Software History

Mr Self Destruct v1 pic.twitter.com/aFloN5VGKI— MG (@_MG_) October 6, 2017

Explains why the year 1900 is treated as a leap year in Excel 2000. This article outlines the behaviors that occur if this specific issue is corrected.

The Emacs editor requires a lot of Lisp code and program state before it can start doing its job. That led Emacs developers to add the "unexec" feature to quickly load all of that at startup, but unexec has always been something of a hack. It employs a fairly ugly (and intrusive) mechanism to do its job. Some non-standard extensions to the GNU C library (Glibc) are required, so a plan to eventually eliminate those extensions was met with some dismay in the Emacs community.

Open a terminal window on your computer—whether Windows, Mac or Linux—and unless you’ve fiddled the defaults, the width is almost always 80 columns. Run a code reformatter like clang-format and same deal…defaults to 80 columns. Why? (1/18) pic.twitter.com/OQLInQDaCo— That Dragon Guy (@PaintYourDragon) February 15, 2022

One of the most impressive hacks I've ever read about has to be the Black Sunday kill. Since the original 2001 Slashdot article I read on this [http://slashdot.org/articles/01/01/25/1343218.shtml] is 99.9% quote, I'm going to do the same. I can see why

Architectural privilege escalation on x86. Contribute to xoreaxeaxeax/sinkhole development by creating an account on GitHub.

It began when my coworker, despite already knowing how to program, was forced to take the intro level Computer Science course at my university. We joked with...

Turning Power Side-Channel Attacks Into Remote Timing Attacks on x86

Cursed computing memory hierarchy, feel free to reply with questions about some of the more obscure stuff here, sources are available for all the cursed knowledge in this. pic.twitter.com/pfZ2FmCcy5— @sparrowgrine@chaos.social (@sparrowgrine) October 13, 2021

The algebraic/model theoretic design of static analyzers uses abstract domains based on representations of properties and pre-calculated property transformer...

I’ve supervised a lot of great student projects in my nine years at MIT, but my inner nerdy teenager has never been as personally delighted by a project as it is right now.  To…

After reading Hidden Features and Dark Corners of C++/STL on comp.lang.c++.moderated, I was completely surprised that the following snippet compiled and worked in both Visual Studio 2008 and G++ 4....

Compilers are caught in a tug-of-war between increasingly exotic architectures and instruction set extensions on one hand, and our desire for advanced progra...

hugeh0ge's blog

The universal Turing machine is generally considered to be the simplest, most abstract model of a computer. This paper reports on the discovery of an accidental arbitrary code execution...

In \cite{entombed}, John Aycock and Tara Copplestone pose an open question, namely the explanation of the mysterious lookup table used in the Entombed Game's Algorithm for two dimensional maze...

We propose a new exploit technique that brings a whole-new attack surface to bypass SSRF (Server Side Request Forgery) protections. This is a very general at...