Hasnain says:

Sigh. This is just a scary situation all around. Appeals processes need to be better as well as detection of CSAM. So many trade offs here but I wish companies would strive to do better. Or at least apologize when they got it wrong (though I understand why they can’t — lawsuits)

“A Google spokeswoman said the company stands by its decisions, even though law enforcement cleared the two men.

Ms. Hessick, the law professor, said the cooperation the technology companies provide to law enforcement to address and root out child sexual abuse is “incredibly important,” but she thought it should allow for corrections.

“From Google’s perspective, it’s easier to just deny these people the use of their services,” she speculated. Otherwise, the company would have to resolve more difficult questions about “what’s appropriate behavior with kids and then what’s appropriate to photograph or not.”

Hasnain says:

The fact that they did it on a 10 year old computer is glorious.

“One reason SIKE’s vulnerability was not detected until now was because the new attack “applies very advanced mathematics—I can’t think of another situation where an attack has used such deep mathematics compared with the system being broken,” says Galbraith. Katz agrees, saying, “I suspect that fewer than 50 people in the world understand both the underlying mathematics and the necessary cryptography.””

Hasnain says:

This was a really entertaining choose your own adventure story. I ended up getting a phd and somehow getting fired because of it - will play again later!

“You are a new employee at the code factory. The job listing said that you’d get to do all sorts of fancy machine learning applications but it turns out you’re needed to fix old legacy code that doesn’t work anymore! You re-run the code against the test cases laid out by the last guy who worked on this legacy code and it’s outputting the error.”

Hasnain says:

This was an interesting read, gave me a lot of food for thought.

“Will this vision pan out? I don't know... maybe. But I think we're heading in this direction already. It won't be overnight revolution, even structured programming wasn't. Many of these ideas are not explored enough yet, and some of them might even be impossible to implement, who knows. Testing is the most developed out of these, I'd say. Even though it's still far behind what I want, I think most of the building blocks are there”

Hasnain says:

Great tutorial. But also this leaves me with very little confidence in Hyundai. Using a publicly available test keypair?! Sigh.

“But at least I had the encryption key. To verify that no one else had gotten this far I googled the encryption key. Encryption Key Search Results

Google Git? Apple? Chegg????

Turns out the encryption key in that script is the first AES 128bit CBC example key listed in the NIST document SP800-38A.”

Hasnain says:

Come for the inspirational story, stay for the lesson on mechanics and the engineering behind motors.

“Robert Sansone is a natural born engineer. From animatronic hands to high-speed running boots and a go-kart that can reach speeds of more than 70 miles per hour, the Fort Pierce, Florida-based inventor estimates he’s completed at least 60 engineering projects in his spare time. And he’s only 17 years old.”

Hasnain says:

This had some useful advice - it rings true though I have no way of verifying it.

“These are just my observations from nearly 20 years of doing professional consulting around FOSS. There is no singular right way of running a consultancy, but these are the key aspects that helped me to maintain good working relationships with my customers.

Running a FOSS consultancy is hard work, but can result in a sustainable business, if you are willing to put in the work.”

Hasnain says:

I can’t wait for the follow up post here - this was really interesting.

“But it certainly has its trade-offs. Kicking out all other transactions whenever you need to write something can become a bottleneck for many applications that have concurrent users. When people say that SQLite doesn't scale, it's typically because they used the rollback journal.

However, SQLite continued to improve and eventually introduced the write-ahead log (WAL) journaling mode and even the wal2 journaling mode. These provide significantly better support for concurrent readers.”

Hasnain says:

“Ranjay Gulati of Harvard Business School has instead characterised it as a “great rethink”, where people evaluate their lives and options: people like Natalie Ormond. “I left my 14-year social work career last September,” she said. “I wasn’t driven to climb the ladder and felt that I was coasting – not doing the bare minimum, but just doing my job and not going above and beyond.””

Hasnain says:

This was a really interesting series of posts. I learnt a lot about weird arcane corners of rust that I didn’t know about and now I’m excited to find a use for these libraries at some point.