Let’s Encrypt: certificate lifetimes 90 days plus one second, “However, RFC 5280 defines the validity period of a certificate as being the duration between the “not before” and the “not after” timestamps, inclusive. This inclusivity means that Let’s Encrypt’s certificates have all been actually valid for 90 days plus 1 second.”

Cryptanalysis of the GPRS Encryption Algorithms GEA-1 and GEA-2, by Christof Beierle, Patrick Derbez, Gregor Leander, Gaëtan Leurent, Håvard Raddum, Yann Rotella, David Rupprecht, and Lukas Stennes. “The attack on GEA-1 is based on an exceptional interaction of the deployed LFSRs and the key initialization, which is highly unlikely to occur by chance.”

Celebrating 30 years of Europe’s first root name server, “In 1991, the Nordic University Network (NORDUnet) was selected to operate the first root name server in Europe.”

Fitting a FORTH in 512 bytes, really good write-up how to implement a Forth on x86 by Jakub Kądziołka.

Gently down the stream, a gentle introduction to Apache Kafka written and illustrated by Mitch Seymour. Absolutely adorable.

ARTSEY is a one-handed keyboard system using 8 keys in a 2x4 layout.

GXemul is a framework for full-system computer architecture emulation. Can emulate Motorola 88K.

Creation of Internet Relay Chat Nicknames and Their Usage in English Chatroom Discourse (2011), by Robert Ecker.

Daedalus: Man’s Greatest Flight, flying from Knossos to Santorini in a human-powered aircraft, in 1988.

Building telemetry for tea aka Tealemetry (2018), by Ben Cox.

Kaboom, a cruel but fair Minesweeper implementation. “If you try to guess, the game will always choose the worst scenario.”

Cores that don’t count (PDF), by Peter H. Hochschild, Paul Turner, Jeffrey C. Mogul, Rama Govindaraju, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, David E. Culler, and Amin Vahdat. “As fabrication pushes towards smaller feature sizes and more elaborate computational structures, and as increasingly specialized instruction-silicon pairings are introduced to improve performance, we have observed ephemeral computational errors that were not detected during manufacturing tests. These defects cannot always be mitigated by techniques such as microcode updates, and may be correlated to specific components within the processor, allowing small code changes to effect large shifts in reliability. Worse, these failures are often “silent” – the only symptom is an erroneous computation.” Oh no.

Unix Shell Programming: The Next 50 Years (PDF), by Michael Greenberg, Konstantinos Kallas, and Nikos Vasilakis.

M1ssing Register Access Controls Leak EL0 State, M1RACLES (CVE-2021-30747) is a covert channel vulnerability in the Apple Silicon “M1” chip.

A metalanguage for multi-phase modularity (PDF), by Jonathan Sterling and Robert Harper.

Half a year of the Liquid Tensor Experiment: Amazing developments, by Peter Scholze.

Introduction to Univalent Foundations of Mathematics with Agda, by Martín Hötzel Escardó. “We introduce Voevodsky’s univalent foundations and univalent mathematics, and explain how to develop them with the computer system Agda, which is based on Martin-Löf type theory.”

A Short Introduction to Categorical Logic (YouTube), by Evan Patterson at the Topos Institute.

Joseph Weizenbaum’s Original ELIZA, Computer Conversations (1965).

The Sweden Solar System is the world’s largest permanent scale model of the Solar System. The model represents the Solar System on the scale of 1:20 million.