Microsoft Open Sources Zork I, II And III

November 21, 2025 by Maya Posch 31 Comments

The history of the game Zork is a long and winding one, starting with MUDs and kin on university mainframes – where students entertained themselves in between their studies – and ending with the game being ported to home computers. These being pathetically undersized compared to even a PDP-10 meant that Zork got put to the axe, producing Zork I through III. Originally distributed by Infocom, eventually the process of Microsoft gobbling up game distributors and studios alike meant that Microsoft came to hold the license to these games. Games which are now open source as explained on the Microsoft Open Source blog.

Although the source had found its way onto the Internet previously, it’s now officially distributed under the MIT license, along with accompanying developer documentation. The source code for the three games can be found on GitHub, in separate repositories for Zork I, Zork II and Zork III.

We previously covered Zork’s journey from large systems to home computers, which was helped immensely by the Z-machine platform that the game’s code was ported to. Sadly the original games’s MDL code was a bit much for 8-bit home computers. Regardless of whether you prefer the original PDP-10 or the Z-machine version on a home computer system, both versions are now open sourced, which is a marvelous thing indeed.

How One Uncaught Rust Exception Took Out Cloudflare

November 20, 2025 by Maya Posch 74 Comments

On November 18 of 2025 a large part of the Internet suddenly cried out and went silent, as Cloudflare’s infrastructure suffered the software equivalent of a cardiac arrest. After much panicked debugging and troubleshooting, engineers were able to coax things back to life again, setting the stage for the subsequent investigation. The results of said investigation show how a mangled input file caused an exception to be thrown in the Rust-based FL2 proxy which went uncaught, throwing up an HTTP 5xx error and thus for the proxy to stop proxying customer traffic. Customers who were on the old FL proxy did not see this error.

The input file in question was the features file that is generated dynamically depending on the customer’s settings related to e.g. bot traffic. A change here resulted in said feature file to contain duplicate rows, increasing the number of typical features from about 60 to over 200, which is a problem since the proxy pre-allocates memory to contain this feature data.

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Fixing A Milltronics ML15 CNC Lathe Despite The Manufacturer’s Best Efforts

November 20, 2025 by Maya Posch 10 Comments

When you’re like [Wes] from Watch Wes Work fame, you don’t have a CNC machine hoarding issue, you just have a healthy interest in going down CNC machine repair rabbit holes. Such too was the case with a recently acquired 2001 Milltronics ML15 lathe, that at first glance appeared to be in pristine condition. Yet despite – or because of – living a cushy life at a college’s workshop, it had a number of serious issues, with a busted Z-axis drive board being the first to be tackled.

The Glentek servo board that caused so much grief. (Credit: Watch Wes Work, YouTube)

The identical servo control board next to it worked fine, so it had to be an issue on the board itself. A quick test showed that the H-bridge IGBTs had suffered the typical fate that IGBTs suffer, violently taking out another IC along with them. Enjoyably, this board by one Glentek Inc. did the rebranding thing of components like said IGBTs, which made tracking down suitable replacements an utter pain that was eased only by the desperate communications on forums which provided some clues. Of course, desoldering and testing one of the good IGBTs on the second board showed the exact type of IGBT to get.

After replacing said IGBTs, as well as an optocoupler and other bits and pieces, the servo board was good as new. Next, the CNC lathe also had a busted optical encoder, an unusable tool post and a number of other smaller and larger issues that required addressing. Along the way the term ‘pin-to-pin compatible’ for a replacement driver IC was also found to mean that you still have to read the full datasheet.

Of the whole ordeal, the Glentek servo board definitely caused the most trouble, with the manufacturer providing incomplete schematics, rebranding parts to make generic replacements very hard to find and overall just going for a design that’s interesting but hard to diagnose and fix. To help out anyone else who got cursed with a Glentek servo board like this, [Wes] has made the board files and related info available in a GitHub repository.

