Porting Retro City Rampage to MS-DOS: From PS4 to 1.44MB Floppy
february 2017
Outstanding talk by Brian Provinciano on the entertaining challenges of this mad endeavour.
journal
february 2017
Standing up to and getting along with China
may 2016
If you want a clear take on the South China Sea situation, read this excellent speech by Bilahari Kausikan (Singaporean policy advisor).
china
journal
may 2016
Seven Little Words (Daily Puzzle)
march 2016
Work out which 2-3 letter groups can be used to answer each of the 7 clues. Quick coffee break puzzle with a new set of clues every day.
puzzle
march 2016
Tsumego - Life and Death Problems of Go by Minoru Harada
march 2016
New problem every Monday, along with the solutions for the previous week. Hosted on the Hitachi corporate website. Gotta love Japan.
puzzle
weiqi
march 2016
Isochronic Distance Map
january 2016
Click to toggle between beautiful global maps of travel time from London for 1914 & 2016. The world really is a lot smaller than it used to be.
journal
january 2016
How the Great Firewall discovers hidden circumvention servers
december 2015
Great talk (1h video) by Philipp Winter at 32C3 about DPI developments in China's GFW tech. I saw the effects of this first hand.
journal
video
china
december 2015
The Life of Satoru Iwata
november 2015
Norman Caruso's excellent documentary about Satoru Iwata, his life and work at HAL & Nintendo.
journal
documentary
video
november 2015
What Happens Next Will Amaze You
september 2015
Maciej Cegłowski's talk in Copenhagen about how the tech industry has sucked at improving our lives, and what we might do better in the future.
journal
september 2015
The politics of China’s anti-corruption campaign
september 2015
William Overholt on Xi Jinping's anti-graft drive and the chilling effect it's having on necessary economic reform.
china
journal
september 2015
A reimplementation of NetBSD using a MicroKernel
june 2015
1h presentation by Andy Tanenbaum about MINIX 3. In-place entire kernel updates (instead of ksplice patches) are interesting, as is the use of NetBSD.
netbsd
journal
programming
june 2015
The Red Guard and the Landlady
may 2015
Alex Ash casually chats with his 66yr old Beijing landlady about her past. "I find it difficult to connect the horrors of the Cultural Revolution as we read about it in textbooks to the people around me."
china
journal
may 2015
Chinese Foreign Policy Database
may 2015
History nerds rejoice! The Wilson Centre's Digital Archive has added ~1500 newly declassified documents pertaining to China's foreign policy since 1945.
china
journal
may 2015
An Atlas in Cloth
may 2015
A catalogue of cloth samples from Cook's third voyage around the islands of the South Pacific. "…from the headdresses of kings to the underwear of peasants, there is a place for everything"
journal
may 2015
Hubble (The Song)
april 2015
What better way to celebrate 25 years of the Hubble Telescope than a parody song? I love this so much.
journal
space
april 2015
Tokyo thanks Beijing for helping evacuate Japanese tourist from Yemen
april 2015
Cynicism about their motives aside, it's nice to be able to say "bravo China" for a change.
china
journal
april 2015
Modern Love in China: Shaking Your Smartphone To Find Your Soul Mate
april 2015
7 minute NPR radio piece on a heart-warming tale of love in the time of WeChat.
china
journal
april 2015
Meet the Chinese Maritime Militia Waging a ‘People’s War at Sea’
april 2015
China Real Time report for the WSJ. The idea of a loosely-networked flotilla of 20,000+ commercial/fishing vessels is genius.
china
journal
april 2015
Born Red
march 2015
Evan Osnos for The New Yorker with an excellent & well-researched profile of Xi Jinping.
china
journal
march 2015
Baidu’s traffic hijacked to DDoS GitHub.com
march 2015
Good explanation of the recent attack from Insight Labs, with relevant data capturing while it was still in progress. The PLA offensive teams are getting bolder…
china
security
journal
march 2015
All-seeing, all-knowing
february 2015
Great piece from James Palmer for Aeon on the Chinese government's use of data mining for good and ill.
china
journal
february 2015
Implementation and Implications of a Stealth Hard-Drive Backdoor (PDF)
february 2015
Regarding the previous link, here's a 2013 paper on implementing a HDD firmware backdoor in off-the-shelf drives with a linux server.
infosec
journal
february 2015
Equation group: questions and answers (PDF)
february 2015
Thorough introduction from Kaspersky Labs to what's currently known about the Equation group. The HDD firmware attack details are interesting (and terrifying).
journal
infosec
february 2015
Why Chinese Promote Confining New Mothers for a Month
february 2015
Rachel Lu's first-hand account of the traditional "Zuo Yuezi" period of post-partum home confinement for new mothers in China. It's an intriguing, if nonsensical, cultural relic.
