Tag: funny

Blinking Tubes

You’ve probably seen it: a dual-tubed generator console that’s appeared in movies and TV shows like Star Trek (all of them, pretty much), Knight Rider, V, Austin Powers, The Last Starfighter, and even Airplane II. This prop was originally built in the 70s and in the decades since has been placed in scenes requiring an impressive piece of high-tech equipment. The video above is a compilation of scenes in which the console has appeared

Trolling Italians

And so, with all this Italian dining going around, why not visit the most famous Italian restaurant in the country. Since Italians have a proclivity for dining on their own cuisine while abroad, I thought I’d snatch a couple of them and take them with me to the Olive Garden. When the food arrived, we took turns staring at each others’ plates. The “muffuletta olives” (not their real name—on the menu they’re called “Parmesan Olive Fritta”) were olive ascolane, stuffed fried olives, and they were quite good, actually. I had the carbonara, which at $26.99 is priced about the same, or higher, as the pasta dishes at some of the city’s best Italian restaurants. It didn’t taste like it, though. In fact, miraculously, despite the presence of parmesan cream, chicken and shrimp, it managed to be utterly tasteless. (Just for the sake of authenticity – not that authenticity is the Olive Garden’s M.O. – you’d never, ever find carbonara served with chicken and/or shrimp and the presence of cream is a culinary war crime.) Marco took a few bites of his “Tour of Italy” dish and said, “I’m ready to turn in my passport and stay home for a while.” Giovanna didn’t hate her salmon which was paired with bright green stalks of steamed broccoli, saying only that it would never have pesto spread over the top. And Sloane’s garlic-rosemary roasted chicken was rubbery.

Indian Legalese

The modern form of Babu English turns up most frequently in the language of India’s legal system. Here’s a single sentence from an order from the Himachal Pradesh state high court issued in 2016: “However, the learned counsel appearing for the tenant/JD/petitioner herein cannot derive the fullest succour from the aforesaid acquiescence occurring in the testification of the GPA of the decree holder/landlord, given its sinew suffering partial dissipation from an imminent display occurring in the impugned pronouncement hereat wherewithin unravelments are held qua the rendition recorded by the learned Rent Controller in Rent Petition No. 1-2/1996 standing assailed before the learned Appellate Authority by the tenant/JD by the latter preferring an appeal therebefore whereat he under an application constituted under Section 5 of the Limitation Act sought extension of time for depositing his statutory liability qua the arrears of rent determined by the learned Rent Controller in a pronouncement made by the latter on 6.11.1999, wherefrom an inference spurs of the JD acquiescing qua his not making the relevant deposit qua his liability towards arrears of rent within the statutorily prescribed period, application whereof suffered the ill fate of its dismissal by the learned appellate Authority under the latter’s order recorded on 16.12 2000.” When the matter came up in appeal before the Supreme Court, the baffled judge sent it back to the high court, observing, “We will have to set it aside because one cannot understand this.” “It seems that some judges have unrealized literary dreams. Maybe it’s a colonial hangover, or the feeling that obfuscation is a sign of merit… It can then become a 300-page judgment, just pontificating” In October, Subhash Vijayran filed a public interest litigation in the Supreme Court, which is in the process of hearing his petition requesting that legal writing be simplified. “The writing of most lawyers is: (1) wordy, (2) unclear, (3) pompous and (4) dull,” his petition states. “We use 8 words to say what can be said in 2. We use arcane phrases to express commonplace ideas.”

See also the elements of bureaucratic style:

What became clear to me in this exchange is that the passive voice is itself unsuited for the lexical landscape of United’s email, which itself is part of a larger world we now find ourselves in, where corporate and government bureaucracies rely heavily on language to shape our perception. Munoz’s email relies heavily on the passive voice to evade culpability, but he also employs a host of other rhetorical moves that collude to put the blame on the man who was assaulted and carried out on a stretcher. Like a well-trained bureaucrat, Munoz used an array of syntactical choices in a predictable, quantifiable, and deliberate manner, and it’s time we recognize it for what it is.

Destroying Cellebrite

By a truly unbelievable coincidence, I was recently out for a walk when I saw a small package fall off a truck ahead of me. As I got closer, the dull enterprise typeface slowly came into focus: Cellebrite. Inside, we found the latest versions of the Cellebrite software, a hardware dongle designed to prevent piracy (tells you something about their customers I guess!), and a bizarrely large number of cable adapters.

By including a specially formatted but otherwise innocuous file in an app on a device that is then scanned by Cellebrite, it’s possible to execute code that modifies not just the Cellebrite report being created in that scan, but also all previous and future generated Cellebrite reports from all previously scanned devices and all future scanned devices in any arbitrary way (inserting or removing text, email, photos, contacts, files, or any other data), with no detectable timestamp changes or checksum failures. This could even be done at random, and would seriously call the data integrity of Cellebrite’s reports into question.

Any app could contain such a file, and until Cellebrite is able to accurately repair all vulnerabilities in its software with extremely high confidence, the only remedy a Cellebrite user has is to not scan devices. In completely unrelated news, upcoming versions of Signal will be periodically fetching files to place in app storage. These files are never used for anything inside Signal and never interact with Signal software or data, but they look nice, and aesthetics are important in software. Files will only be returned for accounts that have been active installs for some time already, and only probabilistically in low % based on phone number sharding. We have a few different versions of files that we think are aesthetically pleasing, and will iterate through those slowly over time. There is no other significance to these files.

nft_ptr

C++ std::unique_ptr that represents each object as an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain.

Why?

Biggest issue facing $125 billion security industry: Memory safety.
“~70% of the vulnerabilities addressed through a security update each year continue to be memory safety issues.” – Microsoft Security Response Center

The world’s largest codebases are written in C++
Browsers, operating systems, databases, financial systems

C++ memory management is hard to understand, opaque, and not secure

As we all know, adding blockchain to a problem automatically makes it simple, transparent, and cryptographically secure.

Thus, we extend std::unique_ptr, the most popular C++ smart pointer used for memory management, with blockchain support

Non-Fungible Tokens and std::unique_ptr have the exact same semantics:
each token/object is unique, not fungible with other tokens/objects
each token/object is owned by 1 owner/unique_ptr
others may view the NFT/use the object, but only the owner can transfer/destroy the NFT/object.
absolutely no protection against just pirating the image represented by the NFT/copying the pointer out of the unique_ptr

Written in Rust for the hipster cred.

2021-11-11: Funny and poignant web3 critique here:

Even at comparable stages in their development, the World Wide Web and Web 2.0 were not quite so … self-referential? They were about other things — science and coffee pots and links and camera lenses — while Web3 is, to a first approximation, about Web3. For all the Web3 rhetoric around the potential rewards for “users”, Ethereum only recognizes “wallets”. One user can control many wallets; one BOT can control many wallets; Ethereum doesn’t know the difference, doesn’t care. Therefore, Web3’s governance tools are appropriate for decision-making processes that approximate those of an LLC, but not for anything truly democratic, which is to say, anything that respects the uniform, unearned — unearned!—value of personhood.