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Two Paths to Memory Safety: CHERI and OMA in the Fight Against Cyber Threats

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The last year has been brutal for businesses globally. Taking examples from my home country, the UK, the cost is over £1B and still rising, as well as the loss of at least one life due to cybercrime. These aren’t isolated incidents - they’re symptoms of a systemic vulnerability in how we build computer systems. According to the Verizon 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report, credential abuse and exploitation of vulnerabilities continue to dominate as attack vectors, accounting for 22% and 20% of breaches respectively. The exploitation of vulnerabilities saw a 34% surge year-over-year, creating what Verizon describes as a “concerning…

Matrices can be your Friends.

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Matrices can be your Friends. By Steve Baker What stops most novice graphics programmers from getting friendly with matrices is that they look like 16 utterly random numbers. However, a little mental picture that I have seems to help most people to make sense of what's going on. Most programmers are visual thinkers and don't take kindly to piles of abstract math. Take an OpenGL matrix: float m [ 16 ] ; Consider this as a 4x4 array with it's elements laid out into four columns like this: m[0] m[4] m[ 8] m[12] m[1] m[5] m[ 9] m[13] m[2] m[6]…

American Solar Farms

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Last week, Jake Stid, a postdoctoral research associate at Michigan State University, announced Ground-Mounted Solar Energy in the United States (GM-SEUS). This is a 15K-array, 2.9M-panel dataset of utility and commercial-grade solar farms across the lower 48 states plus the District of Columbia. This dataset was constructed by a team of researchers including alumni from NOAA, NASA and the USGS. Below is a heatmap of the assets catalogued in this dataset. GM-SEUS is broken up into two datasets, one for arrays and another panels. Below you can see a solar farm with the array outlined in red and the panels…

Spotlight on pdfly, the Swiss Army knife for PDF files

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Project documentation: pdfly.readthedocs.io pdfly is the youngest project of the py-pdf organization. It has been created by Martin Thoma in 2022. It's simply a CLI tool to manipulate PDF files, written in Python and based on the fpdf2 & pypdf libraries. I'm a maintainer of the project 🙂 What can … Project documentation: pdfly.readthedocs.io pdfly is the youngest project of the py-pdf organization. It has been created by Martin Thoma in 2022. It's simply a CLI tool to manipulate PDF files, written in Python and based on the fpdf2 & pypdf libraries. I'm a maintainer of the project 🙂 What…

MAML

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maml{ project: "MAML" tags: [ "minimal" "readable" ] # A simple nested object spec: { version: 1 author: "Anton Medvedev" } # Array of objects examples: [ { name: "JSON", born: 2001 } { name: "MAML", born: 2025 } ] notes: """ This is a multiline strings. Keeps formatting as-is. """ }Rationale JSON is the most popular data-interchange format. But it isn't a very good configuration language.MAML keeps JSON’s simplicity and adds only the needed bits for a good configuration language:CommentsMultiline stringsOptional commasOptional key quotesMAML is human-readable and easy to parse.What’s the difference between MAML and JSONC/JSON5?Why not Zig-style multiline?Implementations…

An initial investigation into WDDM on ReactOS

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The history of ReactOS spans a wider range than the lives of many of the people who work on it today. Incredible individuals have come and gone from the project with vastly different goals for what they want to see developed. In recent years, better hardware support has emerged as one of those goals. As ReactOS gazes towards the world of Vista and beyond, a few questions about how hardware works emerge. Vista introduced massive overhauls to how hardware drivers are written and maintained. Gradually we’re trying to handle many of these overhauls with great success. Today we talk about…

Free Software hasn’t won

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This is a translated version of a talk I gave at P.I.W.O in June, with cleanups and adjustments for the blog form. …that doesn't sound right. I made the slides in Inkscape, on a computer running KDE and Linux, I use Firefox regularly. But maybe that's just me. What about you, are you using Free Software? Hands up! [hands go up in the audience] Of course! What nonsense, "Free Software hasn't won". Someone replaced my slides, hey conference staff! **Staff:** *The other folder.* [Browsing to a directory named "other folder", opening file called "your slides dimwit.pdf"] Now, those are finally…

Introducing the Fastmail desktop app

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Fastmail is now available as a dedicated desktop app for Mac, Windows, and Linux. It’s the same Fastmail you know and love, now with the focus and convenience of a standalone app. With our desktop app you can: Launch Fastmail from your dock or taskbar and find it in your platform’s app switcher. Make Fastmail your default email client, so email links create a new message directly in Fastmail. Work whenever, wherever, with full offline support, just like our mobile apps. You can always read your mail, manage your calendar, and write replies — your changes sync back seamlessly when…

Fully Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC)

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Fully Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC) - Countering Trojan Horse attacks on Compilers Here’s information about my work to counter the “Trusting Trust” attack. The “Trusting Trust” attack is an incredibly nasty attack in computer security; up to now it’s been presumed to be the essential uncounterable attack. I’ve worried about it for a long time, essentially since Ken Thompson publicly described it. After all, if there’s a known attack that cannot be effectively countered, should we be using computers at all? Thankfully, I think there is an effective countermeasure, which I have named “Diverse Double-Compiling” (DDC). This…

Despite what’s happening in the USA, renewables are winning globally

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Editor’s note: This story was originally published by Grist. It appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. If you live in the United States, you could be forgiven for thinking that renewable energy is on the outs. In July, Congress voted to rapidly phase out longstanding tax credit support for wind and solar power, and the Trump administration has taken seemingly every step in its power to halt the development of individual wind and solar projects—even as domestic electricity demand rises and new sources of electricity become more important than ever. But even as clean energy deployment hit…