journal
china
february 2015
Invincea Threat Research Report on the November Forbes.com attack
february 2015
Codoso strikes again. Chained 0-day exploits on a major news site, targeting employees of a few specific US defence & financial firms (and, interestingly, political dissident groups).
journal
infosec
february 2015
Stalking the wily hacker (PDF)
january 2015
Clifford Stoll's account of the hunt for Markus Hess, a KGB-recruited hacker targeting US military ARPANET & MILNET sites in 1986.
security
journal
january 2015
Ken Thompson's acceptance speech for the 2011 Japan Prize
january 2015
How an alligator helped introduce him to the senior staff when he started at Bell Labs in the 1960s.
journal
video
january 2015
Why the Teixobactin discovery is more important than you may think
january 2015
Great explanation of how the culture problem was solved. You don't need to be a biology major to follow it, and it's fascinating.
journal
biology
january 2015
How to tell when a robot has written you a letter
january 2015
I honestly had no idea handwriting robots were this advanced or were being used in this way.
journal
january 2015
From Gongkai to Open Source
january 2015
Fascinating technical account of the process of reverse engineering an open OS for Mediatek's MT6260 SoC (powers many $10 GSM phones). Also a thoughtful essay about differences between Chinese & Western IP systems.
china
journal
january 2015
Special Report: Fear and retribution in Xi's corruption purge
december 2014
Good round-up of the current state of the official purge. It's interesting, if unsurprising, to see how openly it's now being used by businesses to attack rivals.
china
journal
december 2014
Modern security tradecraft for journalists
december 2014
Quick 20min presentation by Ross Anderson (Cambridge Security Research) for The Logan Symposium. Using TLS'd comments on an old blog post via Tor strikes me as smart plausible deniability.
journal
security
december 2014
China’s 13 most valuable startups in 2014
december 2014
Yearly infographic roundup of the big players in China's internet startup scene. Not surprised to see Wandoujia climbing up the ranks.
china
journal
december 2014
Rural China’s economic model limps on
december 2014
A Graeme Smith chapter sample from his upcoming book. Fascinating research. Read his earlier paper "Political Machinations in a Rural County" to get an idea of how corruption works in rural China.
china
journal
december 2014
A Rare Peek Into The Massive Scale of AWS
november 2014
Nice, well researched article with lots of detail. As the author says: "if you are wondering why your network performance has improved recently on AWS, now you know". The custom networking gear with <2ms latency between regions... wow.
journal
november 2014
Chomping at the Bitcoin
october 2014
Good episode of the Sinica podcast (42 mins) all about the past, present & future of Bitcoin in China now that the government has stepped in to regulate it.
journal
china
october 2014
Mirage OS
september 2014
One of the most interesting projects I've seen in a while: the "library operating system" idea re-imagined for the Xen hypervisor. The Mirage libs that provide networking etc. in a normal UNIX dev environment are compiled to actual OS drivers within a "unikernel" for deployment.
journal
programming
september 2014
The Mess We're In
september 2014
Entertainingly erratic 45min lecture by Joe Armstrong (inventor of Erlang) on where things have gone wrong with computing, the physical limits of computation and why we should name everything with hashes.
journal
programming
september 2014
Spoils of the ‘Tiger’ Hunt
july 2014
ChinaFile/Caixin interactive timeline of targets/casualties in Xi Jinping's corruption blitz. Not sure who's who? Read this.
china
journal
july 2014
Tiananmen: How Wrong We Were
june 2014
Jonathan Mirsky's remembrance on the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre. Missed this first time around, great piece for ChinaFile.
china
journal
june 2014
Morris "2 Gun" Cohen
june 2014
I had no idea that an East End character like this guy was such a close friend of Sun Yat-sen. Fascinating slice of history.
journal
china
june 2014
Using BGP for realtime spam list distribution
may 2014
Peter Hessler's talk from BSDCan 2014 on a year in the life of his bgp-spamd project. Interesting project, and some fun spam stats.
journal
bsd
spam
may 2014
The Internet With A Human Face
may 2014
I found myself nodding a lot while reading this talk about privacy by Maciej Cegłowski (owner/operator of Pinboard). His "idle words" blog is also worth a read.
journal
may 2014
China, Cyberspies and the Moral High Ground
may 2014
NYT Sinosphere Q&A with Adam Segal (Council on Foreign Relations) regarding the PLA corporate cyberespionage indictments, and the wider issue of state-sponsored hacking in China.
china
journal
infosec
may 2014
A Long Time Ago in a China Far, Far Away...
may 2014
Ever wondered what Star Wars would look like, drawn as a comic in 1980 in China? Maggie Greene has some PDFs you might like to see.
