today's leftovers
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State Machines II
In the past I've written about state machines in Rust. And more recently I've also written about anonymous enums 1 in Rust. I've been wondering what would happen if the two interacted? I think the result could actually be quite nice, and worth daydreaming about. In this post we'll be discussing state machines, the language features which could make them easier to use, and ways in which we could push the ergonomics further.
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Why do arrays start at 0?
I was at my wits end for this newsletter after my first two ideas hit research barriers. Then someone linked me this story about why arrays start at 0 and bam I had my topic. Specifically, arguing that said link is wrong and does not, in fact, fully explain why arrays start at 0.
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Do you feel overwhelmed trying to stay up to date with the latest tech news?
Even though the technology related news media isn't about inhibiting thinking or controlling the masses, like the regular news media, the technology media is mostly using the same tactics by creating sensational and story-formattet junk. You can spot a bad technology media (or any news media) by the low level of investigative journalism and the high level of sensationalism it contains.
If you try to follow all the latest news within technology, whether hardware related or software related or security related, etc., you can easily spend 3-5 hours a day reading through all the information, even if you only skim. Add social media to the mix, with people sharing links to this and that, and you will spend your entire day shoveling through it all.
Let me share something with you. Most of the technology news media is not about the technology, it's all about getting you to feel overwhelmed and out of control. By doing so they make sure that you keep coming back for more in a desperate attempt to keep up with it all.
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Solving my truck’s TPMS sensor problem with the help of an RTL-SDR dongle
One of the computer modules in modern vehicles listens to the radio waves for signals sent wirelessly by tire pressure sensors in order to make sure that all four tires are inflated to the correct pressure. TPMS stands for Tire Pressure Monitoring System. This blog post is going to be about the TPMS sensors and how I used some computer software/hardware tools to help diagnose a problem with them.
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A peer instruction approach for engaging girls in the Computing classroom: Study results
Today, we are publishing the third report of our findings from our Gender Balance in Computing research programme. This report shares the outcomes from the Peer Instruction project, which is the last in our set of three interventions that has explored teaching approaches to engage more girls in computing.
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Ongoing phishing campaign can hack you even when you’re protected with MFA | Ars Technica
On Tuesday, Microsoft detailed an ongoing large-scale phishing campaign that can hijack user accounts when they're protected with multi-factor authentication measures designed to prevent such takeovers. The threat actors behind the operation, who have targeted 10,000 organizations since September, have used their covert access to victim email accounts to trick employees into sending the hackers money.
Multi-factor authentication—also known as two-factor authentication, MFA, or 2FA—is the gold standard for account security. It requires the account user to prove their identity in the form of something they own or control (a physical security key, a fingerprint, or face or retina scan) in addition to something they know (their password). As the growing use of MFA has stymied account-takeover campaigns, attackers have found ways to strike back.
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Optimizing Developer Impact on K8s Security - Container Journal
Kubernetes just passed its eighth birthday (hope you didn’t forget to send a card). In that time, the DevSecOps movement has decisively shifted security left. The evolution continues to add work to a software engineer’s plate—a plate that is already heaped with Kubernetes complexity. While the now-de facto choice for container orchestration has matured into an enterprise-grade solution, Kubernetes security controls still often boil down to preventing developers from direct access to production clusters or namespaces. In the early days of Kubernetes, development teams commonly operated Kubernetes clusters on their own. This practice was replaced as Kubernetes workloads became more critical; developers now generally own workload security while platform engineers take responsibility for securing the Kubernetes platform.