Tech on Janusworx

On Teddy Bears in Cars, Font Obsessions and Home Password’s Pwnd Password Kerfuffle

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 24 Sep 2021 05:45:00 +0530

This post was first sent to my newsletter on September 17th, 2021.
You really ought to subscribe :)

Welcome folks, to the September work letter! :)
As usual, click the headers to wander off to the orginal articles.

A Bear? Where? Over There — Strapping a giant teddy bear to a car in the name of highway safety
#

You’re adapting my what?
When activated, adaptive cruise control uses forward-looking radar to maintain a specific distance to a vehicle in the lane ahead, slowing down or speeding up (to a maximum of whatever speed cruise control was set to) as necessary. Lane-keeping systems use forward-looking cameras to detect the lane markings on a road to keep the vehicle between them, and when both are active together, the vehicle will do a pretty good facsimile of driving itself, albeit with extremely limited situational awareness.

Which is where the human comes in. Under the SAE’s definitions for automated driving, in Level 2 the car controls braking, acceleration, and deceleration, but the human is responsible for providing situational awareness at all times. Of course, this raises the question of whether the driver is actually paying attention.

[…] To test whether drivers were actually paying attention while using a Level 2 system, IIHS recruited participants and then had them drive for roughly an hour, either using the car’s Level 2 system or not. At three predetermined locations on the test route, a second car—the one with the large pink bear attached to its trunk—would overtake the participant’s vehicle. At the end of the study, the drivers were asked if they saw anything odd, and if so, how many times.

TT2020 is an advanced, open source, hyperrealistic, multilingual typewriter font for a new decade!
#

Crazy obsessions like this, are why even I got into writing software.
From the problem page,

In the second image, there are three ‹N›’s. Yet, they all look exactly the same. A real typewriter can, quite rarely, have one of its letters damaged, or misaligned, such that that letter regularly makes an inferior strike to all the other letters. However, this degree of regularity is impossible; could Underwood or Remington have acheived it, they would have leapt for joy.
While working on the project, incredibly, another bad typewriter scene intruded upon my life. I don’t often sit around and watch movies, so I suppose there are only two possibilities:

a. There are so many of these unrealistic typewritten documents in late-2010’s cinema that almost any movie with a typewritten document in it will be hopelessly unrealistic, or
b. The universe, nay, God himself, was urging me on to complete this project in lieu of others I could finish!

The Font is here.

Home Assistant decided to implement password security checks by integrating Pwned Password lookups at the Have I Been Pwned project and all hell broke loose. Here’s Troy Hunt’s measured look at the situation.
#

I’ve written before about how IRL analogies are terrible and this one is no exception. You will not die if you use a weak password. There aren’t government regulations defining how the software is built. You can be any age to operate it. Home Assistant is free. And so on and so forth.
Cars warn you about a number of unsafe decisions and so does Home Assistant, but that’s where the similarities end. Everything else can be adequately discussed by simply talking about the technology rather than trying to find things IRL to compare to.

If it’s in Pwned Passwords, I’ve seen it in plain text. If I’ve seen it in plain text, hackers have seen it in plain text. It doesn’t matter how many letters and numbers and symbols you’ve got in your password, if it’s in Pwned Passwords then it’s floating around the web where plenty of other people have access to it. The guidance from NIST I quoted earlier said not to use “passwords obtained from previous breach corpuses” - there is no caveat that says “unless you think it’s a really good one”!

Pascal has already indicated this will be configurable and as I said earlier, I agree. With the benefit of hindsight, I suspect he’d do things differently in the first place, even though the intention was good.
I do agree with the comments that people should be free to be dicks and deal with the consequences. What I’d like to encourage people to do, however, is to take this as an opportunity to get a password manager and strengthen all passwords that require it.

Until the next letter folks!

P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list!
Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe!
P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

On Arpanet, Passwords and Moving Codebases

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 27 Aug 2021 05:45:00 +0530

Welcome to August’s work letter :)
As usual, click the headings to wander off to the original articles

A couple of my own posts
#

I wrote about my thoughts on my Kindle Oasis …

I got it.
I used it.
And decided within a day, that I was not going back to a Paperwhite, ever.
I realised that the Oasis, to me, is not a “premium” device.

and joining images using ImageMagick.

Two exhaustive articles on the historical significance of the Arpanet and how the protocol worked
#

This is what was totally new about the ARPANET. The ICCC demonstration didn’t just involve a human communicating with a distant computer. It wasn’t just a demonstration of remote I/O. It was a demonstration of software remotely communicating with other software, something nobody had seen before.
So what I’m trying to drive home here is that there is an important distinction between statement A, “the ARPANET connected people in different locations via computers for the first time,” and statement B, “the ARPANET connected computer systems to each other for the first time.” That might seem like splitting hairs, but statement A elides some illuminating history in a way that statement B does not.

In a section with the belabored title, “Technical Aspects of the Effort Which Were Successful and Aspects of the Effort Which Did Not Materialize as Originally Envisaged,” the authors wrote:

*Possibly the most difficult task undertaken in the development of the ARPANET was the attempt—which proved successful—*to make a number of independent host computer systems of varying manufacture, and varying operating systems within a single manufactured type, communicate with each other despite their diverse characteristics.

