The fictional article <a href="https://suricrasia.online/unfiction/basilisk/" rel="nofollow">https://suricrasia.online/unfiction/basilisk/</a> is one the best written computer science/cryptography SCP like articles I've ever read.<p>What I loved is that:<p>$ echo -en 'basilisk:0000000000:ds26ovbJzDwkVWia1tINLJZ2WXEHBvItMZRxHmYhlQd0spuvPXb6cYFJorDKkqlA' | openssl dgst -sha256 -binary | openssl dgst -sha256
(stdin)= 0000000000000000000000161b9f84a187cc21b172bf68b3cb3b78684d8e9f17<p>actually works, but is a little sneaky. See <a href="https://www.metafilter.com/190463/so-who-is-there-left-to-trust" rel="nofollow">https://www.metafilter.com/190463/so-who-is-there-left-to-tr...</a><p>Edit2: <a href="https://github.com/blackle/Basilisk-Hunter" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/blackle/Basilisk-Hunter</a> How the examples were generated.
I had a major WTF moment when I read about the basilisk collection, only to find out that the file doesn't actually exist and the article is a fiction story, SCP like. Lol. Now I kind of wish it did exist.
<a href="https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161/comments/28" rel="nofollow">https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...</a><p>My wife has complained that open office will never print on Tuesdays!?!<p>Made my day.
>> font hinting is Turing complete<p>TIL. But, from the Wikipedia article:<p><i>>> Although incapable of receiving input and producing output as normally understood in programming</i><p>Great. So this is why this hasn't been the subject of 0-day hacks since like 1988.<p>Also, about that Orson Wells thing (from the linked paper):<p><i>>>In 1938, Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre on the Air performed an infamous broadcast of War of the Worlds [12]. The broadcast begins with a brief theatri- cal introduction, followed by simulated news broadcasts describing an alien invasion of New Jersey that run for thirty-eight minutes before the first and only intermis- sion, after which the story shifts to the past tense and a fictional tone. Prior to the intermission, there is not one commercial, not one word out of character, and not one scene in the past tense to clue the listener in on the fictional nature of the broadcast.
While Welles surely was not concerned with attacking digital radios in 1938, his broadcast does follow the gen- eral pattern of the attacks in this paper. His PIP in this case is the thirty-eight minute panicked broadcast, while the introduction could be considered an outer header. Listeners who miss the introduction might believe the first act to be factual, just as a digital radio which misses a preamble might interpret the PIP to be a legitimate and full packet.</i><p>So basically, because every packet protocol has headers and headers can be spoofed, and War of the Worlds was essentially a header spoof, let's call this the Orson Wells attack?<p>Maybe instead of the Big Scary Iceberg website, we can call it the Leonardo DiCaprio list of bad shit that could happen to you a boat?
In some meta way, I like 00000000000000000021e800c1e8df51b22c1588e5a624bea17e9faa34b2dc4a because it's like a prototypical example of a clickbait article.<p>It strings you along for 20 paragraphs and 3 sections, constantly repeating itself and never quite telling what the deal is with that hash, before ending with "so actually this is just a weird coincidence and a complete non-story"...
This website is incredibly good. Reminds me of qntm. <a href="https://suricrasia.online/unfiction/CSC218-Software-Precognance.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://suricrasia.online/unfiction/CSC218-Software-Precogna...</a>
I love the breadth that Reflections on Trusting Trust, Therac-25, and The Bitter Lesson are! But there's a lot of "X is Turing complete" and "Y is a fork/zip/parsing infinite expansion bomb" though.
Here's a similar one for the C preprocessor: <a href="https://jadlevesque.github.io/PPMP-Iceberg/" rel="nofollow">https://jadlevesque.github.io/PPMP-Iceberg/</a> (previously discussed <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32094693" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32094693</a>).<p>Pretty cursed stuff down there.
This is brilliant and a welcome repost.<p>As a developer with superannuated eyes and a penchant for side-by-side diffs, I am disappointed to see that the supplemental deep abyss contains “80 columns”. Damn kids with their memes and 5pt fonts <i>shakes fist</i>!
I would expect to see <a href="https://yosefk.com/c++fqa/" rel="nofollow">https://yosefk.com/c++fqa/</a> there.