I believe a simpler, more powerful parallel computer is possible, and that there are signs in the historical record. In a slightly alternate universe, we would have those computers now, and be doing the work of designing algorithms and writing programs to run well on them, for a very broad range of tasks.

source: L

An attacker within bluetooth range is able to trigger navigation to a FIDO:/ URI from an attacker controlled page on a mobile browser, allowing them to initiate a legitimate PassKeys authentication intent which will be received on the attacker’s device. This results in the attacker being able to “phish” PassKeys credentials, completely breaking this assumption that PassKeys are impossible to phish.

source: HN

The FreeType library is used by Chrome to compute metrics and load hinted outlines from fonts. Overall, use of FreeType has been a huge win for Google. It does a complex job, and does it well, we rely on it extensively and contribute back to it. However, it is written in unsafe code and has its origins in a time when malicious inputs were less likely. Merely keeping up with the stream of issues found by fuzzing costs Google at least 0.25 full time software engineers. Worse, we observably don’t find everything or find things only after the code has shipped to users.

source: HN

Time for me to write this blog post and prepare everyone for the implementation blitz that needs to happen to make defer a success for the C programming language.

source: HN

Two colliding blocks compute pi, here we dig into the physics to explain why.

The original paper by Gregory Galperin: https://www.maths.tcd.ie/~lebed/Galperin.%20Playing%20pool%20with%20pi.pdf

Adam Brown’s paper on the analogy with Grover’s Algorithm: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.02207

“what’s” –> “once”

For me, the causation of such mysterious typographical errors is not just a matter of sloth or clumsiness. Since they often come out in ways that are superficially intelligible but logically and grammatically impossible, I believe that intelligently studied, they might be able to tell us something significant about the way the brain and neuro-muscular system work.

I make such “transcription” errors frequently as well.

If you return WidgetFlavor::Mint, then this will confuse code written with the Version 1 API, because they expected to get Other for anything that isn’t vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry. The word “other” means “not mentioned elsewhere”, so the presence of an Other logically implies that the enumeration is exhaustive. On the other hand, you obviously should return WidgetFlavor::Mint because that’s why you added the value to the enum in the first place!

Today’s Tedium highlights ACCESS.bus, the would-be standard that wanted to be USB, but couldn’t stick the landing.

Also called the Inter-Integrated Circuit protocol, it’s used as a low-level way to communicate with peripherals, both in its original form and through its de facto successor, SMBus. Developed in the early 1980s by Philips Semiconductor, I²C may be one of the oldest things still in wide use in most modern computers beyond the x86 instruction set—and it is often key to adding driver support into operating systems.

We have long left ACCESS.bus, our would-be contender for the USB throne, into the dustbin of history, but DDC is still at the root of how both HDMI and DisplayPort communicate with our computers.

Critical authentication bypass vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-25291 + CVE-2025-25292) were discovered in ruby-saml up to version 1.17.0. In this blog post, we’ll shed light on how these vulnerabilities that rely on a parser differential were uncovered.

As shown once again: relying on two different parsers in a security context can be tricky and error-prone.

source: HN

Wavefront OBJ is a line-oriented, text format for 3D geometry. It’s widely supported by modeling software, easy to parse, and trivial to emit, much like Netpbm for 2D image data. Poke around hobby 3D graphics projects and you’re likely to find a bespoke OBJ parser. While typically only loading their own model data, so robustness doesn’t much matter, they usually have hard limitations and don’t stand up to fuzz testing. This article presents a robust, partial OBJ parser in C with no hard-coded limitations, written from scratch. Like similar articles, it’s not really about OBJ but demonstrating some techniques you’ve probably never seen before.

Should public bodies in Illinois, like cities and school districts and sheriff’s departments, be allowed to hide information from Freedom of Information requests by keeping them in databases? That question is before the 104th Illinois General Assembly, thanks to a bill sponsored by Donald P. DeWitte, elected state senator by the wise citizens of Batavia and Elgin (motto: “The City In The Suburbs”; indeed), and prompted in part by my friend Matt Chapman.

The book is sold out, but there are some fun widgets to play with as well.

In 1993, Intel released the high-performance Pentium processor, the start of the long-running Pentium line. I’ve been examining the Pentium’s circuitry in detail and I came across a circuit to multiply by three, a complex circuit with thousands of transistors. Why does the Pentium have a circuit to multiply specifically by three? Why is it so complicated? In this article, I examine this multiplier—which I’ll call the ×3 circuit—and explain its purpose and how it is implemented.

It involves a combination of several cutting-edge features in the macOS kernel (XNU)- Safe Memory Reclamation (SMR), read-only page mappings, per-thread credentials, memcpy implementation details, and of course, a race condition tying everything all together. This bug allows for corruption of thread’s kauth_cred_t credential pointer. Specifically, the SMR-protected p_ucred field of a process’s read-only struct can be corrupted to point to invalid memory, or potentially to a different (maybe even more privileged) credential.

https://github.com/jprx/CVE-2025-24118

source: trivium

Jenkins supports pipeline scripts written in Groovy as a first-class entity. A pipeline script effectively defines the build job. It can define build properties, build stages, build steps, etc. It can even invoke other build jobs, including itself.

Wait a minute! If a pipeline can invoke itself, can we, perhaps, solve a recursive problem with it? Absolutely! This is precisely what we are going to do in this post. We are going to implement quicksort as a Jenkins pipeline for fun and not a whit of profit!

source: trivium

If you assume time travel is possible, and you assume that there is one time and place in the entire history of this universe that is the best day ever, you have to believe everyone is going to visit those space-time coordinates.

A wikipedia omniroll is a cylindrical food containing one layer of every item from the wikipedia article “list of rolled foods.”

It looks a bit like L and T have been clipped, but in fact they’ve been drawn over. Black parts of L overlap the T, and vice versa: black parts of the T overlap L. The effect is what you can see, where L and T share a space, the black bars overlap and are solid, obliterating the reversed out letterforms. So how do i kern this font, if not with GSPOS lookups?

source: L

This note discusses the problem of writing cryptographic implementations in software, free of timing-based side-channels, and many ways in which that endeavour can fail in practice. It is a pessimist view: it highlights why such failures are expected to become more common, and how constant-time coding is, or will soon become, infeasible in all generality.

From compiler optimizations to CPU pipelines and register renaming.