Blogs

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-20.

Password cracking: past, present, future

Tags: tech, security

Ever wondered about the state of the art in password cracking? This is not an easy read but a good reference.

https://www.openwall.com/presentations/OffensiveCon2024-Password-Cracking/

Beyond public key encryption – A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering

Tags: tech, cryptography

There are other cryptography schemes out there with interesting properties. Too bad they’re not very much used.

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2017/07/02/beyond-public-key-encryption/

SSD death, tricky read-only filesystems, and systemd magic?

Tags: tech, system, hardware, failure

Strange things do happen when the hardware fails… indeed the systemd open question at the end is mysterious.

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/05/15/ro/

The new APT 3.0 solver | Blog of Julian Andres Klode

Tags: tech, debian, packaging

Interesting work. This is nice to see improvements and experiments in dependency solvers for package managers.

https://blog.jak-linux.org/2024/05/14/solver3/

Extensions for GNU Make

Tags: tech, tools, make

Looks like nice extensions to use GNU Make to run simple tasks.

https://github.com/mitjafelicijan/makext

Which filepath-join behavior is implemented for relative and absolute paths as arguments?

Tags: tech, system, filesystem

You expect joining file paths to be a simple operation? Think again, it’s definitely error prone and can change between stacks.

https://lukas-prokop.at/articles/2024-05-03-filepath-join-behavior

What even is a pidfd anyway?

Tags: tech, processes, system, linux

Definitely a recent and lesser known to interact with other processes. Could be useful in some cases.

https://www.corsix.org/content/what-is-a-pidfd

An informal comparison of the three major implementations of std::string - The Old New Thing

Tags: tech, c++, performance, memory

Interesting quick comparison, this shows the design tradeoffs quite well.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20240510-00/?p=109742

GPUs Go Brrr · Hazy Research

Tags: tech, gpu, hardware, ai, machine-learning, neural-networks, performance

Interesting how much extra performance you can shave off the GPU by going back to how the hardware works.

https://hazyresearch.stanford.edu/blog/2024-05-12-tk

Sir, there’s a cat in your mirror dimension

Tags: tech, graphics, mathematics, funny

Funny experiment playing with the frequency domain and the spatial domain of an image. This gives unintuitive results for sure.

https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/sir-theres-a-cat-in-your-mirror-dimension

Snapshot Testing For the Masses

Tags: tech, tests, snapshots

This is a technique which is definitely underestimated. There are plenty of libraries out there allowing to use them.

https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/2024-05-14-snapshot-testing-for-the-masses

Laurence Tratt: What Factors Explain the Nature of Software?

Tags: tech, programming, software, craftsmanship, engineering

Good food for thought. Explains quite well the factors which impact software development.

https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/2024/what_factors_explain_the_nature_of_software.html

Bye for now!