There you have it from no less a source than the federal government of the United States.

The 1Password blog with a high level overview of their Smart Password Generator
#

Long, random passwords just aren’t convenient. If you need to enter 45 randomly-generated characters on another device often enough, you’ll inevitably change that password to something like password123 because it’s easy to type and remember. It’s also - you got it - not strong.

While a lengthy, unintelligible password may appear stronger than a smart one, it’s mainly illusion. Pronounceable syllables make a smart password look human generated and, therefore, weaker. But a human-generated password could never be chosen uniformly and, therefore, can’t be accurately assessed for entropy.

We’ve made a compromise of sorts. We’ve sacrificed a few bits of (theoretical) entropy, that don’t affect real-world security, to gain a whole lot of convenience, compatibility, and accessibility — and those certainly are real world, which is what really matters.

Mahmoud Hashemi talks about Changing the Tires on a Moving Codebase
#

We realized that CI is more sensitive than most users for most of the site. So we focused in on testing the highest impact code. What’s high-impact? 1) the code that fails most visibly and 2) the code that’s hardest to retry. You can build an inventory of high-impact code in under a week by looking at traffic stats, batch job schedules, and asking your support staff.

And it really is important to develop close ties with your support team. Embedded in our strategy above was that CI is much more sensitive than a real user. While perfection is tempting, it’s not unrealistic to ask a bit of patience from an enterprise user, provided your support team is prepared. Sync with them weekly so surprise is minimized. If they’re feeling ambitious, you can teach them some Sentry basics, too.

My main lessons from Mahmoud’s post …

Everyone has a plan ’till they get punched in the mouth. — Mike Tyson
Prioritise work, on what actually matters. Perfection can wait.
People and their feedback comes first. Matters a lot more than data driven decisions. After all, software is used by and for people.

Until the next letter, folks … :)

P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list!
Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe!
P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

Work Edition

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 28 May 2021 05:45:00 +0530

This post was first sent to my newsletter on May 21st, 2021.
[You really ought to subscribe][1] :)

Welcome to another edition of the work letter :)
Let’s just dive into it. Click the headers to wander off to the original articles.

OS X Reviewed
#

Sometime earlier this year, the operating system known as Mac OS X aka OS X aka macOS, stepped into its 21st year of existence, marking two decades of steady iterative movement.
That its underpinnings are older, by at least another decade, is story for some other time.
I put this in here, not for the OS itself but for the reviews of the OS, by John Siracusa. From it’s fledgling days, through the first ten releases upto 10.10, John covered it all.
In painstaking detail.
Other folks wrote reviews. John wrote introductory books to each new OS.
Every other line was linked someplace I could learn more.
It meant that everytime, I sat to read and learn from a John Siracusa review, I would have to set aside a couple of days to finish it.

From why spatial interfaces matter, to covering the rise of Webkit (which would soon be the bedrock of the modern web) to kernel changes to single handedly goading Apple into creating a new filesystem for their devices,¹ John wrote about it all.

If you want to learn about operating systems and design and how stuff comes together, you owe it to yourself to read John’s chronicles of Apple’s desktop operating system.

And for the curious, yes I have been using Macs (and Mac OS) that long (longer in fact), only to have shifted to Linux in the last couple of years, because I don’t agree with or like the direction Apple seems to be taking it in. I used System 7 and Mac OS 8, then tried the OS X DP2 hotness, got horrified with how agonizingly slow it was and stuck with Mac OS 8 until 10.2 was released in 2002.

Researchers build a swimming robot that works in the Mariana Trench
#

From the Ars Technica post,

But that may not be entirely necessary, based on a report in today’s Nature. In it, a team of Chinese researchers describe adapting hardware so that it could operate a soft-bodied robot in the deep ocean. The researchers then gave the robot a ride 10 kilometers down in the Mariana Trench and showed that it worked.

Mention robots, and for many people, the first thing that comes to mind are the collections of metal and cabling that make up things like the dancing Atlases from Boston Robotics. But over the last decade, plenty of researchers have demonstrated that all that rigid hardware isn’t strictly necessary. Soft-bodied robots work, too, and can do interesting things like squeeze through tight spaces or incorporate living cells into their structure.

## [Intel’s x86 Designs No Longer Limited to Intel on Intel][itpvt] Intel’s found itself in crises before, but as far as I remember, they’ve made such a daring, bet the company, shift only once before. In the era of the [Intel trinity][tit] (the mid 80s), they moved [from being a memory company, to one that focussed on making CPUs][imrc] for the then burgeoning micro computer market. This move by one of their spiritual descendants, Pat Gelsinger, brings back to mind the same audacity. Will it yield similar results? Only time will tell. > For the last 20-25 years, Intel has been steadfast in keeping the crown jewels of its product design firmly inside its very protective walls […] limiting use/production for Intel-only use has enabled the company to improve that design with laser focus, manufacturing not-withstanding. Keeping the cores for internal use only means that neither customers nor competitors were able to see the raw design specifications, and for a long time this has enabled Intel to keep key features, such as its branch predictors, away from all but the most prying eyes. > > In a twist to the norm, Intel is now set to dissolve those walls keeping its x86 cores it itself.

