What I've Been Reading (1)

Just sharing some links :)

Security

https://blog.stmcyber.com/how-to-get-a-heart-attack-while-using-jeb-decompiler/
Many popular reverse engineering tools are vulnerable to RCE exploits. JEB here, Ghidra was vulnerable to Log4j last year. Be careful out there!

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2023/02/16/unrecoverable-election-screwup-in-williamson-county-tx/
Electronic voting machine errors call into question election results at a local level. Unfortunately, the errors were unrecoverable, as the wrong ballots were given to voters.

https://portswigger.net/research/server-side-prototype-pollution
Detecting server-side prototype pollution without crashing a server. I haven’t run into this vulnerability very often, but it’s certainly a scary one to test.

Tech

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-doing-and-why-does-it-work/
Stephen Wolfram on ChatGPT and similar AI technology. It’s a fantastic, clear explanation, everyone interested in AI should read it.

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/02/code-with-swearing-is-better-code/
The author crawled open source code and determined that the average code quality of code with swearing is better than code without swearing in comments. I’d probably expect this in open source code, but inside a company, I’d expect the opposite - it may be indicative of a bad code review process.

https://stratechery.com/2023/from-bing-to-sydney-search-as-distraction-sentient-ai/
Bing chat AKA “Sydney” has had interesting behavior recently. Ben makes an argument that these AIs don’t compete for the search market that Google dominates, but are a step towards producing engrossing content beyond social media.

https://twitter.com/vladquant/status/1624996869654056960
Viral Bing Chat responses. Still funny.

https://twitter.com/harmlessai/status/1624617240225288194
OpenAI admits that better AI makes detecting AI harder. Although the Twitter coverage on this report probably blows it out of proportion.

https://gizmodo.com/google-android-launches-privacy-sandbox-chrome-cookies-1850112117
More privacy sandboxing - you get ads that match your group, rather than you individually. This is a win for everyone - Google gets to keep sharing targeted ads, while we’re tracked a bit less on our Google-owned phones.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-it-pro-blog/internet-explorer-11-desktop-app-retirement-faq/ba-p/2366549
Internet Explorer is finally being removed from Windows. Took long enough.

Investing

https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b8x1qrygcslxy7/No-Amount-of-Economic-Turmoil-Can-Faze-Brookfield
Brookfield has continued to invest well, despite recent market downturns. Value investors love opportunities to buy on the cheap.

History

https://going-medieval.com/2019/08/02/i-assure-you-medieval-people-bathed/
An awfully specific post providing examples of the common medieval practice of bathing. Dr. Janega must have been sick of misinformation that I couldn’t find on a Google search 4 years later.

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