Saturday, February 3, 2018

What was I reading in January 2018?

Reading for the month of January was a bit lite because I was studying for a test (which I passed yesterday). At the same time, I was acting as technical editor for an acquaintance's book (completed a week or two ago).

I have approximately 3 weeks before the next set of courses starts and I'm taking a break (to let stress levels subside). That said, somehow I've let myself be tasked to write another hardware review...

In any case, January's reading:

2018-01-01

- Tech Bros Bought Sex Trafficking Victims Using Amazon and Microsoft Work Emails - Slashdot - SMH... This usually sources from an attitude of either: "The rules don't apply to me." or "I'm too smart to get caught."
- An Introduction to Counterfeit ICs: Counterfeiting Detection and Avoidance Methods
- facebookresearch/wav2letter - Facebook's speech recognition toolkit
- Home - Much Assembly Required - an assembly programming game

2018-01-06

- Don't pirate or we'll mess with your Nest, warns East Coast ISP - From the This-Is-A-Bad-Idea Department: Yet another company that will have to learn (the hard way) that two wrongs don't make a right.
- Announcing the OpenWrt/LEDE merge
- Intel facing class-action lawsuits over Meltdown and Spectre bugs - I'm not sure how the complainants think they have legal standing for this. How damaging is a 5% slowdown? If they're trying to recoup funds spent on installing the patches, that's a weak argument because they'd need to start suing the OS vendors too (on a monthly basis?).
- Spectre-on-Kubernetes - a proof of concept

2018-01-07

- Largest Prime Number Discovered With More Than 23m Digits
- Critical Unpatched Flaws Disclosed In Western Digital 'My Cloud' Storage Devices - Now this is something which might trigger a lawsuit.

2018-01-09

- Control-C handling in Python and Trio - I'm starting to pay attention to these because I've been taking a course in automation with Python.
- Mental models - Much falls into the GTD bucket.
- Introduction to reverse engineering and Assembly.

2018-01-11

- William James - The Thinker Who Believed in Doing
- Cory Doctorow: Persuasion, Adaptation, and the Arms Race for Your Attention
- Now Playing: Continuous low-power music recognition
- Writing a C Compiler - Part 5
- tonybaloney/mocker - How bad could it get? :)

2018-01-12

- Signal partners with Microsoft to bring end-to-end encryption to Skype - I'm suspicious of this. End-to-end encryption was there before Microsoft acquired the tool. I'm also annoyed: Skype doesn't "see" my Microsoft web cam (Google Hangouts does, though).

2018-01-16

- Coin Cell Hacks That Won the Coin Cell Challenge
- Has pop music lost its fun? - I'm thinking that #5 can be blamed on software (i.e., audio loops).
- VMware Advances Container Case

2018-01-17

- Start Your Own ISP
- DNS over HTTPS

2018-01-19

- Reverse engineering FPGAs
- Detecting Chrome headless - new techniques

2018-01-21

- How to Show Asterisks While Typing Sudo Password in Linux

2018-01-23

- Faster R-CNN: Down the rabbit hole of modern object detection
- Why Discrete Math Is Important

2018-01-25

- Mary Lee Berners-Lee's obit
- grep your way to freedom
- Speed Kills - Enter an Age of Unbridled Hyperconnectivity

2018-01-26

- How to Prepare a Talk

2018-01-28

- Rocket Lab Criticized For Launching Their Own Private 'Star' Into Orbit - Given the response, has anyone considered that RocketLabs may have launched the ball to annoy exactly that set of people?
- Deanonymizing Tor: Your Bitcoin Transactions May Come Back To Haunt You
- How Old School C Programmers Process Arguments
- Copyright Royalty Board Boosts Songwriters Streaming Pay Nearly 50 Percent - Anyone else confused by this? The streaming services don't pay the songwriters directly, they pay the publishers. Basic math: If the publishers still keep their (large) percentage, it's not going to budge the writers' cut. Yes, they'll get a bit more money but it won't move their percentage of the vig. Shenanigans by the usual parties?
- Selectric bug - Operation GUNMAN - how the Soviets bugged IBM typewriters
- Google's Cloud Shell
- Please Stop Using Local Storage
- halilozercan/halocoin - Learning about cryptocurrencies while learning Python
- Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read - Err... Speak for yourself.
- Taxonomy of Logical Fallacies - the old version
- [1801.01944] Audio Adversarial Examples: Targeted Attacks on Speech-to-Text
- The Feynman Technique: The Best Way to Learn Anything
- $530 Mln in XEM Stolen From Coincheck Can Be Traced, NEM Team Confirms
- Computer scientist uncovers clue to deciphering one of the most mysterious books in the world - Not holding breath but...

2018-01-29

- The Open Sourcerer's Magic Spell Book
- Qubes Air: Generalizing the Qubes Architecture
- Vulnerable industrial controls directly connected to Internet? Why not?

2018-01-30

- Easy laser-cut electronics cases

2018-01-31

- Hans Peter Luhn and the Birth of the Hashing Algorithm
- LinuxBoot - Linux as firmware

Above was generated by a homegrown bolt-on script for Wallabag, which is a free utility for capturing web content so that it can be read later.