Andrew Reeves-Hall

@AndrewRH
130 Followers
206 Following
20 Posts
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The Turing Police say "X Wins"

I had understood in principle that printf is Turing complete, but I am still aghast at this interactive game of tic-tac-toe implemented with a single printf statement.

Computing the NOT of a single value is also easy:...
https://jwz.org/b/ykOt

The Turing Police say "X Wins"

I had understood in principle that printf is Turing complete, but I am still aghast at this interactive game of tic-tac-toe implemented with a single printf statement. Computing the NOT of a single value is also easy: printf("%1$255d%1$s%hhn", a, b) will compute *b = (strlen(a)+255)%256 = strlen(a)-1 and again, because strlen(x) is either 1 or 0 we have *c = !b From here we can compute any ...

Right

Now the #EiffelTowers map is ready as well! đź’Ş

Now over 470 towers mapped

Full zoomable map
https://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/eiffel-towers-derivatives-and-replicas_1006050#3/22.35/11.87

Can you help me confirm the status of the ones with the ? icons? Can you send me a picture to use for the ones without one? Any towers I am missing?

Next: update the blog post about this (not today!)

Eiffel Towers - Derivatives and Replicas - uMap

uMap lets you create maps with OpenStreetMap layers in a minute and embed them in your site.

Did One Guy Just Stop a Huge Cyberattack?

A Microsoft engineer noticed something was off on a piece of software he worked on. He soon discovered someone was probably trying to gain access to computers all over the world.

The New York Times

I promised a blog post about how much it cost to heat our home in winter with heat pump vs. gas. Also about the much improved insulation. Here it is:

http://davidhembrow.blogspot.com/2024/04/relative-cost-of-heating-with-heat-pump.html

To summarise: In the worst case, our CO2 emissions are reduced by 95% vs. burning gas, we have no heating bill at all any more, and our home was warmer than before.

#VanHetGasAf #HeatPump #Insulation #EnergyBill #Heating #EnergyCost #CO2Budget #ZeroCO2Emission #EnergyEfficiency

Relative cost of heating with a heat pump vs. gas (How to reduce your heating bill by 100%)

We've now had our heat pump for one whole winter. For the purposes of this blog post, "winter" refers to each period of November through to...

I accidentally found a security issue while benchmarking postgres changes.

If you run debian testing, unstable or some other more "bleeding edge" distribution, I strongly recommend upgrading ASAP.

https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2024/03/29/4

oss-security - backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to ssh server compromise

Drunk AI?

'Here, we combine extensive chemical and sensory analyses of 250 different beers to train machine learning models that allow predicting flavor and consumer appreciation.'

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-46346-0

Predicting and improving complex beer flavor through machine learning - Nature Communications

Perception and appreciation of food flavour depends on many factors, posing a challenge for effective prediction. Here, the authors combine extensive chemical and sensory analyses of 250 commercial Belgian beers to train machine learning models that enable flavour and consumer appreciation prediction.

Nature
@alex Do you intend to highlight other animals on signs? If so, then may I offer up the lovely toad on signs found around the River Test in Hampshire, UK?

A newly discovered vulnerability baked into Apple’s M-series of chips allows attackers to extract secret keys from Macs when they perform widely used cryptographic operations, academic researchers have revealed in a paper published Thursday.

The flaw—a side channel allowing end-to-end key extractions when Apple chips run implementations of widely used cryptographic protocols—can’t be patched directly because it stems from the microarchitectural design of the silicon itself. Instead, it can only be mitigated by building defenses into third-party cryptographic software that could drastically degrade M-series performance when executing cryptographic operations, particularly on the earlier M1 and M2 generations. The vulnerability can be exploited when the targeted cryptographic operation and the malicious application with normal user system privileges run on the same CPU cluster.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/03/hackers-can-extract-secret-encryption-keys-from-apples-mac-chips/

Unpatchable vulnerability in Apple chip leaks secret encryption keys

Fixing newly discovered side channel will likely take a major toll on performance.

Ars Technica