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Latest posts
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Sandboxing pre-commit
pre-commit is a tool that is often a prerequisite for contributing to Python upstream projects. It installs as a git pre-commit hook and runs various checks on commit, using tools installed in a set of virtualenvs that it automatically manages. In other words, it is a Remote…
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CEO Impersonation Fraud
In discussion about my post on banks and phones [1] questions were asked about CEO impersonation (link to an article on the security blog Krebs on Security about it) [2] . CEO fraud (or more generally executive fraud) is a subset of Business Email Compromise fraud which…
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Banks and Phones
The Problem For years there have been ongoing issues with SMS being used as a security mechanism for important things including financial services. The problem with this is that access to a phone number is not very well secured, the business model of phone stores is based on…
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Decompilation patterns, part 18: Signed division
As promised, the last one (for now?), and this one blew my mind the first time I saw it: var_v0 = sp4014; if ((s32) sp4014 > 0xB) << 0xB)); There's actually two things going on here. First, the compiler is faking a signed division using shifting (which rounds down) as a building…
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Decompilation patterns, part 17: Loop rotation
Occasionally, you'll see code like this (after initial cleanup): var_v0_2 = crc & 0x80000000; do { if (var_v0_2 != 0) { crc = (crc << 1) ^ 0x1EDC6F41; } else { crc <<= 1; } var_a0 += 1; var_v0_2 = crc & 0x80000000; } while (var_a0 < 8U); The thing with var_v0_2 is unnatural. GCC…
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Restricting device memory usage on Linux 7.3
Linux cgroups has been used for a while to group processes and control their access to certain system resources. One of those resources is memory, through the use of memcg. That control is dynamic, allowing for cgroups to setup a minimal and a maximal amount of memory, as well…
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Cixin Liu is a Bad Person
The Chinese author Cixin Liu [1] is most known for his book The Three Body Problem and it’s sequels. One of the main plot elements in the book is that every species in the universe is cool with genocide and willing to commit genocide as a preemptive strike against any star…
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Decompilation patterns, part 16: Tail reduplication
We're nearing the end soon, I promise. Here's one that I see all the time: ... } else { var_t0_5 = temp_a0_3 - 0x140; var_a2_5 = 0xA0 - temp_a3_5; goto block_45; } } else { var_t0_5 = 0xA0 - temp_a0_3; var_a2_5 = temp_a3_5 - 0x118; block_45: var_v0_3 = var_t0_5 + 0xA0; var_v1_4…
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myman 0.12.0 on CRAN: Two new waves!
Another new and exciting version of our still-new package myman reached CRAN this morning, and has been built for r2u and on r-universe . The matching Python package has also been updated. The package offers twenty one hundred eighty four “My man …” posts by Kevin Kruse made on…
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Decompilation patterns, part 15: Redundant if-for
Yet another way of writing for loops: var_a2_4 = ... if (var_a2_4 < 0x78) { ... do { ... var_a2_4 += 1; } while (var_a2_4 < 0x78); } This extra if is merely there because the compiler wasn't able to prove that the variable didn't start below the bound, so it can't rewrite the…
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High Court: secret trial collapses due to confidentiality breaches
On 7 October 2026, I submitted an application withdrawing the secret legal document served on Nigel Farage's Reform UK party/company . Specifically, I lost any remaining confidence in the procedure after discovering a second potential breach of confidentiality. Before getting…
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RcppArmadillo 15.6.2-1 on CRAN: New Upstream
Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick…
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Decompilation patterns, part 14: Strength increase
Let's look at the entire loop from yesterday: u16 spE10; u16 *var_v0_2; ... var_t1_2 = 0x7F; var_v0_2 = &spE10 + 0xFE; do { *var_v0_2 = 0; var_t1_2 -= 1; var_v0_2 -= 2; } while (var_t1_2 >= 0); What's going with the pointer arithmetic here? Why is it indexing out-of-bounds? The…
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RcppSimdJson 0.1.17 on CRAN: Updates
A brand new release 0.1.17 of the RcppSimdJson package is now on CRAN , and has been built for r2u and on r-universe . RcppSimdJson wraps the fantastic and genuinely impressive simdjson library by Daniel Lemire and collaborators. Via very clever algorithmic engineering to obtain…
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qlcal 0.1.4 on CRAN: Fresh Upstream Updates
The twenty-second release of the qlcal package arrivied at CRAN yesterday, and has been built for r2u as well as on r-universe . qlcal delivers the calendaring parts of QuantLib . It is provided (for the R package) as a set of included files, so the package is self-contained and…
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Reproducible Builds in September 2026
Welcome to the September 2026 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In our reports, we try to outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a quick recap about what problem our project intends to solve, whilst anyone may inspect the…
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Review: Ties That Bond in Gretna Green
Review: Ties That Bond in Gretna Green , by Linzi Day Series: Midlife Recorder #3 Publisher: Linzi Day Copyright: February 2023 ISBN: 9798376517017 Format: Kindle Pages: 616 Ties That Bond in Gretna Green is a self-published fantasy novel and the third book in the Midlife…
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RQuantLib 0.4.29 on CRAN: New QuantLib, Plus Small Fixes
A new release 0.4.29 of RQuantLib arrived on CRAN this evening, had already been built for r2u as well as on r-universe and has just been uploaded to Debian . QuantLib is a rather comprehensice free/open-source library for quantitative finance. RQuantLib connects (some parts of)…
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Review: Daggerbound
Review: Daggerbound , by T. Kingfisher Series: Swordheart #2 Publisher: Bramble Copyright: 2026 ISBN: 1-250-40009-0 Format: Kindle Pages: 436 Daggerbound is a secondary-world fantasy and a sequel to Swordheart , although it follows different protagonists for most of the book.…
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Paying for elections, Reform UK illegal confession in High Court
Fromt the day the Clacton-on-Sea by-election was announced on 7 July 2026 , the British public were given a series of promises about Reform UK intending to pay for the election. When looking at the comments: It wasn't just a single, off-the-cuff comment on social media The…