The Weekly Weird - 2018-01-19
Hope everyone had a quiet end of year. Glad nothing big happened in computer security while I was vegetating.
- Oh, except Theo being proved right I guess. It's a good thing slack was around to save the day. Even nvidia wasn't safe.
- While all these deep-magic, time-traveling speculative execution bugs are scary, some of you are wondering why put so much effort when you can just ask people nicly to run your arbitrary javascript?
- I don't know if this qualifies as art but it's interesting: a chatroom for people whose battery is about to die.
- Likewise, I dunno if this qualifies as performance art but god I hope nobody is taking it seriously: the consent blockchain.
- Speaking of blockchains, bitcoin's volatility is legendary (so much so that even bitcoin conferences won't accept it as actual payment) and the market is so shallow and unregulated that you can move the price an order of magnitude singlehandedly. Can bitcoin even survive the withdrawl of criminal money now that "all transactions are visible to everyone forever" has turned out to be sub-optimal for crooks?
- creepy shopping tracker
- Ahh Penn Station, how I hate thee. Let me count the ways: +1.
- residential solar
- Jobs that won't exist: readers?
- I regret that I never got to fly on a 747 before it was decommissioned by US airlines.
- Thankfully, NYC isn't alone in terrible infrastructure choices: the Oroville dam spillway was designed by some kid with no experience and the flaws were ignored for decades.
- Don't do drugs. Especially don't do synthetic heroin. Double secret especially don't do drugs that are made of MPTP instead of MPPP and will give you advanced-stage Parkinsons within 48h.
- Yet another story from the "user-interface-matters" department, please don't build interfaces that look like this, and then please don't put your passwords on post-it notes.