Copying another idea from Old New Thing and porting to unix. This time it’s Piping to notepad. Instead of starting a new notepad process, let’s feed stdin to any existing window.

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At the g2k14 hackathon in July, I thought about a new interface for SSL connections. One of the most frequent complaints from OpenSSL users was that it was too much work to do anything, and one of the most frequent complaints from advanced users was that it was too much work to do anything correctly. Notably, failure to check the hostname in the cert against the hostname of the network connection is an unfortunately common mistake. And so was born the ressl (reimagined SSL) interface. Joel Sing (jsing) ended up implementing it first, putting the libressl in LibreSSL.

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OpenBSD has lots of version numbers, each incremented at their own pace and for their own reasons. Here’s a rundown.

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They’re potato chips. Why would they have gluten? “Gluten free” is the new “won’t turn pink in the can”.

Matthew Green asked for a password generator that’s easy to enter on a phone.

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At the core of the bcrypt pbkdf is the magic string c"OxychromaticBlowfishSwatDynamite". The particular value of the string doesn’t change the algorithm, but the hash works by encrypting this string. All generated outputs are really just ciphertext versions of the magic string. What does it mean?

Let’s arrange the words on a 4x8 grid.

Oxychrom
aticBlow
fishSwat
Dynamite

An interesting pattern emerges with the capital letters. They form a triangle. Let’s take the letters inside.

 xy
atic
fish
 yn

Atic fish? Y/N? hmmm. Two lines of two letters with a y and two lines of four with an i. y? i? They’re the only letters repeated, and perhaps have some other relationship (“change the y to an i...“). We’ll have to think about this some more. For now, let’s combine lines of equal lengths.

xyyn aticfish

yy is very unusual in English. Maybe it doesn’t belong. Or maybe it’s a hint about the i as well? There seems to be some relationship between i and y, certainly. What if we delete the ys and the is and also the letters between the is? As so:

xn atsh

And suddenly the hidden message is revealed. It’s an anagram for thx nsa.

Since the dawn of time, the OpenBSD buffer cache replacement algorithm has been LRU. It’s not always ideal, but it often comes close enough and it’s simple enough to implement that it’s remained the tried and true classic for a long time. I just changed the algorithm to one modelled somewhat after the 2Q algorithm by Johnson and Shasha. (PDF)

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A two hour long Final Fantasy (X, XII, XIII) cutscene, but uninterrupted by the need for level grinding. All the major motifs are present: good but actually evil churches that are actually governments, coverups and double crosses, dead but not dead people, ancient technology, preposterously ineffective battle tactics, collect all the MacGuffins quest, family squabbles, life in the shadow of the great war of the before times.

In Los Últimos Días, English title The Last Days, an extreme agoraphobia pandemic has swept the planet. Nobody can go outside without experiencing a fatal seizure. The movie doesn’t spend any time trying to explain the cause (which is good; better than a terrible explanation), but the Panic, as it is known, starts with a few cases and then affects more people over time until eventually everybody is trapped in whatever building they were last in. This sets us up for a story in a post apocalyptic world that’s a little different than the typical zombie virus plague outbreak.

It’s not a great movie (relies too much on flashbacks for my taste), but the concept is intriguing. Different spaces (office building, subway station, apartment building, indoor mall) all follow their own Lord of the Flies trajectory based on their occupant mix.

A few thoughts reflecting on Sen. Wyden’s not quite proposal. As noted on HN there’s some question of exactly what your data is. Is it information you created (or otherwise control) or is it information about you? Is it an email you composed by typing on a keyboard or is it a log entry created by an autonomous system of whose existence you are unaware? The thornier issues of what the government can or cannot do are best deferred until this basic question is answered.

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