Your customers don’t want to figure out some newfangled thing just to navigate a dialog box. In fact, your customers don’t want to think about you at all. They have their actual job to do. They’d like to be able to do it predictably and safely.

In reference to the inquiry, gettimeofday(2) does not conform to POSIX.1-2008?

Standards state a contract or implication: *if* you, the developer follow _these_ rules, *then* the standardized item will follow _these_other_ rules (if compliant). If you violate the implication, then the standard no longer applies and you have lost the guarantees of the standard.

Nice summary of the standards situation. If you color inside the lines, you get a pretty picture. If you don’t, you don’t.

She claimed that any time she typed the word Taiwan or worse, received a message with a Taiwanese flag (🇹🇼) it would crash the application on her (fully patched) iOS device.

source: L

Not sure how to classify or summarize. Interesting reading.

source: grugq

In a short film shot in 1957, Walt Disney described the multiplane camera, one of the many inventions and innovations his company had developed in order to produce more realistic and affecting animations.

source: K

This article explains how I figured out how Cypress’s jury-rigged “supervisor” mode in the PSoC4 family works, dumped the secret unreadable SROM, exploited it, and found a way to unlock extra flash in the PSoC4 as well as how you can develop scary rootkits for touchpads and touchscreens that use Cypress chips.

source: grugq

Errata patches will continue to be generated for 2 releases.

This is in a nutshell what UB means: the compiler can assume that UB does not happen, and produce code under that assumption. In the code producing routines used by the compiler, each instruction has dependencies that restrict the opcode scheduling algorithm: an instruction cannot be issued before the instructions that it depends upon, or after the instructions that depend on it. In the example above, UB removes the dependencies between the writes to d[], and the “subsequent” reads from s[]. In a similar way, UB can allow the compiler to simply remove code that cannot happen without going through an UB condition.

source: L

A good summary of the bug affecting Ryzen CPUs.

When programming in Ruby many people think that egregious memory usage is the norm and unavoidable. However, there are ways and strategies to keep memory usage down and in this post I will show you some of them.

source: L

Finally took the time to get modified vboot bitmaps & layout working on the Pixel, now shows this instead of “developer mode warning”

All hail the puffy.

Uncle Andrew wants to tell you a festive story. The NTPmare shortly after Christmas.

source: L

This release brings significant improvements in terms of hardware support, quality assurance, security, along with new features and hundreds of bug fixes.

source: Dfly

When it comes to technology, I have a lot of love for edge cases—situations where the march of innovation actually makes things a little bit worse.

This blog post explains the story behind a bug which had existed in the Steam client for at least the last ten years, and until last July would have resulted in remote code execution (RCE) in all 15 million active clients.

source: HN

We keep making old stuff significantly less useful in the modern day, sometimes by force. We cite problems things such as security, maintenance, and a devotion to constant evolution as reasons for allowing this to happen. But the net effect is that we are making it impossible to continue using otherwise useful things after even a medium amount of time. I’m not even exclusively talking about things that are decades old. Sometimes, just a few years does the trick. Today’s Tedium ponders planned obsolescence and how it theatens preservation.

In other words, we’ve reached a point where people’s belief in RSS has faded sufficiently that it makes perfect sense to them that a technical blog might not even have an RSS feed. They know what RSS is and they want it, but they don’t believe it’s automatically going to be there and they sort of assume it’s not going to be. Syndication feeds have changed from a routine thing everyone had to a specia

One possible solution to this problem is for network intermediaries to refuse government requests for aid, and attempt to sustain those refusals in court. Although this possibility has received an enormous amount of attention, there is substantial cause for skepticism about how well it can work. Congress has given the government wide authority to demand information and assistance through tools like subpoenas, the Stored Communications Act, and Title III. Even when the government does not have specific statutory authorization, courts have interpreted the All Writs Act to authorize a great deal of open-ended aid, consistent with the well-settled Anglo-American history of third-party assistance in law enforcement. It is also far from unheard-of for the Executive to read restrictions on its surveillance authority narrowly, and its own inherent powers broadly, to engage in surveillance that is quasi- or extra-legal.

This is a very good read, covering several hundred years of common law history in general, plus a hundred years of wiretapping history, plus some current events.

Another turn of the crank.

In Alaska, residents are negotiating a contentious relationship with muskoxen, which were introduced to the area decades ago without local consent.

One Iñupiaq word for muskox is umiŋmak, a term that refers to the animal’s beard-like coat. The word’s existence speaks to the Iñupiat’s long relationship with muskoxen, which once roamed the Arctic. The decline of muskoxen is often attributed to climatic changes after the last ice age, along with predation and hunting. Around Nome, few, if any, Indigenous stories about the animals survive.

The average visitor to Nome today would never guess that muskoxen were ever ghosts on the landscape. The animals adorn guidebooks and artwork at gift shops and draw wildlife viewers and photographers. With their bulky coats, sloping shoulders, short legs, and upturned horns, it’s not hard to picture them roaming alongside saber-toothed cats, wooly mammoths, and other big-bodied beasts of the Pleistocene. But all the muskoxen around Nome today have ancestors that saw the inside of a train station in New Jersey. Their reintroduction to Alaska was the result of a decades-long campaign by early 20th-century settlers and promoters, one that followed a template used many times over before and since: it was a plan for developing the Arctic, drawn up without the consent of Indigenous people.

source: HN