Weeknotes 8

22 Aug 2021

Engineering

A website whose contents are served via DNS. Source. The Hacker News comments are a lot more interesting. Comments
A insightful twitter thread about why wild foxes lead to treasure in Skyrim. This perfectly illustrates unintended consequences of design choices we make while developing software. Source
The author argues most of the code in existence is “Glue Code” which essentially converts data sent by a system/program to be understandable by something else. Giving it a cursory thought reveals most of the code I have written might be glue code. Source
The original paper on Google titled “The Anatomy of a Search Engine”, authored by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders themselves. One thing that caught my eye was their web crawling section and the number of pages they could crawl with their crawler written in Python. Source

Collisions have been found in Apple Neural Hash which it uses to search for Child Sexual Abuse Material(CSAM) in users’ device. While apple has clarified that the process of matching involves more than just hash matching, the entire rollout of this feature has been a PR nightmare for apple and an actual nightmare for all privacy advocates. Model | Collision Example | Collision generator | Apple’s Clarification

A lot of middleboxes have been been found to be non-compliant with the TCP standard which allows them to be used for amplification DoS attacks. Makes me realise there is nothing to actually enforce internet standards; also could we write a compliance tester for popular protocols??? Short Source | A bit longer source | The Actual Source
LinkedIn allows one to post job listings as any employer and the way to stop it has not been published anywhere visible. This can be a serious hit to a company’s credibility if a competitor decides to flood LinkedIn with fake listings for a company. Source

The article explain the whole controversy and the concept of “stablecoins”. They were blatantly lying about their reserves, which is like the backbone of the entire stablecoin. In a way, it reflects the state of the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem now, built on a bunch of empty promises with nothing backing it up. Source
Loon, a project by X Development (an Alphabet company) which delivered internet to remote areas through balloons in stratosphere is shutting down. The blog itself is worth a read as it gives links to a lot of interesting stuff that Loon invented as a part of achieving their goal. Source
People are planning to sue Binance for the losses caused by the outage during the bitcoin price drop. I see a trend in people realising that cryptocurrency businesses are not upheld to the same legal standard as a traditional business as the entire market is unregulated. Source

The author argues for a comeback of cargo pants. I never get why they went out of fashion; they are comfortable, functional and looks awesome. I really hope they are popular again. Source