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WebAssembly: What Is It And Why Should You Care?

April 4, 2019 by 45 Comments

If you keep up with the field of web development, you may have heard of WebAssembly. A relatively new kid on the block, it was announced in 2015, and managed to garner standardised support from all major browsers by 2017 – an impressive feat. However, it’s only more recently that the developer community has started to catch up with adoption and support.

So, what is it? What use case is so compelling that causes such quick browser adoption? This post aims to explain the need for WebAssembly, a conceptual overview of the technical side, as well as a small hands-on example for context.

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In Praise Of The App Note

April 2, 2019 by 36 Comments

When I am at a loss for an explanation in the world of electronics, I reach for my well-thumbed Horowitz & Hill. When H&H fails me which is not that often, the chances are I’ll find myself looking in an application note from a semiconductor company who is in cut-throat competition with its rivals in a bid for my attention. These companies have an extensive sales and marketing effort, part of which comes in the dissemination of knowledge.

Razor blades may be sold to young men with images of jet fighters and a subtle suggestion that a clean-shaven guy gets his girl, but semiconductor brands are sold by piquing the engineer’s interest with information. To that end, companies become publishing houses in praise of their products. They produce not only data sheets that deal with individual device, but app notes documents which cover a wider topic and tell the story of why this manufacturer’s parts are naturally the best in the world.

These app notes frequently make for fascinating reading, and if you haven’t found them yet you should head for the documentation sections of semiconductor biz websites and seek some of them out.

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Radio Free Blockchain: Bitcoin From Space

April 2, 2019 by 31 Comments

Cryptocurrencies: love them, hate them, or be baffled by them, but don’t think you can escape them. That’s the way it seems these days at least, with news media filled with breathless stories about Bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies, and everyone from Amazon to content creators on YouTube now accepting the digital currency for payments. And now, almost everyone on the planet is literally bathed in Bitcoin, or at least the distributed ledger that makes it work, thanks to a new network that streams the Bitcoin blockchain over a constellation of geosynchronous satellites.

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Extraterrestrial Excavation: Digging Holes On Other Worlds

March 27, 2019 by 15 Comments

We humans are good at a lot of things, but making holes in the ground has to be among our greatest achievements. We’ve gone from grubbing roots with a stick to feeding billions with immense plows pulled by powerful tractors, and from carving simple roads across the land to drilling tunnels under the English Channel. Everywhere we go, we move dirt and rock out of the way, remodeling the planet to suit our needs.

Other worlds are subject to our propensity for digging holes too, and in the 50-odd years that we’ve been visiting or sending robots as our proxies, we’ve made our marks on quite a few celestial bodies. So far, all our digging has been in the name of science, either to explore the physical and chemical properties of these far-flung worlds in situ, or to actually package up a little bit of the heavens for analysis back home. One day we’ll no doubt be digging for different reasons, but until then, here’s a look at the holes we’ve dug and how we dug them.

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What To Do When The Botnet Comes Knocking

March 21, 2019 by 34 Comments

“It was a cold and windy night, but the breeze of ill omen blowing across the ‘net was colder. The regular trickle of login attempts suddenly became a torrent of IP addresses, all trying to break into the back-end of the Joomla site I host. I poured another cup of joe, it was gonna be a long night.”

Tech noir aside, there was something odd going on. I get an email from that web-site each time there is a failed login. The occasional login attempt isn’t surprising, but this was multiple attempts per minute, all from different IP addresses. Looking at the logs, I got the feeling they were pulling usernames and passwords from one of the various database dumps, probably also randomly seeding information from the Whois database on my domain.

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Expert Says Don’t Teach Kids To Code

March 14, 2019 by 220 Comments

I was a little surprised to see a news report about Andreas Schleicher, the director of education and skills at OECD — the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Speaking at the World Innovation Summit for Education in Paris, Schleicher thinks that teaching kids to code is a waste of time. In particular, he seems to think that by the time a child today grows up, coding will be obsolete.

I can’t help but think that he might be a little confused. Coding isn’t going away anytime soon. It could, of course, become an even deeper specialty, and thus less generally applicable. But the comments he’s made seem to imply that soon we will just tell smart computers what we want and they will just do that. Somewhat like computers work on Star Trek.

What is more likely is that most people will be able to find specific applications that can do what they want without traditional coding. But someone still has to write something for the foreseeable future. What’s more, if you’ve ever tried to tease requirements out of an end user, you know that you can’t just blurt out anything you want to a computer and expect it to make sense. It isn’t the computer’s fault. People — especially untrained people — don’t always make sense or communicate unambiguously.

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Spoiler, Use-After-Free, And Ghidra: This Week In Computer Security

March 13, 2019 by 24 Comments

The past few days have been busy if you’re trying to keep up with the pace of computer security news. Between a serious Chromium bug that’s actively being exploited on Windows 7 systems, the NSA releasing one of their tools as an open source project, and a new Spectre-like speculative execution flaw in Intel processors, there’s a lot to digest.
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