Articles

Not that many articles this month. I have been reading a lot of books.

The Rise and Fall of 3M’s Floppy Disk

A very interesting chronicle of 3Ms floppy disk business. It also touches on the history of the floppy disk, and its legacy. A bit nostalgic but still fun to read.

xz/liblzma: Bash-stage Obfuscation Explained

This title may not mean anything to you who didn’t follow the 2024 Easter mystery of the xz backdoor. A backdoor was discovered by Anders Freund OpenSSH. OpenSHH kind of underpins the entire internet, and is how developers and sysadmins connect to servers remotely (among other things). Read this explainer on how the backdoor was added to the xz-codebase. It is very interesting. We still don’t know much about how the actual backdoor works, only how it got sneaked into xz. A lot of very smart people are working on reverse engineering the backdoor as we speak.

Ars Technica has a a more general article about the backdoor.

Books

The Will of the Many

A colleague recommended this book to me. The book has a unique and controversial magic system, and is set in a world inspired by roman culture. It is pretty unique fantasy book. The characters are very deep and interesting, and there is so much tension and mystery throughout the book. The book is from a single persons point of view, which makes the story easier to follow, and maintains a lot of the mystery. I am really looking forward to reading the rest of the series as it becomes available.

The Lost Metal

I started this just recently and am about half way through. It is part of one of my favorite series, The Mistborn Saga by Brandon Sanderson. I guess I missed the release of this book as I was busy reading something else, but the book is very classic Sanderson, and thus very good.