February 2022
The peculiar Benford distributionBenford's law or the first digit rule states that in many data sets, the first digit of each value tends to be small. This is not at all obvious, but it has significant implications.
Categories: mathematics
How Unicode reading direction characters defeat source code inspection, and what it means for the open-source movementThere's been a recent scare that Unicode reading direction characters could be used to conceal malicious code in open-source projects. This is undoubtedly true, but that fact doesn't make it significantly harder to ensure the security of open-source code than it already is.
Categories: software development, security
cwordle -- A Wordle-like word-guessing game for CP/MBuilding a CP/M implementation of the notorious Wordle game.
Categories: retrocomputing, C, Z80
Juice-jacking -- it's a problem, but not because it's a problemJuice-jacking is the alleged practice of getting unauthorized access to the contents of a cellphone by subverting public USB charging points. It doesn't happen, and probably never has; so why has there been a recent increase in scare stories?
Categories: science and technology, security
that library?What can the software industry learn from the Log4J security debacle?
Categories: software development, Java, security
UTF-8 and the problem of over-long charactersHow an oddity in the way UTF-8 encoding works can cause all sorts of problems for unwary developers, including security weaknesses.
Categories: software development, security