How to Spot a Counterfeit Lithium-Ion Battery
5 min read Andrew Moseman is the online communications editor at Caltech and a freelance contributor to IEEE Spectrum. Cylindrical lithium-ion batteries for small, inexpensive devices are increasingly turning up counterfeit. As an auditor of battery manufacturers around the world, University of Maryland mechanical engineer Michael Pecht frequently finds himself touring spotless production floors. They’re […]
Windows ARM64 Internals: Deconstructing Pointer Authentication
Pointer Authentication Code, or PAC, is an anti-exploit/memory-corruption feature that signs pointers so their use (as code or data) can be validated at runtime. PAC is available on Armv8.3-A and Armv9.0-A (and later) ARM architectures and leverages virtual addressing in order to store a small cryptographic signature alongside the pointer value. On a typical 64-bit […]
A Reverse Engineer’s Anatomy of the macOS Boot Chain and Security Architecture
1.0 The Silicon Root of Trust: Pre-Boot & Hardware Primitives The security of the macOS platform on Apple Silicon is not defined by the kernel; it is defined by the physics of the die. Before the first instruction of kernelcache is fetched, a complex, cryptographic ballet has already concluded within the Application Processor (AP). This […]
Show HN: Build the habit of writing meaningful commit messages
smartcommit is an intelligent, AI-powered CLI tool that helps you write semantic, Conventional Commits messages effortlessly. It analyzes your staged changes, asks clarifying questions to understand the “why” behind your code, and generates a structured commit message for you. Future you will thank you for deciding to use smartcommit! AI-Powered Analysis: Automatically analyzes your staged […]
The Mozilla Cycle, Part III: Mozilla Dies in Ignominy
I owe Mozilla a thank-you. Really, I do. Maybe an Edible Arrangement? People like those. Some lil pineapples cut into stars on sticks and chocolate strawberries might brighten their day. For the note, I’m thinking something like: Thank you for proving me exactly right. XOXO MT Eight months ago, in the fallout of Mozilla’s fumbling […]
A Woman on a Mission to Photograph Every Species of Hummingbird
Seven years ago, anesthesiologist and budding photographer Carole Turek embarked on a seemingly impossible quest to photograph every hummingbird species in the world—all 366 of them. Now 75 years old and entering retirement, Turek has just 90 species left on her list. And what began as a personal obsession has garnered the attention and praise […]
Markdown Is Holding You Back
I’ve used many content formats over the years, and while I love Markdown, I run into its limitations daily when I work on larger documentation projects. In this issue, you’ll look at Markdown and explore why it might not be the best fit for technical content, and what else might work instead. Markdown is everywhere. […]
Depot (YC W23) Is Hiring a Staff Infrastructure Engineer
At Depot, we are on a mission to redefine software collaboration and accelerate developers everywhere. We are creating a build performance and developer platform unlike any other, combining performance, empathy, and centralized collaboration to enable companies to iterate exponentially faster. We launch millions of EC2 instances per month and orchestrate half a petabyte of cache […]
China reaches energy milestone by “breeding” uranium from thorium
An experimental reactor developed in the Gobi Desert by the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics has achieved thorium-to-uranium fuel conversion, paving the way for an almost endless supply of nuclear energy. Advertisement The achievement makes the 2 megawatt liquid-fuelled thorium-based molten salt reactor (TMSR) the only operating example of the technology […]
Gwern’s “Stem Humor” Directory
Annotations sorted by machine learning into inferred ‘tags’. This provides an alternative way to browse: instead of by date order, one can browse in topic order. The ‘sorted’ list has been automatically clustered into multiple sections & auto-labeled for easier browsing. Beginning with the newest annotation, it uses the embedding of each annotation to attempt […]