today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 17, 2023

• How accurate is the birthday’s paradox formula?

  Given a set of r random values from a large set (of size N), I have been using the formula 1-exp(-r**2/(2N)) to approximate the probability of a collision. It assumes that r is much smaller than N. The formula suggests that if you have hundreds of millions of random 64-bit numbers, you will start getting collisions with non-trivial probabilities, meaning that at least two values will be equal. At the one billion range, the probability of a collision is about 3% according to this formula.

• [Crackers] are increasingly hiding within services such as Slack and Trello to deploy malware

  An analysis of more than 400 malware families deployed over the past two years found that at least a quarter of them abused legitimate [Internet] services in some way as part of their infrastructure, allowing malicious hackers to more easily blend in with normal traffic and complicating the job of those tasked with defending networks.

• How a hacking crew overtook a satellite from inside a Las Vegas convention center and won $50,000

  Teams participating in the Hack-A-Sat contest at this year’s DEF CON’s Aerospace Village all had the same target: a small cubesat dubbed “Moonlighter” outfitted with challenges and “flags” that NASA and SpaceX launched in June.

• Enforcing wrap-and-sort -satb

  For Debian package maintainers, the wrap-and-sort tool is one of those nice tools that I use once in a while, and every time have to re-read the documentation to conclude that I want to use the --wrap-always --short-indent --trailing-comma --sort-binary-package options (or -satb for short). Every time, I also wish that I could automate this and have it always be invoked to keep my debian/ directory tidy, so I don’t have to do this manually once every blue moon. I haven’t found a way to achieve this automation in a non-obtrusive way that interacts well with my git-based packaging workflow. Ideally I would like for something like the lintian-hook during gbp buildpackage to check for this – ideas?

• July 2023 Software Development Projects Update

  There are different ways to measure progress like the rate of commits, the number of developers, the number of FreeBSD ports, and so on. By one measure, the number of Foundation-funded contractors, we are in a boom cycle. As of the time of writing, the FreeBSD Foundation has contracts open for 12 different projects. Some projects we have written about in past newsletters, others have only begun recently. What follows is a summary of this contracted work as well as some noteworthy development by Foundation employees.

• Identifying jails and data to migrade from old host to new host

  In this post, I’ll start the migration process by identifying what data needs to move, from where, and to where.