Software History

I’ve supervised a lot of great student projects in my nine years at MIT, but my inner nerdy teenager has never been as personally delighted by a project as it is right now.  To…

After reading Hidden Features and Dark Corners of C++/STL on comp.lang.c++.moderated, I was completely surprised that the following snippet compiled and worked in both Visual Studio 2008 and G++ 4....

Compilers are caught in a tug-of-war between increasingly exotic architectures and instruction set extensions on one hand, and our desire for advanced progra...

hugeh0ge's blog

The universal Turing machine is generally considered to be the simplest, most abstract model of a computer. This paper reports on the discovery of an accidental arbitrary code execution...

In \cite{entombed}, John Aycock and Tara Copplestone pose an open question, namely the explanation of the mysterious lookup table used in the Entombed Game's Algorithm for two dimensional maze...

We propose a new exploit technique that brings a whole-new attack surface to bypass SSRF (Server Side Request Forgery) protections. This is a very general at...

The Committee says these things do not exist. The Committee says these things are invisible, not our business, and not something we can or should talk about....

The code behind the biggest crowdfunded project ever was supposed to eliminate the need to trust humans. But humans are tough to take out of the equation.

When a developer 'unpublished' his work from the NPM JavaScript package registry, it broke dependencies for many other projects -- and highlighted the fragility of the open source ecosystem

Things to commit just before leaving your job · GitHub

Xerox scanners/photocopiers randomly alter numbers in scanned documents Please see the “condensed time line” section (the next one) for a time line of how the Xerox saga unfolded. It for example depicts that I did not push the thing to the public right away, but gave Xerox a lot of time before I did so.

not to oversimplify: first you have to flatten the rock and put lightning inside it— ben 🚀 cobalt core! (@daisyowl) March 15, 2017

On September 9, 1947, a team of computer scientists reported the world’s first computer bug—a moth trapped in their computer at Harvard University.

I thought you had it.

Funny names for funny functions.