What’s a Sage SmartProbe? The Sage SmartProbe was a very spiffy “Hard ICE” CPU debugger, one of the few ever manufactured for use with modern (2010s) AMD x86-64 processors, and – as far as I’m aware – the only one ever sold on the mass market, rather than strictly to moneyed organizations (as e.g. Intel’s […]

Note: Please read the FAQ!!! If you cured your Sage SmartProbe of its congenital disease as per the last article on the subject, you may now be wondering what to do with it. The vendor supplied a massive Java shitware with the thing, which does not merit any discussion whatsoever. Instead, we will use the […]

The thought began, as many good things begin, in #trilema. Users of the WOT, of V, and other systems where your cryptographic identity is wholly in your own hands1 live with a certain risk of “cryptographic death” – i.e. the compromise of one’s signing key. A conscientious user of public key crypto might keep the […]

Note: Please read the FAQ!!! The Sage SmartProbe was a very spiffy “Hard ICE” debugger, one of the few ever manufactured for use with modern (2010s) AMD x86-64 processors, and – as far as I’m aware – the only one ever sold on the mass market, rather than as part of “favourite son” deals (as, […]

Edit: This item has been adopted by Diana Coman of S.MG. This README (signed) mpi-genesis.tar.gz mpi-genesis.tar.gz.sig (See here re: formatting bug) mpi-genesis.vpatch mpi-genesis.vpatch.asciilifeform.sig mpi_second_cut.vpatch mpi_second_cut.vpatch.asciilifeform.sig —–BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE—– Hash: SHA512   What you see here is a very classic version of the GNU MPI (bignum) library. It has been surgically removed from GnuPG 1.4.10, […]

The public discovery of FLUXBABBITT, a modestly-clever American spy gadget – that may or may not have been “fired in anger” yet – has provoked the usual flood of media garbage (“JTAG is a Chinese back door! Threat or menace?”) What follows is some basic investigation regarding the plausible workings of this device, based only […]

By now, I imagine everyone with the slightest inkling of an interest in electronics has seen this scandalous tidbit: To anyone who has received this generous gift from his Government, I offer: 4 Bitcoin for either of the above, in working condition. 1 Bitcoin for a dead or untestable unit. Serious inquiries only! Please attach […]

Presenting a very old game, entitled: Man vs. Machine. Or, why Man is not a Particularly Good Source of Entropy.

If you came here via a search engine, you were probably looking for Pierre Cartier’s wonderful mini-biography of the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck – from which I shamelessly stole the title. Please go straight there. Otherwise… “And so no one, except for two people, enters the top floor of the Aedificium. …” The abbot smiled. “No […]

Douglas Engelbart – perhaps the last of the great American inventors – is dead. The newspapers are keen to remind everyone that Engelbart invented the computer mouse, but they are largely silent on the matter of his having personally created almost every one of the concepts we think of as part of the standard human-computer […]