What I've Been Reading (7)

Hacking, Psychology, Statistics, and Fun

Hacking

https://www.chrisfarris.com/post/public-access-key-2023/

Chris intentionally exposed an AWS key. It took a solid 50 seconds for the first GetCallerIdentity call to come in. I wonder how repeatable attacker behavior is.

https://twitter.com/hillai/status/1641146508639600646

How to hack Bing: First find a public Azure application anyone can log into. Then edit search results to inject into result summaries. Then add an XSS payload.

https://openai.com/blog/march-20-chatgpt-outage

ChatGPT leaked searches and responses from other users. And credit card information. As per standard operating procedure, they blamed it on a 3rd party tool. In this case, a Redis caching library.

https://fabiensanglard.net/joy/index.html

A list of favorite computer history books.

https://robertu94.github.io/2023/03/14/how-i-work-the-tools-i-use.html

A list of tools that Robert uses for development/hacking/computer stuff. I strongly support Feedly as a RSS reader, but defer to Adobe software for creative work, and IntelliJ when I need a robust IDE to quickly work with. If you’ve got your own list of favorite tools, please share it with me, I’m curious!

Psychology

https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/you-cant-reach-the-brain-through

Convincing people of things is hard. We have primal beliefs that are near unshakable. I guess the moral is to write things that readers already resonate with, rather than convincing readers they are wrong.

https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/brain-training-begins-in-the-hips

On writing. The technical aspects of writing well are different from having something to say and being willing to say it. Lots of great metaphors, like butts making writing better.

Statistics

https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

The number of people who drown by falling into pool any given year depends on how many films Nicholas Cage appears in.

Fun

https://www.thesr71blackbird.com/Aircraft/Stories/mach-35-over-libya-in-an-sr-71-blackbird

A romantic telling of what it’s like traveling in the fastest plane ever built, by the pilot himself. A section from his book Sled Driver.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/turing-test

Fictional discussion between AIs (or Humans?). Fun read.

https://www.arcamax.com/thefunnies/mutts/s-2802860

Mutts is the best.

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