news
Programming Leftovers
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Micah Kepe ☛ That Time Ken Thompson Wrote a Backdoor into the C Compiler
When Ken Thompson won the Turing Award jointly with Dennis Ritchie for their work in UNIX, he was expected like other Turing winners to write a paper that would be published in the ACM Computer Journal. What he ended up submitting was a paper about "the cutest program [he] ever wrote"-- a sneaky undetectable self-reproducing "Trojan horse" backdoor in the C compiler that would allow him to log into affected machines as any user.
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Undeadly ☛ Game of Trees 0.129 released
Version 0.129 of Game of Trees has been released (and the port updated). Complete release notes are as follows: [...]
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Ned Batchelder ☛ Expert asterisks
What!? Why mention this while explicitly pointing out no one does it? The newb just barely understands how git works at all. Why introduce obscure command-line options that “hardly anyone” uses?
I call this an asterisk because it feels like an esoteric footnote that only experts, academics, or completionists would need to know.
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Aquila Macedo Costa: Testing library transitions before they reach unstable
A library transition can affect many packages in Debian. I added a way for Salsa CI to rebuild the ones that depend on the changing library, so maintainers can test the transition before it reaches unstable.
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Adam Sawicki ☛ Writing Efficient C++ Code
Although high-level languages—scripting, interpreted, or running in a virtual machine—have many advantages and are the best choice for numerous applications, sometimes we need to write code that is as efficient as possible. Choosing a native language such as C++ is not enough. Only some knowledge and familiarity with good practices will let us get the most computing power out of the hardware.
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Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: #060: Using bubblewrap for R sandboxing
Welcome to post 60 in the R4 series.
bubblewrap is a great tool and very suitable for using with an agent harness. It is a very compelling—and lightweight—alternative to using a full-blown docker container as it offers low-level unprivileged sandboxing on GNU/Linux hosts.
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Perl / Raku
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Olaf Alders ☛ Debugging HTTP::Tiny Calls Deep Inside Your Stack
LWP::ConsoleLogger is one of the little libraries that I am most proud of. First, because I think it’s clever pats self on back but second because I have found it to be incredibly useful over many years of working with libwww-perl based UserAgents like LWP::UserAgent and WWW::Mechanize.
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