Micropost

The dynamic creation and destruction of objects was always one of the bugbears of C. It required the programmer to (manually) control the allocation of memory for the object, handle the object’s initialisation then ensure that the object was safely cleaned-up after use and its memory returned to the heap. Because many C programmers weren’t educated in the potential problems (or were just plain lazy or delinquent in their programming) C got a reputation in some quarters for being an unsafe, memory-leaking language. ...

Using HSTS to track your browsing habits evades the features of web browsers designed to control more normal ”cookie” based tracking mechanisms. Using ”incognito” or ”private” modes means that existing cookies won’t be shared with sites you visit. Browsers also let you entirely delete cookies that could be used to track you. Because HSTS is a security feature and isn’t intended to be used for tracking, web browsers treat it differently from cookies. It is only by intentional misapplication that HSTS can be exploited to track users. ...

HipHop Virtual Machine, or HHVM, reduces the median page-saving time for editors from about 7.5 seconds to 2.5 seconds, and the mean page-saving time from about 6 to 3 seconds. Below, I’ll explain the technical background for HHVM on MediaWiki and some of the far-reaching benefits of this change that will go beyond the recent performance gains. » Ori Livneh | blog.wikimedia.org

Two-player limit Texas hold’em poker has finally been solved, according to a study published in Science today. Scientists have designed a computer program, named Cepheus, with a strategy for the game that is so close to perfect that statistical analysis shows it can’t be defeated by a human poker player, even if that player competed against the computer for an entire lifetime. This means that no matter how the game starts out, the computer will win or break even in the long run — making it essentially unbeatable. » Cepheus ...

The background is set, you know why I took interest now it’s time to tell what solidified the decision. Each change made to the OpenBSD codebase undergoes a code review before it’s committed to the tree. If you managed to get that far in this article you perfectly know why I deem that of upmost importance. No matter how many features your software has, if your documentation is sub-par then your software is most likely useless. The quality of OpenBSD documentation is on a level I didn’t expect even after reading about it in so many places. Not only will you get information on how something works, what’s possible and how to use it. It will also tell you the best practices for using the tool and warn you about the common pitfalls. ...

Reading the documents, I have the feeling that the NSA can 1) decrypt weak crypto and 2) steal keys. Let’s focus on the crypto first. SSH supports different key exchange algorithms, ciphers and message authentication codes. The server and the client choose a set of algorithms supported by both, then proceed with the key exchange. Some of the supported algorithms are not so great and should be disabled completely. If you leave them enabled but prefer secure algorithms, then a man in the middle might downgrade you to bad ones. This hurts interoperability but everyone uses OpenSSH anyway. ...

Software for MS-DOS machines that represent entertainment and games. The collection includes action, strategy, adventure and other unique genres of game and entertainment software. Through the use of the EM-DOSBOX in-browser emulator, these programs are bootable and playable. Please be aware this browser-based emulation is still in beta - contact Jason Scott, Software Curator, if there are issues or questions. » archive.org

Monkey Island es uno de los videojuegos más míticos de todos los tiempos. Está lleno de pequeñas curiosidades, anécdotas y huevos de pascua. Estas son 10 de nuestras favoritas. » Carlos Rebato | gizmodo.com

A summary of some problems I faced when tinkering with Quake to get it play nicely on an oscilloscope. After seeing some cool clips like this mushroom thing and of course Youscope, playing Quake on a scope seemed like a great idea. It ticks all the marks that make me happy: low-poly, realtime rendered and open source. » Pekka Väänänen | lofibucket.com

Este jueves, 1 de enero, entra en vigor gran parte de la ley Lassalle de propiedad intelectual y con ella su artículo 32.2, que obliga a los editores y autores a cobrar —aunque no quieran— cuando los agregadores de Internet enlacen y distribuyan sus contenidos. Estos son los aspectos clave a tener en cuenta sobre el denominado canon AEDE. » M.M. | 20minutos.es