Missouri's Governor Wouldn't Fund Public Defenders—So He's Been Ordered to Serve as One Himself
The state's top public defender invoked a seldom-used provision to compel his political foe to come to the aid of an indigent defendant.
Hasnain says:
Sickest burn in quite a while, in response to Gov. Nixon slashing the public defender budgets.
"Therefore, pursuant to Section 600.042.5 and as Director of the Missouri State Public Defender System tasked with carrying out the State’s obligation to ensure that poor people who face incarceration are afforded competent counsel in their defense, I hereby appoint you, Jeremiah W. (Jay) Nixon, Bar No. 29603, to enter your appearance as counsel of record in the attached case."
Posted on 2016-08-04T15:37:47+0000
Dentists forgot to study flossing for a century, recommended it anyway
Federal health experts dropped it from health guidelines due to lack of research.
Illegal in Massachusetts: Asking Your Salary in a Job Interview
A law taking effect in 2018 requires employers to offer a compensation figure upfront in an effort to end the wage gap between men and women.
When It Comes to China, Google’s Experience Still Says It All — Backchannel
Uber was only the latest victim of a syndrome making it tough for US firms
Hasnain has not yet written a summary for this.
Posted on 2016-08-03T21:31:43+0000
Better Exception Messages · Writing an OS in Rust
Better Exception Messages Aug 3, 2016 In this post, we explore exceptions in more detail. Our goal is to print additional information when an exception occurs, for example the values of the instruction and stack pointer. In the course of this, we will explore inline assembly and naked functions. We…
When Tenure Never Comes
Academia has become a high-stakes gamble—and the losers can barely afford pants
Hasnain says:
"Then I asked if she could substantiate rumors that the position would eventually translate into tenure-track position. This answer was more troubling. “Universities aren’t really looking to make thirty-year commitments anymore,” says the beneficiary of such a sinecure. In the space of five minutes this Dean had summarized my plight: because I’ve never held a tenure-track position, my decade of productivity put me in no greater standing for a job than someone fresh out of grad school; and those tenure-track positions—the only means to vindicate that work—aren’t in the interests of higher-education administrators."
Posted on 2016-07-31T16:27:37+0000
High frequency security bug hunting: 120 days, 120 bugs
1) Intro & Motivations 2) Findings 3) Analysis 4) Methodology 5) Advice 6) Notable bug I: Second order subdomain/page takeovers 7) Notable bug II: DOM Based XSS via subtitle tracks 1) Intro & Motivations At the start of of this year, I set myself a personal goal of finding
The chip card transition in the US has been a disaster
They're confusing to use, painstakingly slow, and aren't even the best solution for consumers. And banks had every chance to do it right.
Hasnain says:
"Critics have told me that banks opted for a signature versus a PIN code because it saves them large amounts of money by not having to store PIN codes for everyone. Banks, on the other hand, say they feared that their customers would have a difficult time remembering a four digit code. (This, despite millions of people already using check cards and other access cards with PIN codes.)"
Posted on 2016-07-31T16:17:46+0000
Random notes on improving the Redis LRU algorithm - <antirez>
antirez 53 seconds ago. 8 views. Redis is often used for caching, in a setup where a fixed maximum memory to use is specified. When new data arrives, we need to make space by removing old data. The efficiency of Redis as a cache is related to how good decision it makes about what data to evict: dele...
Hasnain has not yet written a summary for this.
Posted on 2016-07-31T16:14:57+0000
The law depends on compute power
In 2011 Sony sued George Hotz and his friends for jailbreaking the Playstation 3. One of the main complaints was that Hotz published an…
Hasnain says:
"The only real conclusion I can draw from this is the observation that the law necessarily depends on current computational power, but the law doesn’t make that explicit in any document or court opinion I’ve heard of."
Posted on 2016-07-31T16:01:30+0000