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I was watching a video by John Higgins this morning about the poem in Ecclesiastes 3, one of the most famous passages in the Bible. There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and […]

The post Deliberate imperfection first appeared on John D. Cook.

It was 52 years ago this month, in October 1974, that Creative Computing, one of the greatest computer magazines of the 1970s and 1980s, made its debut. Origins at Digital Equipment Corporation Competing with Byte magazine was tough, even though

The post Creative Computing launched October 1974 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

eMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise

This is very, very bad news:

The private keys of eight eMudhra intermediate CA certificates have been compromised. They chain to roots trusted by the Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple and Chrome root programs and by many downstream trust stores.

Any software that bundles a list of trusted certificates needs to be updated. This site is tracking software updates via this GitHub repository - Linux distros need to update their ca-certificates packages.

In Python world uv 0.13.4 and pip 26.2.2 and certifi 2026.10.19 have been released with upgraded certificate lists.

Tags: encryption, https, pip, python, security, uv

My latest vibe coded game experiment is a Command & Conquer style RTS (Real Time Strategy) game called Battle Drones (play it here). Unlike my previous experiments, this one is actually fun to play. I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that I got there by telling Claude to ...

A recent piece on “forever domains” sparked bigger questions about permanence online: when domain owners die out, do we need new systems that don't rely on domains at all?

It’s time to install an app! But here in 1986, we still call them “programs,” not apps. So, you’ll want to set aside some time to get started installing a program. Since you have a Commodore 64, there are really only two options for getting new programs this month: COMPUTE!’...

Today's links The death of history's most successful publisher: Google has a scorching case of "main character syndrome." Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Civil War x 4,400 ceramic cats; Okaysellers; Frankenstein hat; Clockwork Fagin; Tracking track...

This is a charming and funny book all about the various ways humans have promoted fake medical cures in exchange for money. Despite the grim (and occasionally distressing) subject matter, the tone remains light and poppy throughout. There are lots of snarky asides (especially about the fake medical practitioners) and a real appreciation for the bizarre. It's fun the whole way through, although …

Something funny happened a little while ago: I read about FreshRSS, and it sounded nice, so I installed it on a server and started using it. That would not have happened a year ago, but then again, a year ago I didn’t have any NixOS servers. For the past few years, my ...

Epyx was one of the most celebrated and prolific software publishers for 8-bit home computers, especially Atari and Commodore, and, to a lesser degree, Apple. But they struggled to transition to newer platforms and that ultimately led to bankruptcy, on

The post What happened to Epyx appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

For the past couple of weeks, you could get my latest book — The Secret Life of Circuits — directly from the publisher.

An interrupt is not a fault.

The post Why do we need <CODE>ud2</CODE> when <CODE>int 6</CODE> is right there? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Have you heard the good news? I bemoaned the approach of putting an icon in every menu item by default which shipped with macOS Tahoe — but now it’s gone in Golden Gate! John Gruber wrote about this reversion back in June, including the fact that Apple’s new Human Interface ...

My obituary for programming Jeremy Scheff poignantly captures the key loss caused by coding agents for career programmers who enjoyed the puzzle of developing code: Programming turned into one of the greatest jobs you could imagine. You got paid to work on tricky little log...

Some people think that LLMs should not be used in technical fields like programming or mathematics, because those fields are actually art. True or not, this kind of argument is not going to be persuasive to the general population. The argument goes something1 like this: It ...

Splitting N! into N factors is trivial. It’s defined as the product of N integers, the integers 1 through N. Can you still split N! into N factors if you put a minimum size requirement on the factors? You can’t split 3! into three factors unless one of the factors is 1, but you can split 4! into factors ≥ 2: 4! […]

The post Refactoring factorials first appeared on John D. Cook.

U.S. federal investigators pursuing the ShinyHunters hacking group that recently stole highly sensitive data from the FBI have identified executives at two different ransomware negotiation firms who maintained unusually close relations with the extortion group, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Sources close to the investigation say one of the executives in the United States even helped ShinyHunters operate a website that pressured victims into paying a ransom.

Announcing a Lean Educators Conference. Teaching Lean in the Age of AI. November 18-19th at K&S Ranch, California. When AI hit our spring Lean Launchpad for Deep Tech class, our teaching team was unprepared for the impact it made on the class. What I didn’t realize was that other Lean educators (Hacking for Defense, NSF […]

Many words can be spelled by stringing together chemical symbols. For example, sarcasm can be written S Ar Ca Sm using the symbols for sulfur, argon, calcium, and samarium. How would you write a program to determine whether a word can be written by stringing together chemical element abbreviations ignoring case? Obviously this isn’t a […]

The post A frivolous problem with a deeper lesson first appeared on John D. Cook.

There are two ways to look at the question of who bought Gateway computers. Who bought the company, and who bought the computers. Gateway’s computers didn’t have the best reputation, but people loved the company until they didn’t. Gateway fell

The post Who bought Gateway computers? appeared first on The Silicon Underground.