Lucet, the Sandboxing WebAssembly Compiler

Lucet, the Sandboxing WebAssembly Compiler

is a Rust crate that provides wrappers around these tools for building C programs into Lucet modules. For example, to create a WebAssembly module from :

The next step is to use Lucet to build native code from that WebAssembly file:

is the WebAssembly to native code compiler. On recent Ubuntu versions, the , and packages must be installed:

In order to compile applications to WebAssembly, builtins need to be installed as well:

Install the latest stable version of the Rust compiler:

Enter the Lucet git repository clone, and fetch/update the submodules:

In order to compile applications to WebAssembly, builtins need to be installed as well:

Enter the Lucet git repository clone, and fetch/update the submodules:

The lucet project aims to provide support for secure execution of untrusted code.

Source: github.com

Symbolicator: Sentry’s service to process native crash reports and minidumps

Symbolicator: Sentry’s service to process native crash reports and minidumps

Debuggers — and also Sentry — are presented with the challenge of reading a stack trace from the threads’ call stack memory region, symbolicating them into human-readable function names, and, finally, enriching them with additional information. Unwind information indicates the size and contents of all function frame records so that the application or a debugger can walk the stack and extract values like the return address. And, this is essentially what debuggers do; they look up the respective instruction address in the debug file and then display all sorts of stored information.

Source: blog.sentry.io

Facebook’s New Cryptocurrency, Libra, Gets Big Backers

Facebook’s New Cryptocurrency, Libra, Gets Big Backers

Facebook Inc. has signed up more than a dozen companies including Visa Inc., Mastercard Inc., PayPal Holdings Inc. and Uber Technologies Inc. to back a new cryptocurrency it plans to unveil next week and launch next year. The financial and e-commerce companies, venture capitalists and telecommunications firms will invest around $10 million each in a consortium that will govern the digital coin, called Libra, according to people familiar with the matter. The money would be used to fund the creation of the coin, which will…

Source: www.wsj.com

Video Upload Latency Improvements at Instagram

Video Upload Latency Improvements at Instagram

To ingest video and make it available for playback, we had the Instagram app upload the entire video file to the server once the client had finished recording it. Let’s start by defining upload latency for this article as the time it takes once the server has received all video bytes from the client, until the video is made “publishable” or available for viewing. This reduces latency in cases where the lower-quality versions took longer than the highest-quality version to process, and increases the success rate of video uploads, since we only depend on one version instead of all versions.

Source: instagram-engineering.com

Agatha Christie’s 1926 Disappearance

Agatha Christie’s 1926 Disappearance

It was like a plot from one of her own novels: On the evening of Dec. 4, Agatha Christie, carrying nothing but an attaché case, kissed her daughter good night and sped away from the home in England that she shared with her husband, Col. Archibald Christie. Christie was 36 at the time and had already published several detective novels, including “The Secret Adversary” and “The Murder on the Links.” Her disappearance merited banner headlines the world over, making the front page of The Times on Dec. 6.

Source: www.nytimes.com

FDA halts clinical trials of fecal transplants after patient’s death

FDA halts clinical trials of fecal transplants after patient’s death

Two patients contracted severe infections, and one of them died, from fecal transplants that contained drug-resistant bacteria, the Food and Drug Administration reported on Thursday. Fecal transplants have come into increasing use to treat severe intestinal disorders, particularly an infection caused by a bacterium called Clostridium difficile, which can be deadly and tends to occur in hospitalized patients who have been heavily treated with antibiotics. The idea behind the transplants is to use stool from a healthy donor to restore the normal balance of bacteria and other organisms in the intestine, the microbiome.

Source: www.nytimes.com

Browser tabs are probably the wrong metaphor

Browser tabs are probably the wrong metaphor

Back when Internet Explorer was dominant, and every developer I knew installed Firefox on every family member and their dogs desktop, I remember a big selling point for convincing people to use Firefox was ‘Tabs’. Firefox may not have been the first browser to introduce tabs, but in my experience it was the number one selling point to get people to switch. When interviewing people with a ton of tabs on their screen and asking them why, the most common responses can be somewhat categorized as:

When asking the first group for more information, I realized that a lot of people use tabs as a sort of bookmark.

Source: evertpot.com

Notes on privacy and data collection of Matrix.org

Notes on privacy and data collection of Matrix.org

In this document, we will attempt to answer the following questions:

To do so, we will follow the most common setup and the ones recommended by Matrix.org itself for self-hosting:

Matrix.org only gives self-hosting recommendations for client, Home and Identity server, a full Matrix stack also include several other items. Riot therefore uses, by default, a for-profit service that has no related privacy policy, sharing Personal Identifiable data with a 3rd-party without informing its users, while relying on the trust of a Matrix.org recommendation. While Matrix.org does not recommend self-hosting Identity servers, they deal with several key behaviours and personal identifiers:

Control of the and/or server allows several Denial of Services in terms of blocking 3PID associations and finding other people.

Source: gist.github.com