As an engineer for the U.S. Digital Service, Marianne Bellotti has encountered vintage mainframes that are still being used in production — sometimes even powering web apps. Last month she
entertained a San Francisco audience with tales about some of them, in a talk called “7074 says Hello World,” at Joyent’s “Systems We Love” conference.
Created under the Obama administration, The U.S. Digital Service was designed as a start-up-styled consultancy to help government agencies modernize their IT operations, drawing engineering talent from Google, Facebook and other web-scale companies.
Or, as President Obama put it last March, it’s “a SWAT team — a world-class technology office.”
So it was fascinating to hear Bellotti tell stories about some of the older gear still running, and the sometimes unusual ways it was paired with more contemporary technology…
Together with a friend I recently built Dropshare Cloud. We offer online storage for the file and screenshot sharing app Dropshare for macOS/iOS. After trying out Django for getting started (we both had some experience using
Django) I decided to rewrite the codebase in Rails. My past experience developing in Rails made the process quick — and boring…
In early June 2014, accountants at the Lumiere Place Casino in St. Louis noticed that several of their slot machines had—just for a couple of days—gone
haywire. The government-approved software that powers such machines gives the house a fixed mathematical edge, so that casinos can be certain of how much they’ll earn over the long
haul—say, 7.129 cents for every dollar played. But on June 2 and 3, a number of Lumiere’s machines had spit out far more money than they’d consumed, despite not awarding any major
jackpots, an aberration known in industry parlance as a negative hold. Since code isn’t prone to sudden fits of madness, the only plausible explanation was that someone was cheating…
In this post I’ll explain why quantum computers are useless to find hash function collisions, and how we can leverage this powerlessness to build post-quantum signature
schemes. I’ll then describe a quantum computing model that you can try at home, and one where hash function collisions are easy to find…
In common slang, FTW is an acronym “for the win” and while that’s appropriate here, I think a better expansion is “for the world.”
We’re pleased to announce that we have sponsored the development of TLS 1.3 in OpenSSL. As it is one of the most widely-used TLS libraries, it is a good investment for the overall
health and security of the Internet, so that everyone is able to deploy TLS 1.3 as soon as possible…
I got metaphorically spanked a couple of days ago. Folks have been talking about the Fearless Girl statue ever since it was dropped in Manhattan’s Financial District some
five weeks ago. I have occasionally added a comment or two to some of the online discussions about the statue.
That last character is U+2022. Select that line with the mouse, right-click, and select Copy to copy it to
the clipboard. Now go to a command prompt and paste it and hit Enter.
You’d expect a • to be printed, but instead you get a beep. What happened?