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Browser Fingerprinting And Why VPNs Won’t Make You Anonymous

November 19, 2025 by Maya Posch 89 Comments

Amidst the glossy marketing for VPN services, it can be tempting to believe that the moment you flick on the VPN connection you can browse the internet with full privacy. Unfortunately this is quite far from the truth, as interacting with internet services like websites leaves a significant fingerprint. In a study by [RTINGS.com] this browser fingerprinting was investigated in detail, showing just how easy it is to uniquely identify a visitor across the 83 laptops used in the study.

As summarized in the related video (also embedded below), the start of the study involved the Am I Unique? website which provides you with an overview of your browser fingerprint. With over 4.5 million fingerprints in their database as of writing, even using Edge on Windows 10 marks you as unique, which is telling.

In the study multiple VPN services were used, each of which resulted in exactly the same fingerprint hash. This is based on properties retrieved from the browser, via JavaScript and other capabilities exposed by the browser, including WebGL and HTML5 Canvas.

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Writing Type-Safe Generics In C

November 17, 2025 by Maya Posch 17 Comments

The fun part about a programming language like C is that although the language doesn’t directly support many features including object-oriented programming and generics, there’s nothing that’s keeping you from implementing said features in C. This extends to something like type-safe generics in C, as [Raph] demonstrates in a blog post.

After running through the various ways that generics are also being implemented using methods including basic preprocessor macros and void pointers, the demonstrated method is introduced. While not necessarily a new one, the advantage with this method is that it is type-safe. Much like C++ templates, these generics are evaluated at compile time, with the preprocessor handling both the type checking and filling in of the right template snippets.

While somewhat verbose, it can be condensed into a single header file, doesn’t rely on the void type or pointers and can be deduplicated by the linker, preventing bloat. If generics is what you are looking for in your C project, this might be a conceivable solution.

Reverse Engineering The Miele Diagnostic Interface

November 17, 2025 by Maya Posch 22 Comments

Since modern household appliances now have an MCU inside, they often have a diagnostic interface and — sometimes — more. Case in point: Miele washing machines, like the one that [Severin] recently fixed, leading to the firmware becoming unhappy and refusing to work. This fortunately turned out to be recoverable by clearing the MCU’s fault memory, but if you’re unlucky, you will have to recalibrate the machine, which requires very special and proprietary software.

Naturally, this led [Severin] down the path of investigating how exactly the Miele Diagnostic Utility (MDU) and the Program Correction (PC) interface communicate. Interestingly, the PC interface uses an infrared LED/receiver combination that’s often combined with a status LED, as indicated by a ‘PC’ symbol. This interface uses the well-known IrDA standard, but [Severin] still had to track down the serial protocol.

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Using Multiple Quadcopters To Efficiently Lift Loads Together

November 16, 2025 by Maya Posch 7 Comments

Much like calling over a buddy or two to help with moving a large piece of furniture and pivot it up a narrow flight of stairs, so too can quadcopters increase their carrying capacity through the power of friendship and cooperation. However, unless you want to do a lot of yelling at your mates about when to pivot and lift, you’d better make sure that your coordination is up to snuff. The same is true with quadcopters, where creating an efficient coordination algorithm for sharing a load is far from easy and usually leads to fairly slow and clumsy maneuvering.

Simplified overview of the motion planner by Sihao Sun et al.

Recently. researchers at the Technical University of Delft came up with what appears to be a quite efficient algorithm for this purpose. In the demonstration video below, it’s easy to see how the quadcopters make short work of even convoluted obstacles while keeping themselves and their mates from getting tangled.

The research by [Sihao Sun] et al. appears in Science Robotics (preprint), in which they detail their trajectory-based framework and its kinodynamic motion planner. In short, this planner considers the whole-body dynamics of the load, the cables, and the quadcopters. An onboard controller for each quadcopter is responsible for translating the higher-level commands into specific changes to its rotor speeds and orientation.

Along with tests of its robustness to various environmental factors, such as wind, the researchers experimented with how many simultaneous quadcopters could work together with their available computing capacity. The answer, so far, is nine units, though they think that the implementation can be further optimized.

Of course, sometimes you just want to watch synchronized drones.

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