The key phrase here is ‘core of Intel’s compute offerings’. It could be interpreted in two ways: at the core of a CPU design is a CPU core, which would mean an x86 design unless Intel were to skew away from x86 (unlikely). The other alternative could be an IO chiplet, which is also a ‘core part’ of a compute offering. Paul Alcorn from Tom’s Hardware has confirmed from Intel that the key element here is ‘compute cores’, and although Intel hasn’t specifically said the ISA of those cores, we are set to believe that Intel does indeed mean x86.

This means that other foundries will have access to the floorplans of Intel’s x86 designs, which used to be a big no-no at Intel. […] the fact that Intel is even letting another foundry build x86 cores that is the highlight of this announcement.

All-in-all, Pat Gelsinger is enabling a roadmap that allows Intel to pivot, and pivot hard.

That filesystem bit might not be true, but to my mind, it absolutely just is. John willed it so, and therefore Apple made APFS :) ↩︎

NeXTSTEP, Shopify and Bash History

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 05:45:00 +0530

This post was first sent to my newsletter on April 23rd, 2021.
[You really ought to subscribe][1] :)

Welcome to a tech edition of the letter.
I’m trying something new with this now, since I am in that strange valley, where I don’t know enough about programming to write opinions of my own and yet I need to talk to my techie friends.

So, taking a leaf out of Kushal’s newsletter, I will share stuff that I come across as I read.
And reading and jabbering about tech is something I can do.
And the stuff I share will definitely be the best links and articles I find from the wide variety of sites I read.
At most three a letter; I don’t want to overwhelm you :) So, like Kushal, but not as niche as him. Definitely not wide ranging either. Let’s see :)
Also, please let me know how you like it :)
Here we go …

Brad Cox, passed away on January 2nd this year.
#

The throwaway language he created to sell his software libraries was picked up by a computer company as the cornerstone language to base its operating system around. That failing company was then bought out by another company at death’s door, for the operating system and the libraries they’d created with Brad’s language.
Read all about it in The Deep History of Your Apps: Steve Jobs, NeXTSTEP, and Early Object-Oriented Programming,

NeXT had already invented the future back in 1988, but because NeXT never shipped more than 50,000 computers, only a handful were lucky enough to glimpse it in the 1990s.
Steve Jobs needed to return to Apple to distribute that future to the rest of the world.

Ben Thompson always has awesome insight on the meta, in technology.
#

Here’s his take on The Web’s Missing Interoperability,

from a big picture perspective this is clearly a case of Shopify, one of the most exciting companies in tech and the seeming leader of The Anti-Amazon Alliance, effectively moving into Facebook’s garden, because the web is increasingly a barren wasteland for small businesses. The cause is Apple: its approach to cookies makes platform-based web storefronts increasingly difficult to monetize effectively (Shop Pay performed magic in this regard), and its attack on “tracking” — which goes far beyond the IDFA — makes it increasingly impossible to acquire users in one place and convert them in another. The solution is to do user acquisition and user conversion all in one app — i.e. on Facebook — which is why Shopify is helping merchants move off the web and onto Facebook.

Again, it’s a good solution for Shopify, and Facebook deserves credit for recognizing that Shopify is a complement to their service, not a competitor, but I find it disappointing that once again elevating privacy above every other tradeoff is entrenching Facebook, the biggest incumbent of all.

Jump more efficiently into bash history
#

The third tip on Max Hoffman’s post solved an really sore and irritating need I had.

The last tip aims for faster retrieval of commands from history. Usually, the up-arrow jumps to the previous command in the history. However this quickly becomes very tedious if one jumps 5 or 10 or more commands back in history. Instead if you put

bind '"\e[A":history-search-backward'
bind '"\e[B":history-search-forward'

into your /.bashrc and start typing part of a command it will only jump to those commands in the history which start with the same fragment of a command. This is useful for any command line work and you may already know if from e.g. IPython but it is also useful for cd. So …

cd <up-arrow><up-arrow> …

let’s you quickly navigate through previous cd commands.

That’s all folks! :)

Tech on Janusworx

On Teddy Bears in Cars, Font Obsessions and Home Password’s Pwnd Password Kerfuffle

A Bear? Where? Over There — Strapping a giant teddy bear to a car in the name of highway safety #

TT2020 is an advanced, open source, hyperrealistic, multilingual typewriter font for a new decade! #

Home Assistant decided to implement password security checks by integrating Pwned Password lookups at the Have I Been Pwned project and all hell broke loose. Here’s Troy Hunt’s measured look at the situation. #

On Arpanet, Passwords and Moving Codebases

A couple of my own posts #

Two exhaustive articles on the historical significance of the Arpanet and how the protocol worked #

The 1Password blog with a high level overview of their Smart Password Generator #

Mahmoud Hashemi talks about Changing the Tires on a Moving Codebase #