Why GNU grep is fast

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I am the original author of GNU grep.  I am also a FreeBSD user,
although I live on -stable (and older) and rarely pay attention
to -current.

However, while searching the -current mailing list for an unrelated
reason, I stumbled across some flamage regarding BSD grep vs GNU grep
performance.  You may have noticed that discussion too...

History of the browser user-agent string

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In the beginning there was NCSA Mosaic, and Mosaic called itself NCSA_Mosaic/2.0 (Windows 3.1), and Mosaic displayed pictures along with text, and there was much rejoicing…

Have you ever wondered why every major web browser identifies itself as “Mozilla”? Wonder no longer…

How Learning To Be Vulnerable Can Make Life Safer – Empathy increases Shell oil workers’ safety by 83%

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Men who worked on oil rigs lived by certain rules. They were tough. They worked under any conditions. They didn’t ask questions. It was this way as far back as Tommy Chreene, 60, who started working on rigs in the Gulf of Mexico back when he was 15, can remember.

Back then, it wasn’t unusual to see someone die on an oil rig. Chreene remembers the death of one man who had just finished a shift. He was standing before an enormous pipe that the workers twisted into the ground and held in place with a handle. The man kicked the handle, and the tension on the pipe released. It caught the man’s ankle as it whipped around…

NISTs new password rules what you need to know

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It’s no secret. We’re really bad at passwords. Nevertheless, they aren’t going away any time soon.

With so many websites and online applications requiring us to create accounts and think up passwords in a hurry, it’s no wonder so many of us struggle to follow the advice of so-called password security experts.

Stereotypical hacker in a hoodie, from the article.

At the same time, the computing power available for password cracking just gets bigger and bigger.

OK, so I started with the bad news, but this cloud does have a silver lining…

Breaking https’ AES-GCM (or a part of it)

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The coolest talk of this year’s Blackhat must have been the one of Sean Devlin and Hanno Böck. The talk summarized this early year’s paper, in a very cool way: Sean walked on stage and announced that he didn’t have his slides. He then said that it didn’t matter because he had a good idea on how to retrieve them…

A hacker 'steals his own slides back'

The network is reliable

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In the spring of that year, my travels brought me upon a previously undiscovered civilization. The people called themselves Ossians, and they lived in an isolated collection of villages in a remote part of South America.

Being remote as they were, their level of technology was understandably primitive. But I was surprised by the locals’ recent obsession with new forms of communication. It all started, they told me, when one of them discovered that by attaching a rope between two clay pots and stretching the rope taut, a voice uttered into one side could be heard on the other. (I neglected to tell them that even as a boy I had done this very thing with tin cans.)…

Review of Pierre Calvini Luxury Stripe Cotton Rich Sock

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Good value socks

Perfectly fine socks at a fair price. Because losing or wearing holes in socks is sort-of my superpower, I stocked up (or should that be “socked up”?) with these and they’ve served me well.

Review of Power Banks RAVPower 26800mAh Portable Charger

This review originally appeared on Amazon. See more reviews by Dan.

Powerful, heavyweight battery: great, but wish the ports were labelled!

Big, powerful battery, but still (barely) small enough to fit in large jeans pockets alongside a phone, for charging-on-the-go. Never seen it run dry, despite charging two phones each night of a two-night camping trip. Only downside is the the ports aren’t labelled and some (by design) have their maximum output limited, so if you don’t know which ones those are by heart – or carry the manual around! – then you might find that some devices charge slower than they ought to. Still a great device, and even comes with a set of USB cables (A to B-micro, as used by most smartphones) for your convenience.