If you don’t talk to your kids about quantum computing, Scott Aaronson will. This is really good.

I got launchd and recoveryd to start on an emulated iPhone running iOS 12 beta 4’s kernel using a modified QEMU. Here’s what I learned, and how you can try this yourself.

For a bhyve virtual machine with more than 3GB of guest memory configured,

a malicious guest could craft device descriptors that could give it access
to the heap of the bhyve process.

For the g2k18 Ljubljana hackathon, i decided to try and get rid of as many small userland tasks as possible. Lots of them have been piling up over time.

source: L

Malcc is an incremental and ahead-of-time lisp compiler written in C.

This is the story of my progress over the years and what I learned in the process. An alternate title for this post is: “How to Write a Compiler in Ten Years or Less”

source: L

Americans traditionally have thought of themselves as the great movers, and indeed that was true in the nineteenth century and even through most of the twentieth. But since the 1980s, Americans have become much less restless in movements across the country, and more people are looking to simply settle down and entrench themselves.

Adapted from The Complacent Class by Tyler Cowen.

source: MR

And even though there are thousands of different security products focused on detecting each step of the attacker killchain, it’s time that we start architecting our applications—and data-flows—in a way that makes it harder for attackers to continue following the same script.

source: green

In a new paper, “Information Gaps and Shadow Banking,” forthcoming in the Virginia Law Review and available here, I offer a novel, complementary explanation for why short-term creditors run: information nobody possesses.

Despite the lawsuits and predictions of gridlock, restricting a single Manhattan street to buses has been a success. Why stop there?

And in SF: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Plan-to-remake-SF-s-Market-Street-without-car-14535887.php

Also: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191011-what-happens-when-a-city-bans-car-from-its-streets

source: HN

Reading the Pusher articles made me wonder how well would the Elixir implementation perform. After all, the underlying Erlang VM (BEAM) has been built with low and predictable latency in mind, so coupled with other properties such as fault-tolerance, massive concurrency, scalability, support for distributed systems, it seems like a compelling choice for the job.

While there are endless different kinds of dioramas, there is something that most all of them have in common: the strange beauty that comes from capturing our world in miniature, in exacting detail.

Given a MITM apk repo.

Persistent arbitrary file writes can be easily turned into code execution because of apk’s “commit hooks” feature. If we can figure out a way to extract a file into /etc/apk/commit_hooks.d/ and have it stay there after the cleanup process, it will be executed before apk exits.

Transactions are hard.

source: HN

My favorite sound in computing is one that I haven’t actually had to use on a computer in nearly 20 years. The modem was a connection to a world outside of my own, and to get that connection required hearing the sounds of a loud, abrasive handshake that could easily be mistaken for Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. I’d like to compare it to another kind of sound for a little bit—the noise of a “straight key” used for a telegraph. Both technologies, despite more than a century in age difference, seemingly turned data into sound, then into electrical pulses, and back into sound again. It’s no wonder, then, that you can actually trace the roots of the modem back to the telegraph, and later the teletype machine. Data and wires, simply put, go way back. And it’s not the only example of the telegraph’s quiet influence on modern computing. Today’s Tedium draws a line between the modern computer and the pulses that inspired it.

If you’re using clang on Windows, you can now get PDB debug information!

I’ll be starting to publish a series that is written to aid new and interested readers with building, testing, and understanding type-2 hypervisor development. This hypervisor will be written for use on Intel processors with virtualization support. If you’re operating on an AMD chip, you may find some parts helpful, but overall it may not be what you need to understand the nuances. All concepts for each article, their importance, the references to more detailed information, and otherwise will be linked through just like any other of my blog posts followed by a recommended reading section at the end should your thirst for details and knowledge not be satisfied. I will also put recommended reading for those of you with interest in developing an AMD SVM.

There’s a lot here.

https://revers.engineering/day-0-virtual-environment-setup-scripts-and-windbg/

https://revers.engineering/day-1-introduction-to-virtualization/

https://revers.engineering/day-2-entering-vmx-operation/

https://revers.engineering/day-3-multiprocessor-initialization-error-handling-the-vmcs/

https://revers.engineering/day-4-vmcs-segmentation-ops/

https://revers.engineering/day-5-vmexits-interrupts-cpuid-emulation/

source: grugq

Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.

source: L

How are the bounds of computability, as delineated by the 1930s pioneers—bounds that theoretical computer science has by and large simply inherited and enshrined in the textbooks—related to the bounds of physical computing?

Vision is an essential sensory modality for humans. Our visual system detects light between 400 and 700 nm (Dubois, 2009, Wyszecki and Stiles, 1982, Schnapf et al., 1988), so called visible light. In mammalian photoreceptor cells, light absorbing pigments, consisting of opsins and their covalently linked retinals, are known as intrinsic photon detectors. However, the detection of longer wavelength light, such as near-infrared (NIR) light, though a desirable ability, is a formidable challenge for mammals. This is because detecting longer wavelength light, with lower energy photons, requires opsins (e.g., human red cone opsins) to have much lower energy barriers. Consequently, this results in unendurable high thermal noise, thus making NIR visual pigments impractical (Ala-Laurila et al., 2003, Baylor et al., 1980, Luo et al., 2011, St George, 1952). This physical limitation means that no mammalian photoreceptor can effectively detect NIR light that exceeds 700 nm, and mammals are unable to see NIR light and to project a NIR image to the brain.

To this end, the successful integration of nanoparticles with biological systems has accelerated basic scientific discoveries and their translation into biomedical applications (Desai, 2012, Mitragotri et al., 2015). To develop abilities that do not exist naturally, miniature nanoscale devices and sensors designed to intimately interface with mammals including humans are of growing interest. Here, we report on an ocular injectable, self-powered, built-in NIR light nanoantenna that can extend the mammalian visual spectrum to the NIR range. These retinal photoreceptor-binding upconversion nanoparticles (pbUCNPs) act as miniature energy transducers that can transform mammalian invisible NIR light in vivo into short wavelength visible emissions (Liu et al., 2017, Wu et al., 2009). As sub-retinal injections are a commonly used ophthalmological practice in animals and humans (Hauswirth et al., 2008, Peng et al., 2017), our pbUCNPs were dissolved in PBS and then injected into the sub-retinal space in the eyes of mice. These nanoparticles were then anchored and bound to the photoreceptors in the mouse retina.

source: MR

Most who read the draft of this post found the next sections too technical. They’re right. It’s about to get confusing and aggravating.

source: HN