masswerk

This seems to be an interestingly generational thing. As someone who learned to write prior to the 1990s, I may attest that the pen used to be controlled by balance and cautiously applying pressure. (…

I faintly recall reading (to my utter astonishment) that he was at least not freed from the accusation as you would have expected. I tried a search for any follow-ups, but to no avail. Maybe due to th…

Please note that this wasn't related to some lawyer actions, but the Metropolitan Police's Computer Crime Unit acting on the basis of suspected offence under the Computer Misuse Act. The off…

Compare Linux Reviews, "Solaris-user arrested by British Police for using Lynx" -- http://linuxreviews.org/news/2005/01/28_0001/28_0001.html.en …

I may be wrong, but isn't connecting to a web server by lynx illegal (considered "hacking") in some countries? I remember a case in the UK around the time of the London olympic games.

P.S.: Traces of the Minskytron circle algorithm are also to be found in Spacewar!, the first digital video game (also for the PDP-1): In the main code, there's a parameter controlling "torpe…

See also here (PDP-1 emulation, running the Minskytron, Munching Squares, and more; includes a description of the program and a link to the annotated source code): http://www.masswerk.at&#x…

Mind that there is no need for estimates and backtracking when doing it in binary! Since the term q for solving the remainder r for any step as in the binomial r = x2 - 4p2 - q(4p + q) is either 1 or …

Those who interested in how to go from there to computer algorithm may have a look at http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/inside/insidespacewar-pt6-gr... This is part of an excu…

Now, the process as described in the MS analysis differs from the description provided by F-Secure. MS: "[W]hen the malicious MBR starts, it loads additional code from sectors after the MBR, whic…

As I read it, first there's user-mode encryption in every case. Then, admin-mode is attempted, and, when successful, either the first 10 sectors including the MBR are overwritten by garbage, in c…

A binary file on disk is just a file, like any other file, and you may read and hex-dump it, like any other. (Probably, your text editor has this built in.) And, of course, you may alter a file, eithe…

Notably, 1999 is also the year which saw the beginning of intensified studies on the Archimedes Palimpsest[1]. Some inspiration may have been drawn from this. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org&#…

Why not include the Intel 8080/Datapoint 2200, which introduced the basic instruction set and architecture? This is 57 this year! (The first Datapoint 2200 prototypes were shipped in April 1970, …

See, e.g, this emulation in JS: http://members.aon.at/~nkehrer/ibm_5110/emu5110.html Some resources (including sources for a UNIX/X11): http://computermuseum…

The 5100 / 5110 used two emulation layers, one for the S/360 architecture, used to tun APL 360, and a S/3 emulation used to run BASIC. Amazingly, these emulation characteristics weren&#…

Back in the day, it was certainly Pac-Man for the 2600. While ET wasn't exactly a hit, its extraordinary bad reputation came after the fact (retro gaming without instructions, etc). Moreover, as …

Ahem, Webkit ...

It may also be interesting that these styles of writing characters originally went with different styles of filling a page. Around the first millennium horror vacui reigned the scriptoria and scribes …

Traditionally, there was no uppercase and lowercase. These were actually just stylistic variations of the same letters. First, there were majuscules (uppercase only), then came minuscules (lower case)…

Provided that the majority of users and customers are non-US citizens, this kind of attitude would render any US-based business a black hat honeypot operation. Same for any US cross-border investments…

This. – More important than any language features is the conceptual space of a given language. JS used to be (very) good at this, but is losing terrain lately.

The only problem: We're downgrading functionality, while upscaling file sizes, bandwidths, processor load, the complexity of the tool chains involved, the costs of development, etc. Most of what …

The page shows the game running in an in-browser emulation of the DEC PDP-1 (in html5/JavaScript). The project was an entry to RetroChallenge 2016/10 [1]. A writeup/blog is available at…

Slightly amusing: HTML4, XHTML: Make sure to include all optional tags, because scannability. Now: For (...) scannability purposes, consider omitting optional tags.

Since it's now Mac OS again, I want the Appearance Manager back, too! (Note: In Mac OS 8+ Appearance Manager was the built-in part and Kaleidoscope 2 rather provided a more accessible way of hack…