Viewing profile — KateLawson

MNIST is what the Post Office solved in the late 1990s. It's basically the "hello world" of visual recognition these days. https://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1999/02/postal-servi…

It's important to point out that these programs have two different objectives. The Mullvad client is designed to connect to a closed-source service, which is run by someone else. I…

There's another reason why USB-to-parallel adaptors can't replace a PC with a printer port: the latency for round-trip applications is significantly higher over USB. It takes a few…

The slowness was due to a hardware bug in the 6522 VIA chip. The shift register (FIFO) would lock up randomly. Since this couldn't be fixed before the floppy drive needed to be shi…

Yeah, the ISP I founded in 1995 (elite.net) was a PM2ER for both dialup and routing with a Pentium 90 as the shell & web server. We quickly hit the 30 line limit and went up to the…

These typically work by changing the media bit encoding to be easier to process with 6502 instructions instead of a lookup table. Others simplify the table and use more RAM so that…

A semi-legit app can later drop malicious code and run it. Think of a repackaged OSS project or pirated software that has an auto-updater built in.

Xprotect is part of GateKeeper, which arrived in Mountain Lion (and late versions of Lion).

Here's a good summary of the flaw: https://guidovranken.com/2022/06/27/notes-on-openssl-remote-... Note that the bug is only in 3.0.4, which was released June 21, 2022. So if you d…

Sun did have a firewall by the early 90's. It had application-level proxies, and you'd have to configure applications to bounce through it if you wanted to get to the Internet. In …

My company, Root Labs, has consulted on various lawsuits. We aren't trial witnesses but we've done supporting work, such as reverse engineering and writing a detailed technical ana…

If you did a pure analog copy (dual tape deck), you had generation loss. Eventually copies of copies would have too much noise and thus persistent load errors. Additionally, in-ban…

Same year, and every engineering and CS student I knew had one in their dorm room. The lowest spec I saw was 386SX-16 with 2 MB and the highest was 486DX-50 with 16 MB RAM. Most us…

As late as the mid-90s in California, some kids showed up at university without a computer. There were PC and Mac labs on campus that were open pretty late, as well as VT100 termin…

This article is a good list of implementation flaws with RSA, both in parameter selection and protocols. However, I disagree with the recommendation to use ECIES. It has a separate…

You need to get access to the raw entropy stream in order to characterize it and test it under a number of different situations. At Cryptography Research, we did a number of review…

QKD relies on many underlying assumptions, which researchers conveniently sweep under the rug while continuing to build castles ever higher on the theoretically "perfect" but insec…

This is kind of a ridiculous announcement, but I appreciate what they're trying to do. I find it ironic that they're trying to improve security & privacy for app users, but then th…

Kirk McKusick took this kind of scale into consideration when designing softupdates for UFS. One of his criticisms of the competing log structured filesystems at the time was that …

Hacking became "cool" for the corporate world in the late 90's. Movies like The Matrix and the fact that nothing too valuable was online yet meant that getting hacked was likely ju…

There was some ongoing consternation at ISS around 96-97 about an employee being a Phrack editor. Management talked to them but it didn't threaten their career.

My university had terminal labs in the early 90s, tables full of Wyse terminals hooked up to the central UNIX cluster. PCs and Macs were common in other labs, but a terminal lab wa…

Butler Lampson (Xerox PARC researcher who created the Alto) recently revised this classic paper from 1983, updating it for more modern systems and principles (e.g., eventual consis…

SourceDNA is generating an amazing data feed, revealing the secrets in the binary code of every app in the app stores. Our backend team has built an automated reverse engineering m…