Reinventing Firefox for Android: A Preview

Reinventing Firefox for Android: A Preview

The new application is powered by Firefox’s own mobile browser engine — GeckoView — the same high-performance, feature enabling motor that fuels our Focus app. While all other major Android browsers today are based on Blink and therefore reflective of Google’s decisions about mobile, Firefox’s GeckoView engine ensures us and our users independence. Building Firefox for Android on GeckoView also results in greater flexibility in terms of the types of privacy and security features we can offer our mobile users.

Source: blog.mozilla.org

Nearly 100 drivers followed Google Maps detour ended up stuck in an empty field

Nearly 100 drivers followed Google Maps detour ended up stuck in an empty field

(CNN) — Technology isn’t always foolproof, as about 100 Colorado drivers learned when Google Maps offered them a supposedly quick way out of a traffic jam. A crash on Peña Boulevard, a road leading to Denver International Airport, prompted the app to take drivers on a detour on Sunday. The alternate route took drivers down a dirt road that rain had turned into a muddy mess, and cars started sliding around.

Source: edition-m.cnn.com

CUDA Grep

CUDA Grep

Initially we only parallelized the regular expression matching, but then realized that matching a single regex against every input file was actually slower than grep. Each thread block has a specific regular expression (thus NFA) associated with it (there is no restriction on N thread blocks sharing the NFA since they will be working on separate lines no redundant work is done). Note: that copying the strings to the device is extremely fast now (this also might be cache exploitation on the GPU)

Above is a graph which records our speedup over the single-threaded grep which runs on a single core of a CPU (to be fair we did try to parallelize by spawning processes for each regular expression but this resulted in a slow-down for grep as explained above) for a 53 MB javascript file as we increase the number of regular expressions used per run time.

Source: www.cs.cmu.edu

A New Wave of Bad Ads Is Hijacking Even Top-Tier Websites (2018)

A New Wave of Bad Ads Is Hijacking Even Top-Tier Websites (2018)

“Over the past two years, we have seen the amount of malware and mobile redirects, which might lead to malware, roughly double in the digital ad ecosystem,” says Chris Olson, CEO of The Media Trust, a McLean, Virginia company that provides security services to ad providers and online publishers. The exact content users see depends on who they are, where they are, what kinds of devices they’re running and other characteristics, making it difficult for publishers and ad networks to conclusively review every version of an ad for malicious content. And experts say the problem traditionally gets worse around the year-end holidays, when the number of online ads skyrockets just as the people able to review security issues at ad networks and publishers are on vacation or occupied with other matters.

Source: www.fastcompany.com

Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side

Khormaee won’t share what signals Google uses to determine these scores because he says that would make it easier for scammers to imitate benign users, but he believes that this new version of reCaptcha makes it incredibly difficult for bots or Captcha farmers—humans who are paid tiny amounts to break Captchas online—to fool Google’s system. Google is also now testing an enterprise version of reCaptcha v3, where Google creates a customized reCaptcha for enterprises that are looking for more granular data about users’ risk levels to protect their site algorithms from malicious users and bots. According to two security researchers who’ve studied reCaptcha, one of the ways that Google determines whether you’re a malicious user or not is whether you already have a Google cookie installed on your browser.

Source: www.fastcompany.com

Dijkstra Archive (1930-2002)

Dijkstra Archive (1930-2002)

Although most of Dijkstra’s publications began life as EWD manuscripts, the great majority of his manuscripts remain unpublished. To alleviate both of these problems, the department has collected over a thousand of the manuscripts in this permanent web site, in the form of PDF bitmap documents (to read them, you’ll need a copy of Acrobat Reader). When Dijkstra himself didn’t provide the backward references, we indicate the relationship by “see also” links in the index, leaving the judgment of the extent to which the earlier EWD is superseded by the later one to the reader.

Source: www.cs.utexas.edu

RPM Packages Explained

RPM Packages Explained

This can be queried using the rpm tool:

When an RPM package is installed, the rpm tools know exactly what files were added to the system. That way, the tools interacting with the RPM package archive know what else must must be installed so that fpaste works correctly:

While rpm knows the required dependencies for each archive, it does not know where to find them. It can also search them for software, or install/uninstall/upgrade packages from them:

When installing the package using dnf now, it resolves all the required dependencies, then calls rpm to carry out the transaction:

Notice how dnf even installed python3-igor, which isn’t a direct dependency of python3-elephant.

Source: fedoramagazine.org

Why are the username and password on two different pages?

Why are the username and password on two different pages?

The most common reason to put username and password on two different pages is to support both:

However, this login flow confuses people which is probably why you’re reading this! This post looks at the security of this design decision and presents options for designing login forms that support multiple paths of authentication. Presenting the fields on a single page (Option 2 or 3) also allows additional authentication options like adding social login buttons.

Source: www.twilio.com

What I Learned Co-Founding Dribbble

What I Learned Co-Founding Dribbble

Reflecting on what I’ve learned from building a community for designers, learning how to run a business, and navigating some tough life years proved both fun and difficult. Many of Dribbble’s early features (Rebounds, Playoffs, etc.) were a direct reaction to how the community wanted things to work—regardless of whether we’d built a feature set around it. If looking at the Popular page around this time, we would hear, “Dribbble is nothing but icon designers”.

Source: simplebits.com