Micropost

A compilation of classic arcade deaths, arranged to an 8-bit cover of ”Mad World”. The music is a cover of Mad World, by Tears for Fears. » Rob Beschizza | boingboing.net

Much of this data was entered by hand (obtained by contacting past conference organizers, retrieving cached conference websites, and searching CVs) so please email me if you notice any errors or omissions: bestpaper-AT-jeffhuang.com. I tried to collect best paper awards from the top-tier conferences in each area, but some conferences do not have such an award (e.g. SIGGRAPH, CAV). ”Distinguished paper award” and ”outstanding paper award” are included but not ”best student paper” (e.g. NIPS) or ”best 10-year old paper” (e.g. POPL) ...

When developers shift from PHP, Ruby or any other platform to Python, the very first road block they face (most often) is a lack of an overall understanding of the Python ecosystem. Developers often yearn for a tutorial or resource that explains how to accomplish most tasks in a more or less standard way. What follows is an extract from the internal wiki at my workplace, which documents the basics of the Python ecosystem for web application development for our interns, trainees and experienced developers who shift to Python from other platforms. ...

I just made a tool to transform any javascript code into an equivalent sequence of ()[]{}!+ characters. You can try it here, or grab it from github or npm. Keep on reading if you want to know how it works. What do you know about non-alphanumeric XSS? The other day one of my friends asked me that question on IRC, pointing me to some articles on sla.ckers.org where they tried to create some scripts like alert(1) with non-alphanumeric characters. As a security researcher and a penetration tester, he insisted that extending that concept to any javascript source would be really useful for bypassing IDSs, IPSs and WAFs. So challange accepted! ...

Twenty-four years ago today, I had a very bad day. On August 8, 1988, I was a senior in high school. I was working my after school and weekend job at Safeway as a cashier, when the store manager suddenly walked over and said I better stop ringing up customers and talk to my mother on the store phone right now. Mom told me to come home immediately because, well, there were police at the front door asking for me with some legal papers in hand. ...

You must have heard about The Internet map by now. If not, you can take a look at it here. Roughly speaking, the Internet Map displays websites’ location according to users’ behavior. Similar websites visited by the same people are situated close to one another; different websites not having mutual visitors are situated at a considerable distance from each other. The size of a website on the map is determined by its average click rating while the color is defined by belonging to a nationality. You can get a more detailed notion referring to the About section on the website of the Map. In the present article I would like to tell you how the website of The Internet map is organized, which technologies ensure its normal day-to-day functioning and what steps had to be taken in order to sustain a massive surge of visitors wishing to have a look at the map. The operability of the Internet Map is enabled by present-day internet-giants’ technologies: the Map’s visual display is powered by Google Maps engine by Google Inc., web query processing is performed with Microsoft’s .net technologies, while Amazon Web Services by Amazon is responsible for hosting and content delivery. All the three components are vital for the Map’s normal operation. With some effort, alternatives can be found, but I am not confident that it will bring much of a benefit. ...

The history of the computer industry is filled with fascinating tales of riches that appear to practically fall from the sky. Along with stories of riches won, there are stories of opportunities missed. Take that of Ronald Wayne, who cofounded Apple Computer with Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs but sold his shares for just US $2300. And John Atanasoff, who proudly showed his digital computer design to John Mauchly”who later codesigned the Eniac, often defined as the first electronic computer, without credit to Atanasoff. But by far the most famous story of missed fame and fortune is that of Gary Kildall. A pioneer in computer operating systems, Kildall wrote Control Program for Microcomputers (CP/M), the operating system used on many of the early hobbyist personal computers, such as the MITS Altair 8800, the IMSAI 8080, and the Osborne 1, before IBM introduced its own machine, the PC. Kildall could have virtually owned the personal computer operating system business, had he sold that system to IBM. He didn’t. Why is a matter of speculation, mundane gossip, and urban legend. We’ll get to that. Bill Gates at Microsoft, however, did sell an operating system to IBM”and reaped then-unimaginable rewards. A cloud of speculation has hung over that part of the story as well. The big question: Was the operating system Gates sold to IBM his to sell? Or was a key part of it stolen from Kildall? Microsoft has stated that its hands were clean. Kildall maintained that QDOS, and subsequently MS-DOS, had been directly copied from CP/M and thus infringed on his copyright. But until now there’s been no way to conduct a reliable examination of the software itself, to look inside MS-DOS for the fingerprints of CP/M, and settle the issue once and for all. ...

I’ve had too many personal experiences get messed up just because companies change things on the cloud. I’ve come to a depressed state of feeling that I own nothing on the cloud and have no ability to keep things working the way they do. Features change and get dropped, things you depend on disappear, etc. And no company will ever take responsibility. It’s rare to ever get told what really happened. ...

Wi-Fi radio signals are found in 61 percent of homes in the U.S. and 25 percent worldwide, so Karl Woodbridge and Kevin Chetty, researchers at University College London, designed their detector to use these ubiquitous signals. When a radio wave reflects off a moving object, its frequency changes”a phenomenon called the Doppler effect. Their radar prototype identifies frequency changes to detect moving objects. It’s about the size of a suitcase and contains a radio receiver composed of two antennas ;íand a signal-processing unit. In tests, they have used it to determine a person’s location, speed and direction”even through a one-foot-thick brick wall. Because the device itself doesn’t emit any radio waves, it can’t be detected. ...

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is where it all began in March 1989. A physicist, Tim Berners-Lee, wrote a proposal for information management showing how information could be transferred easily over the Internet by using hypertext, the now familiar point-and-click system of navigating through information. The following year, Robert Cailliau, a systems engineer, joined in and soon became its number one advocate. The idea was to connect hypertext with the Internet and personal computers, thereby having a single information network to help CERN physicists share all the computer-stored information at the laboratory. Hypertext would enable users to browse easily between texts on web pages using links. The first examples were developed on NeXT computers. ...