what "this" refers to
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Retweet of linkalis

2015 Mar 15, 9:30
Was skeptical at first, but now I'm sold! "USB Type-C Explained: What It Is and Why You’ll Want it" http://www.howtogeek.com/211843/usb-type-c-explained-what-it-is-and-why-youll-want-it/ … @howtogeek
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Retweet of doomquasar

2015 Mar 8, 11:53
We finally did what we should've done forever ago: filled a party bag with restaurant names so we never have to decide again.
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Retweet of benchirlin

2015 Mar 1, 8:56
RE: anti @WordPress "There are 2 types of programming languages: the ones ppl complain about and the ones nobody uses." -Bjarne Stroustrop
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Retweet of __apf__

2015 Feb 11, 7:44
want to live the experience of a non-technical user? watch someone narrate what they think an ssl warning is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngCIU7b5j-M …
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Retweet of DrPizza

2015 Feb 11, 12:38
btw, @fxshaw, if Microsoft wants to rebrand with my new logo, I'm sure we can come to a suitable arrangement. http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/cool-microsoft1-300x150.png …
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Retweet of jaffathecake

2015 Feb 5, 9:58
quick someone see if there's a correlation between anti-vaxers and those defending sync xhr
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Tweet from David_Risney

2015 Feb 3, 3:37
After visiting a page then immediately wanting to take back my page view and associated ad revenue: REGRET http://clicbait HTTP/1.1 ...
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Retweet of panzer

2015 Feb 1, 3:01
Call me old fashioned but I want Superbowl commercials to hypersexualize food and trucks not make me want to double check my childproofing
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DrPizza: <- my reaction when there are new hats.

2015 Jan 27, 9:00
Peter Bright        ✔ @DrPizza :
http://fat.gfycat.com/ShadowyUnimportantHorsefly.gif … <- my reaction when there are new hats.
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The Interview ending interpretation

2014 Dec 25, 2:29

As the title suggests, spoilers for The Interview follow.

Towards the end of the movie, after Dave Skylark is shot, he miraculously has a bullet proof vest, blows up Kim Jong-un, finds a random tunnel and is picked up by Seal Team Six. These are the same details of the unbelievable scenario that Dave Skylark describes to Agent Lacey at the beginning of the movie.

This isn't a coincidence. Everything after Dave is shot is his fantasizing about how things should have gone as he dies in the interview chair. Unsurprisingly his fantasy closely matches his original ridiculous thoughts about how he would assassinate and escape.

This is similar to movies like Brazil in which the later fourth of the movie is the main character’s romantic fantasy as he is tortured and killed in real life. Or Total Recall where the end of the movie matches the description of the memories that the main character will have implanted at the beginning.

Its safe to assume that after Dave is killed, Aaron and Sook are captured and also killed.

PermalinkCommentsthe-interview

Why do Nigerian Scammers Say They are from Nigeria? - Microsoft Research

2014 Aug 26, 3:53

Mass mailing Internet scams intentionally use poor spelling, grammar etc to filter down to target ignorant audience .

PermalinkCommentstechnical security statistics

The Strange & Curious Tale of the Last True Hermit

2014 Aug 21, 3:02

The story of Chris Knight, living in isolation in the woods of Maine for 27 years.

'Anyone who reveals what he's learned, Chris told me, is not by his definition a true hermit. Chris had come around on the idea of himself as a hermit, and eventually embraced it. When I mentioned Thoreau, who spent two years at Walden, Chris dismissed him with a single word: “dilettante.”'

'But still, I pressed on, there must have been some grand insight revealed to him in the wild…”Get enough sleep.”'

I don’t want to brag, but I’ve been telling that people all along and I didn’t have to live alone in the woods for decades.

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Gamers Messed With The Steam Sale, Then Valve Changed The Rules

2014 Jun 24, 3:51

Applied game theory 101: Valve’s Steam Summer Sale involves a meta game with teams of Steam users competing for daily prizes. On Reddit the players join together to take turns winning daily. Valve gets wise and performs an existential attack, changing the rules to make it harder for players to want to coordinate.

Still, that all the players joined together to game the system gives me hope for humanity. Its a self organized solution to a tragedy of the commons problem. Only in this case the tragedy is by design and is updated to be more tragic.

PermalinkCommentsgame video-game game-theory valve

On exploiting security issues in botnet C&C...

2014 Jun 23, 4:26


On exploiting security issues in botnet C&C software:

Hackers “are learning that it’s not so easy to write secure code,” Toro says. “Most of us in the business of securing our applications and systems know that bulletproofing software is an extremely expensive and exhaustive undertaking. Malware creators who have to look to their own defences would have to slow down the production of new attacks.”

FYI, if you want to know what it looks like when you hack a hacker, look no further than the seminal 1995 film Hackers.

PermalinkCommentstechnical security

mostlysignssomeportents: More than 90% of Americans believe...

