Four short links: 10 July 2020
CRDTs, Reverse Engineering Malware, GDPR, and A Whole Lot of Research
- Notes on Splicing CRDTs for Structured Hypertext — It’s a great feeling, seeing everyone around you create beautiful 3D graphical masterpieces or fully complete web applications while you spend twelve hours a day struggling to read technical papers that you don’t even understand. This is what happens when you attempt to do things with CRDTs.
- FinFisher Exposed — FinFisher is not afraid of using all kinds of tricks, ranging from junk instructions and “spaghetti code” to multiple layers of virtual machines and several known and lesser-known anti-debug and defensive measures. What a cunning piece of code this malware is! It has its own virtual machine, which means that typical reverse-engineering tools fail.
- GDPR Explained by People Who Attack It For Having What it Actually Has — Richard Stallman argues [against the GDPR] that laws must prohibit data collection if it is not necessary or not justified, and that systems must be designed not to collect certain data. That is why, since 1995, EU data protection law regulates not only data use, but also the collection of personal data.
- Evidence-Based Software Engineering Based on Publicly-Available Data — the first half discusses the major areas of software engineering, driven by an analysis of the publicly available data. The aim is to provide the information needed to reduce the resources needed to build and maintain software systems, and to make efficient use of available resources. Many topics usually covered in software engineering textbooks are not discussed because public data relating to them could not be located. I don’t know that it has that much to say on software engineering, but it’s a fascinating summary/tour of a whole lot of research in many interesting fields.
