The effect exploited in all of these papers is caused by speculative dereferencing of user-space registers in the kernel. Hence, mitigation techniques such as KAISER do not eliminate this leakage as previously believed.
Author: Gregor J. Rothfuss
Wine Windows
Wine Windows Used During the Plague Are Being Reopened
Nearly 300 of these small service windows have been cataloged across Tuscany.
Protecting Genes from Excel
1 study from 2016 examined genetic data shared alongside 3597 published papers and found that 20% had been affected by Excel errors.
COVID-19 winners/losers
a good framework for thinking about winners / losers post COVID-19, with a focus on which services scale worldwide vs stay at the 1:1 scale, with opportunities on both ends.
gVisor
Sandboxing and Workload Isolation
gVisor implements basically all of Linux in userland. Processes. Devices. Tasks. Address spaces and page tables. Filesystems. TCP/IP; the entire IP network stack, all reimplemented, in Go, backended by native Linux userland.
The pitch here is straightforward: you’re unlikely to have routine exploitable memory corruption flaws in Go code. You are sort of likely to have them in the C-language Linux kernel. Go is fast enough to credibly emulate Linux in userland. Why expose C code if you don’t have to?
US companies cut space
office demand will be reduced by up to 15% as a result of work from home policies once the COVID-19 pandemic is contained.
this estimate is laughably low.
macintosh.js
Mac OS 8, running in an Electron app pretending to be a 1991 Macintosh Quadra. Yes, it’s the full thing. I’m sorry.
Baltimore PD
The most corrupt police squad. How the baltimore police operate.
Cordoba Thunderstorms
From what the team could gather, each of the storms had generated such large, powerful updrafts that they’d eventually merged together and begun to spawn other, smaller updrafts, creating what’s called a “mesoscale convective system” — in short, a giant, organized complex of perhaps 50 or more updrafts, which becomes self-sustaining as it germinates more and more offspring.
2022-02-01:
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has established 2 new world records for megaflashes of lightning.
- The longest single flash that covered a horizontal distance of 768 ± 8 km across parts of the southern United States on 29 April 2020.
- The greatest duration for a single lightning flash of 17.102 ± 0.002 seconds from the flash that developed continuously through a thunderstorm over Uruguay and northern Argentina on 18 June 2020.
COVID-19 origins
Support for the idea that something resembling SARS-COV-2 might have been circulating in the region before the pandemic began also comes from another intriguing observation, the low incidence of COVID-19 in South-East Asia, particularly in Vietnam.
A great piece on lab vs zoonotic COVID-19 origins
If the case that SARS2 originated in a lab is so substantial, why isn’t this more widely known? As may now be obvious, there are many people who have reason not to talk about it. The list is led, of course, by the Chinese authorities. But virologists in the United States and Europe have no great interest in igniting a public debate about the gain-of-function experiments that their community has been pursuing for years.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 