Micropost

David D. Clark, an MIT scientist whose air of genial wisdom earned him the nickname “Albus Dumbledore,” can remember exactly when he grasped the Internet’s dark side. He was presiding over a meeting of network engineers when news broke that a dangerous computer worm — the first to spread widely — was slithering across the wires. One of the engineers, working for a leading computer company, piped up with a claim of responsibility for the security flaw that the worm was exploiting. “Damn,” he said. “I thought I had fixed that bug.” But as the attack raged in November 1988, crashing thousands of machines and causing millions of dollars in damage, it became clear that the failure went beyond a single man. The worm was using the Internet’s essential nature — fast, open and frictionless — to deliver malicious code along computer lines designed to carry harmless files or e-mails. ...

The evolution of the Unix operating system is made available as a version-control repository, covering the period from its inception in 1972 as a five thousand line kernel, to 2015 as a widely-used 26 million line system. The repository contains 659 thousand commits and 2306 merges. The repository employs the commonly used Git system for its storage, and is hosted on the popular GitHub archive. It has been created by synthesizing with custom software 24 snapshots of systems developed at Bell Labs, Berkeley University, and the 386BSD team, two legacy repositories, and the modern repository of the open source FreeBSD system. In total, 850 individual contributors are identified, the early ones through primary research. The data set can be used for empirical research in software engineering, information systems, and software archaeology. ...

There are just 32 pieces on a chessboard, but the number of patterns in which those pieces can move in the course of an individual game are astronomical. Still, as these maps show, despite all those different possibilities, each piece has a pretty clear pattern behind it. The maps, which track the most common trajectories of each chess piece, are the works of Steve Tung. Tung explained the process behind the maps to io9, noting that each map represents condensed data from over 2 million individual games of chess. ...

Por aquel entonces, Azpiri se había ganado merecidamente su fama de buen dibujante en periódicos, revistas y álbumes de historietas, por lo que Dinamic contactó con él para realizar su primera portada de un videojuego, el famoso ‘Rocky‘ de 1985. Poco después, en el mismo año, ilustró la aventura ‘Abu Simbel, Profanation‘, para el que escribe uno de los mejores, más adictivos y complicados videojuegos de la historia del entretenimiento digital. ...

La Dama en el Ajedrez no siempre tuvo los movimientos que tiene hoy, de hecho esta figura femenina ni siquiera existía en el tablero. Esta es la historia de como la Dama del Ajedrez se convirtió en la pieza más poderosa. » Gabriela González | hipertextual.com

Having a solid foundation in Computer Science is important to become a successful Software Engineer. This guide is a suggested path for university students to develop their technical skills academically and non-academically through self paced hands-on learning. You may use this guide to determine courses to take, but please make sure you are taking courses required for your major in order to graduate. The online resources provided in this guide are not meant to replace courses available at your university. However, they may help supplement your learnings or provide an introduction to a topic. ...

The rules of chess have remained consistent since the early 19th Century, but that doesn’t mean our approach to the game has stayed the same. Here are some intriguing and surprising ways the Game of Kings has changed its shape over the past 150 years. The history of chess dates back 1,500 years, but it wasn’t until the introduction of competitive chess in 1834 that the rules were solidified. Since that time, players of all calibers have diligently worked to find new and better ways of winning. ...

After HeartBleed, POODLE and FREAK encryption flaws, a new encryption attack has been emerged over the Internet that allows attackers to read and modify the sensitive data passing through encrypted connections, potentially affecting hundreds of thousands of HTTPS-protected sites, mail servers, and other widely used Internet services. A team of security researchers has discovered a new attack, dubbed Logjam, that allows a man-in-the-middle (MitM) to downgrade encrypted connections between a user and a Web or email server to use extremely weaker 512-bit keys which can be easily decrypted. ...

One of the most crucial pieces of any UNIX-like operating system is the init dæmon process. In Linux, this process is started by the kernel, and it’s the first userspace process to spawn and the last one to die during shutdown. During the history of UNIX and Linux, many init systems have gained popularity and then faded away. In this article, I focus on the history of the init system as it relates to Linux, and I talk about the role of init in a modern Linux system. I also relate some of the history of the System V Init (SysV) scheme, which was the de facto standard for many Linux distributions for a long time. Then I cover a couple more modern approaches to system initialization, such as Upstart and systemd. Finally, I pay some attention to how things work in systemd, as this seems to be the popular choice at the moment for several of the largest distributions. ...

In the modern era, software is commonly delivered as a service: called web apps, or software-as-a-service. The twelve-factor app is a methodology for building software-as-a-service apps that: Use declarative formats for setup automation, to minimize time and cost for new developers joining the project; Have a clean contract with the underlying operating system, offering maximum portability between execution environments; Are suitable for deployment on modern cloud platforms, obviating the need for servers and systems administration; Minimize divergence between development and production, enabling continuous deployment for maximum agility; And can scale up without significant changes to tooling, architecture, or development practices. The twelve-factor methodology can be applied to apps written in any programming language, and which use any combination of backing services (database, queue, memory cache, etc). ...