Micropost

I don’t know anything about music. I know there are letters but sometimes the letters have squiggles; I know an octave doubles in pitch; I know you can write a pop song with only four chords. That’s about it. The rest has always seemed completely, utterly arbitrary. Why do we have twelve notes, but represent them with only seven letters? Where did the key signatures come from? Why is every Wikipedia article on this impossible to read without first having read all the others? ...

If you’re reading this page, chances are that you’re already well aware that E.T. for the Atari 2600 is one of the most reviled games ever made. I never understood why. As a child, it was one of my favorite games. I still think it’s a good game. Apparently, I’m not alone. On this page I’m going to briefly explore why people hate E.T., and how the game can be fixed. ...

It’s universally acknowledged that it’s a bad idea to store plain-text passwords. If a database containing plain-text passwords is compromised, user accounts are in immediate danger. For this reason, as early as 1976, the industry standardized on storing passwords using secure, one-way hashing mechanisms (starting with Unix Crypt). Unfortunately, while this prevents the direct reading of passwords in case of a compromise, all hashing mechanisms necessarily allow attackers to brute force the hash offline, by going through lists of possible passwords, hashing them, and comparing the result. In this context, secure hashing functions like SHA have a critical flaw for password hashing: they are designed to be fast. A modern commodity CPU can generate millions of SHA256 hashes per second. Specialized GPU clusters allow for calculating hashes at a rate of billions per second. ...

The earliest incarnation I can find is in ALGOL 58. The original description of ALGOL 58 is a fascinating read — it’s written like a math paper, with literal text in italics and heavy use of subscripts. Character classes are even named by Greek letters, with λ representing letters and so on. The example program at the end is completely incomprehensible, with almost every variable being a single letter and labels forming their own entire column on the left side. I guess that last bit came from FORTRAN. ...

Computer science books contains timeless wisdom, but performance advice doesn’t always age well. When reading Programming Pearls, by Jon Bentley, I’ve found more modern hardware advances that puts conventional wisdom on its head. » Franklin He | medium.com

Es un periodo en la historia del software bien diferenciado. Uno en el que muchos jugadores se sumaron a la industria, sin saber apenas qué había antes. Probablemente también fueron los años en los que nacieron un mayor número de propiedades intelectuales. Y también es el inicio de la generación PlayStation, asentándose un modelo de negocio (consumo rápido, gran oferta de videojuegos) que permanece hasta nuestros días. Hablamos de una época que empieza en 1993 y acaba en 1996. Tres años en los que los videojuegos en dos dimensiones pasaron de dominar la industria (y ser casi el único camino viable en ella) a prácticamente desaparecer por completo. ...

En primer lugar, igual que hice en la entrada anterior “Volcado de memoria RAM en Windows – OSForensics”, voy a recordar la importancia de las buenas prácticas, recordando la necesidad de conocer y seguir la RFC 3227, que lleva por título “Guidelines for Evidence Collection and Archiving”, (Directrices para la recolección y archivo de la Evidencia). Vuelvo a decir: recomiendo encarecidamente su lectura. En esta ocasión, vamos a realizar un volcado de memoria de un sistema Linux. ...

Our content, web design, and development teams spent months putting together a brand new guide to walk users through the process of identifying and clearing a WordPress hack, as well as ensuring post-hack actions are taken using the free Sucuri plugin. » Alycia Mitchell | sucuri.net

» Real Engineering | youtube.com

Un lenguaje informático no es más que un conjunto de instrucciones que introducimos en una máquina para que esta opere permitiéndonos así desarrollar programas. De este modo, las distintas formas en que combinamos dichas instrucciones dan lugar a los diferentes estilos y escuelas responsables de lo que podemos denominar ‘la estética de la programación‘. Esa estética, según las reglas a las que responda, se puede clasificar a su vez en cuatro grandes grupos que tradicionalmente, como muchas corrientes artísticas, han coexistido de forma simultánea… ...