Last week saw the public disclosure of the POODLE vulnerability, a practical attack allowing a network attacker to steal plaintext from HTTPS connections. In particular, this attack can be used to steal authentication cookies. It’s a bad vulnerability, and it particularly hurts because it should…

Unstructured programming with GOTO is the stuff of legend, as are calling subroutines by line number--GOSUB 1000--and setting global variables as a mechanism for passing parameters. The little language that fueled the home computer revolution has been long buried beneath an avalanche of derision, or…

Bill (not his real name, and I’ve fuzzed some details to protect his identity) is a software engineer on the East Coast, who, at the time (between 2011 and 2014) of this story, had recently turned 30 and wanted to see if he could enter a higher weight class on the job market. In order to best assess…

Idle Words > Talks > The Internet With A Human Face This is the text version of a talk I gave on May 20, 2014, at Beyond Tellerrand in Düsseldorf, Germany. Marc [Thiele] emailed me a few weeks ago to ask if I thought my talk would be appropriate to close the conference. "Marc," I told him, "my talk…

Posted Fri 16 May 2014 Author Serge Guelton Category Programming Tags Python, obfuscation, programming, 2014 Where building a custom obfuscated Python interpreter for a Python packer turned into an optimized Python interpreter. The paper Looking inside the (Drop) box) from Przemysław Węgrzyn and…

March 21 March 23 March 26 March 28 Previous Next-> The JoyPoll was... If you could do anything to your competition's employees, what would it be? Poach them! Fry them! Assimilate them all. Become one of them. Work co-operatively with them. Bah! I have no competition! View the Results The JoyBase!…

After reading: http://t.co/rPzvRLVbMR I played 2048 using “up-right (repeat), left if stuck” strategy. Scored 5384. Didn’t even know rules.

The best paper you’ll ever read on computer security: https://t.co/EH2lJZFHcs

Must... Resist... Quoting... Every other sentence... https://t.co/fxJhBSYcy0

I forget the first time I heard about Bill Drenttel, but I remember it was in tones of awe. He was "the business guy" at the hottest design firm in town, Drenttel Doyle Partners. We all knew that Stephen Doyle was a great designer, but it was this mysterious Drenttel guy who was the secret weapon:…

Code, nerd culture and humor from . The Empathy Vacuum Feb 21 2014 Romantimatic — the little app I wrote to remind the distracted or forgetful to text nice things to their significant other — is a month old today. It’s been an interesting month. The app has sold just over 875 copies, across a couple…