The cursed computer iceberg meme (2021)
suricrasia.online
suricrasia.online
What I loved is that:
$ echo -en 'basilisk:0000000000:ds26ovbJzDwkVWia1tINLJZ2WXEHBvItMZRxHmYhlQd0spuvPXb6cYFJorDKkqlA' | openssl dgst -sha256 -binary | openssl dgst -sha256 (stdin)= 0000000000000000000000161b9f84a187cc21b172bf68b3cb3b78684d8e9f17
actually works, but is a little sneaky. See https://www.metafilter.com/190463/so-who-is-there-left-to-tr...
Edit2: https://github.com/blackle/Basilisk-Hunter How the examples were generated.
And I gotta say congrats to them, I completely fell for it.
It may still be a clever ad, but doesn't seem necessarily related to their font choices.
Turned out to be related to some sort of timeout (and 150 miles being around the time it would take for the timeout to fail).
I liked it because the user reporting it was debugging in an interesting way a non-technical person might, but it initially weirded out the technical person when they first tested it and saw the 150mi thing appeared to be true (before deducing why).
The story of Mel is also on there and a great (true one). Speed up loops was another fun DailyWTF one and I also liked the one about the cool cam (that saved some flight video game that was way behind schedule).
The old programmer lore stories are great.
> They doctored their hashes. See, the hashes of the story's example strings do match the hashes given in the story in their first many non-zero characters, and they do match the last ten or so characters. Someone like me who bothers to check that they're legit -- and who like me is used to not checking every character of a hash -- will be fooled. But the real hashes have extra characters in between those start and end chunks, and crucially the real hashes also start with many fewer zeros. The real hashes are the same as the story hashes but with extra characters added, balanced out with fewer zeros to start. The hashes in the story start with 22 zeros. The actual hashes that the example strings produce start with 11 zeros. That means that, effectively, the real hashes have a massively easier difficulty level. An achievable-in-reality difficulty level
[1]: https://suricrasia.online/unfiction/CSC218-Software-Precogna...
(Of course it helps that I believe that there’s an afterlife - but even if I didn’t, I’m likely to make the same choice)
72 Letters by Ted Chiang is a great short story with a well-developed premise. Maybe not people's typical idea of hard sci-fi, but as a fan of the genre I really enjoyed it. One of his stories became the movie Arrival.
Peter Watts is another author whose work I really enjoy. The slideshow you linked reminds me of a fictional presentation he used to have on his website on vampire biology. Can't find it though.
My wife has complained that open office will never print on Tuesdays!?!
Made my day.
Pasting an image from the clipboard on Firefox while the browser language is set to German causes the filename not to get a timestamp
TIL. But, from the Wikipedia article:
>> Although incapable of receiving input and producing output as normally understood in programming
Great. So this is why this hasn't been the subject of 0-day hacks since like 1988.
Also, about that Orson Wells thing (from the linked paper):
>>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.
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?
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?
The Cursed Computer Iceberg Meme - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26766722 - April 2021 (60 comments)
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"...
I would have expected to find Cicada 3301 in there. That one still bugs one.
Pretty cursed stuff down there.
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 shakes fist!