2014 Jun 7, 9:55


mostlysignssomeportents:

More than 90% of Americans believe that the US government is unduly influenced by money, and the Mayday.US super PAC is raising $5M to fund the election campaigns of politicians who’ll pledge to dismantle super PACs and enact other campaign finance reforms. They raised more than $1M in 30 days last month, and this month, the goal is $5M. It’s the brainchild of Lawrence Lessig, who’s going to run prototype the project by running five electoral campaigns in 2014, and use the lessons of those projects to win enough anti-corruption seats in 2016 to effect real change.

Again, I’m not able to contribute to Mayday.US, because I’m a Canadian and Briton. But I ask my American friends to put in $10, and promise that I’ll put CAD1000 into any comparable Canadian effort and/or £1000 into a comparable UK effort. We all win when countries embrace evidence-based policy guided by doing what’s best for its citizens, rather than lining the pockets of corrupting multinationals.

Mayday.US

Please reblog!

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So You Want To Write Your Own CSV code? · TBurette

2014 May 25, 1:46

Additional considerations beyond the naïve implementation of a CSV parser.

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Debugging anecdote - the color transparent black breaks accessibility

2014 May 22, 10:36

Some time back while I was working on getting the Javascript Windows Store app platform running on Windows Phone (now available on the last Windows Phone release!) I had an interesting bug that in retrospect is amusing.

I had just finished a work item to get accessibility working for JS WinPhone apps when I got a new bug: With some set of JS apps, accessibility appeared to be totally broken. At that time in development the only mechanism we had to test accessibility was a test tool that runs on the PC, connects to the phone, and dumps out the accessibility tree of whatever app is running on the phone. In this bug, the tool would spin for a while and then timeout with an error and no accessibility information.

My first thought was this was an issue in my new accessibility code. However, debugging with breakpoints on my code I could see none of my code was run nor the code that should call it. The code that called that code was a more generic messaging system that hit my breakpoints constantly.

Rather than trying to work backward from the failure point, I decided to try and narrow down the repro and work forwards from there. One thing all the apps with the bug had in common was their usage of WinJS, but not all WinJS apps demonstrated the issue. Using a binary search approach on one such app I removed unrelated app code until all that was left was the app's usage of the WinJS AppBar and the bug still occurred. I replaced the WinJS AppBar usage with direct usage of the underlying AppBar WinRT APIs and continued.

Only some calls to the AppBar WinRT object produced the issue:

        var appBar = Windows.UI.WebUI.Core.WebUICommandBar.getForCurrentView(); 
// appBar.opacity = 1;
// appBar.closeDisplayMode = Windows.UI.WebUI.Core.WebUICommandBarClosedDisplayMode.default;
appBar.backgroundColor = Windows.UI.Colors.white; // Bug!
Just setting the background color appeared to cause the issue and I didn't even have to display the AppBar. Through additional trial and error I was blown away to discover that some colors I would set caused the issue and other colors did not. Black wouldn't cause the issue but transparent black would. So would aqua but not white.

I eventually realized that predefined WinRT color values like Windows.UI.Colors.aqua would cause the issue while JS literal based colors didn't cause the issue (Windows.UI.Color is a WinRT struct which projects in JS as a JS literal object with the struct members as JS object properties so its easy to write something like {r: 0, g: 0, b: 0, a: 0} to make a color) and I had been mixing both in my tests without realizing there would be a difference. I debugged into the backgroundColor property setter that consumed the WinRT color struct to see what was different between Windows.UI.Colors.black and {a: 1, r: 0, g: 0, b: 0} and found the two structs to be byte wise exactly the same.

On a hunch I tried my test app with only a reference to the color and otherwise no interaction with the AppBar and not doing anything with the actual reference to the color: Windows.UI.Colors.black;. This too caused the issue. I knew that the implementation for these WinRT const values live in a DLL and guessed that something in the code to create these predefined colors was causing the issue. I debugged in and no luck. Now I also have experienced crusty code that would do exciting things in its DllMain, the function that's called when a DLL is loaded into the process so I tried modifying my C++ code to simply LoadLibrary the DLL containing the WinRT color definition, windows.ui.xaml.dll and found the bug still occurred! A short lived moment of relief as the world seemed to make sense again.

Debugging into DllMain nothing interesting happened. There were interesting calls in there to be sure, but all of them behind conditions that were false. I was again stumped. On another hunch I tried renaming the DLL and only LoadLibrary'ing it and the bug went away. I took a different DLL renamed it windows.ui.xaml.dll and tried LoadLibrary'ing that and the bug came back. Just the name of the DLL was causing the issue.

I searched for the DLL name in our source code index and found hits in the accessibility tool. Grinning I opened the source to find that the accessibility tool's phone side service was trying to determine if a process belonged to a XAML app or not because XAML apps had a different accessibility contract. It did this by checking to see if windows.ui.xaml.dll was loaded in the target process.

At this point I got to fix my main issue and open several new bugs for the variety of problems I had just run into. This is a how to on writing software that is difficult to debug.

PermalinkCommentsbug debug javascript JS technical windows winrt
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