china
journal
may 2014
Fishing for Hackers: Analysis of a Linux Server Attack
may 2014
Great writeup from Gianluca Borello. Interesting that rather than using the more usual honeypot setups he did this with real, "vanilla" machine instances. It's also a powerful sales pitch for sysdig: examining bytes written to disk by a wget process and grepping tcp traffic, all from a trace file after the fact, is neat.
journal
may 2014
A Passage from Hong Kong
april 2014
Great NYRB piece in which a Harvard History Professor takes a cabin on a container ship from HK to Southampton and gets to know the crew.
journal
april 2014
Promotion of young Chinese banker with alleged military links sparks controversy
april 2014
Li ChunXiao piece for SCMP on the ABC/PLA story. Opaque nepotistic hierarchy breeds suspicion. Not exactly shocking.
china
journal
april 2014
Visualising China
april 2014
Exceptional photo archive of China from 1850-1950, nicely presented and cross-referenced.
china
journal
april 2014
We will make you learn to love Báijiǔ
march 2014
Derek Sandhaus guests on the Sinica podcast to talk about his book "Báijiǔ: The Essential Guide to Chinese Spirits". Fun episode, although I'm not sure I'm ever going to love the stuff.
journal
china
march 2014
The Alibaba IPO and what it might mean for Western luxury brands
march 2014
Elizabeth Paton's take on the Alibaba IPO rumblings - I'm not sure it's all about the luxury brands. The big hitters are already here; a US-floated Alibaba with international partners/subsidiaries seems like more of a win for the middle of the market.
journal
china
march 2014
The Bloomberg Fallout
march 2014
"Where Does Journalism in China Go from Here?" ChinaFile collects some thoughts on Ben Richardson's resignation and the recent Bloomberg goings on.
china
journal
march 2014
Gears of war
march 2014
Entertaining feature in Ars about the history of mechanical computers used in naval ballistic calculations. Includes old fire control instructional footage.
journal
march 2014
Chinese Workers at IBM Factory on Strike Amid Company Sale
march 2014
IBM's sale of its x86 server business to Lenovo isn't going as smoothly as might be hoped. Strikes aren't particularly noteworthy any more, but the last couple of paragraphs are both hilarious and depressing.
journal
china
march 2014
The Strangers
march 2014
Sadly, given yesterday's attack in Kunming, James Palmer's excellent piece from last September on Uighur-Han ethnic relations in Xinjiang has become even more relevant reading.
china
journal
march 2014
Say Goodbye to Taiwan
february 2014
According to John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, Taiwan as it exists today is doomed. This piece in National Interest is apparently adapted from a speech he gave in Taipei in December. I'd love to know how that went down.
china
journal
february 2014
The New TextSecure: Privacy Beyond SMS
february 2014
Big update. Threema has some serious competition at last - the group messaging implementation and (currently in development) desktop client in particular stand out.
journal
security
cryptography
february 2014
Messaging: Mobile's Killer App
february 2014
Ben Thompson's piece on why mobile messaging is important to consumer businesses. I think he's spot on, which is why the Facebook/WhatsApp announcement this morning makes sense. I don't like this trend but it does seem inevitable.
journal
february 2014
Super Hexagon
february 2014
Oh dear, how have I only just discovered this game? Edge put it succinctly: "Forget about VVVVVV. This is Terry Cavanagh’s masterpiece."
iOS
Android
games
journal
february 2014
Bloomberg suspends reporter over China leak
november 2013
Mike Forsythe has a long history of excellent writing on China, so while this is a shame I suspect he'll have no trouble finding other publishers. The strangest part of the story though is Matthew Winkler apparently "Godwin"-ing himself.
china
journal
november 2013
Subor NES/SNES clones
november 2013
This story combines the Nintendo consoles of my youth with Jackie Chan and (what appears to be) an IBM Model M keyboard. Forget Guangdong in the '90s, I want one today!
journal
china
november 2013
Living in a Surveillance State
november 2013
20 minute TEDx talk from Mikko Hypponen on NSA/GCHQ surveillance overreach, why people are right to be worried, and what can be done. A well-presented, non-technical summary.
journal
security
november 2013
Attacking Tor: how the NSA targets users' online anonymity
october 2013
Bruce Schneier writing in The Guardian about the current state of the NSA's Tor attacks. I've always found Tor interesting, so examining how the NSA attacks it is fascinating to me. Also, they have some great codenames: EgotisticalGiraffe and DireScallop are my favourites.
security
journal
october 2013
Puzzle Script
october 2013
Stephen Lavelle's fun combination of engine & DSL for 2D puzzle games. I know what I'll be doing this evening.
journal
linkedin
october 2013
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