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Reverse engineering an obfuscated codebase and fixing it in the process
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nicolaiarocci.com
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5 years ago
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eng
Today’s mandatory reading is How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70% . As someone who’s been fighting the protection/obfuscation cat & mouse game for twenty+ years, let me tell you one thing. The way this guy reverse-engineered parts of the GTA5 codebase and then proceeded to single-handly triage and fix a long-standing (7+ years) performance issue is simply mindblowing. All he had to work with were heavily obfuscated dlls. This also ..
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I’m really interested in privacy and how my data are collected, used, stored and just in general exists. While I think of my data as mine, the more I think about it, the hazier I am. I think defining ownership more clearly will help me think of what’s possible and then what’s also appropriate and reasonable to do with data. Limits to using my data I was reading about how Google is changing Chromium to remove and restructure some features....
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The Harrell-Davis quantile estimator is one of my favorite quantile estimators because of its efficiency . It has a small mean square error which allows getting accurate estimations. However, it has a severe drawback: it’s not robust. Indeed, since the estimator includes all sample elements with positive weights, its breakdown point is zero. In this post, I want to suggest modifications of the Harrell-Davis quantile estimator which inc..
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The Harrell-Davis quantile estimator is one of my favorite quantile estimators because of its efficiency . It has a small mean square error which allows getting accurate estimations. However, it has a severe drawback: it’s not robust. Indeed, since the estimator includes all sample elements with positive weights, its breakdown point is zero. In this post, I want to suggest modifications of the Harrell-Davis quantile estimator which inc..
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A vision for the "small web", small software, and small architectures. Also, a bonus rant about microservices.
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摘要 本文准主要介绍计算机这门学科的理论发展史，从计算机理论模型的设想开始到通用计算机的实现，以及关于下一代计算机的思考。笔者一直认为不管是学习什么学科，其发展史都是非常有必要的，只有了解了这个学科从零开始发展到现在的过程，才能对整体有更深刻的理解。另外本文也不会涉及太多硬件方面迭代发展的描述。 引言 我们都知道现代通用计算机的理论计算模型是图灵机，图灵被称为计算机之父，关于图灵本人也流传了很多故事，比如二战时期发明解码机破解了德军的通讯密码，这还被拍成了电影《模仿游戏》；还有他关于对人工智能的定义，能通过图灵测试的才算是真正的人工智能；以及他由于性取向问题导致最终咬了一口带毒的苹果而自杀，甚至传言 Apple 的 Logo 就源于此。 而直到 2013 年英国女王才宣布赦免早已去世的图灵，据说 2021 年英国的 50 英镑钞票上将会印上图灵的照片。但实际上图灵机最初发明的目的跟计算机并没有任何关系，只是为了解决一个困扰当时数学家们很久的一个问题：希尔伯特的判定问....
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Email: alex@lagomor.ph PGP: D9FA 1C2A B497 9505 4A2B 0EFA 048F A29E 53CB ED4E -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- mDMEZeNz3RYJKwYBBAHaRw8BAQdAFAQMGDRVMG388G2Oog8WHv/5Z+QaXeCyvUiq JW+T2CC0NEFsZXggU3Blem93a2EgKGh0dHBzOi8vbGFnb21vci5waCkgPGFsZXhA bGFnb21vci5waD6ImQQTFgoAQRYhBNn6HCq0l5UFSisO+gSPop5Ty+1OBQJl43Pd AhsDBQkDwmcABQsJCAcCAiICBhUKCQgLAgQWAgMBAh4HAheAAAoJEASPop5Ty+1O sQgBAJq+3pJjzYtqLGbXZai5FRz32e7OuY..
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Early access to works-in-progress The Carrot is where I share drafts before they’re ready, half-formed ideas worth discussing, and the occasional exclusive piece that won’t appear on the main site. What you’ll get: First looks at essays and projects while they’re still malleable Behind-the-scenes notes on process, failures, and pivots Exclusive content that stays newsletter-only Puzzle previews before public release No fixed schedu..
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Last weekend’s reading list also included Taking Back Our Privacy , yet another 1 New Yorker piece but this time signed by Anna Wiener. This article is a long-read on Moxie Marlinspike, co-founder and CEO of Signal. Moxie is a childhood nickname. That alone signals (pun intended) an original personality. I mean, how many times have you heard of a CEO going by his childhood nickname? Indeed the personal story of Marlinspike, along with..
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Another historic project I produced in early 2011. This was ReachStuff to provide analytics for Halo Reach.
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Von Neumann architecture This basic model of a computer as a processing unit that receives input, communicates with a memory and produces output is known as the von Nuemann architecture named after the first computer scientist John von Neumann. In this architecture, the processor itself consists of several specialized parts: The arithmetic logic unit (ALU)-the central processing unit capable of performing mathematical and logical operations..
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When most people think of three dimensions, they think of three positional (spatial) dimensions. Up & down, left & right, forward & back. I was thinking - instead of a positional dimension, what if we used something else that we can perceive such as color?
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4300 words, 14 minutes. This post was circulated privately in April 2020. Three months later the government announced that Huawei 5G equipment will be removed from the UK by 2027, a reversal of their previous position. I’ve updated the timeline with that development. Otherwise, the text is almost unchanged from the original. Keep that in mind. It follows my July 2019post on the consideration the UK and its allies are giving to Huawei as a ..
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I was asked during a recent panel on Clubhouse about assessing culture fit. What was once an innocuous term for “people who aren’t terrible human beings” has quickly become a trigger for exclusivity, gate-keeping, and homogeneity. Here are my thoughts on how things got out of hand with this hiring practice.
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Retro computing Going back to the roots of your field can provide new insights into your day to day experience. For me, the roots are located in the 70s / 80s a time when personal computers were much simpler and could be fully understood by a regular person. This is a time when the most popular computers were the Vic20, Apple II and later Commodore 64. These computers booted in less than a second to a raw basic prompt. To be clear....
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Retro computing Going back to the roots of your field can provide new insights into your day to day experience. For me, the roots are located in the 70s / 80s a time when personal computers were much simpler and could be fully understood by a regular person. This is a time when the most popular computers were the Vic20, Apple II and later Commodore 64. These computers booted in less than a second to a raw basic prompt. To be clear....
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WFH Day 350 It’s already the last day of a perfect month. Perfect in that sense that the month started with a Monday and ended adequately on a Sunday. :-) I mentioned in my post that I was about to create my sourdough starter. It was an experiment, and I failed it. I assume that I didn’t have the right place in my house with sufficient constant temperature (this house is so badly insulated :-|). It’s a wonder that I don’t have ice flow..
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Today, my Sunday long-reading list included New Yorker’s The Activists Who Embrace Nuclear Power by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow. Can nuclear power possibly be a viable solution for climate change? Twenty or even ten years ago, my answer would have been a big fat No. Today? Not so sure anymore. Today, the looming disruptions of climate change have altered the risk calculus around nuclear energy. James Hansen, the NASA scientist credited with ..
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This post has been discussed on Hacker News , /r/rust , and lobste.rs . I should not have posted this to Hacker News on a Saturday night right before going to bed, but in my defense, this post blew up in a way I didn’t expect. Introduction There was a recent dust-up on GitHub surrounding the decision by the Cryptography library (which I will call cryptography for convenience) to switch to Rust . One of the distro maintainers..
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