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Microsoft's bug bounty program
Pascal Cuoq on 19 June 2013

I like Robert Graham's analysis on Microsoft's new bug bounty program. I would never have thought of selling vulnerabilities to the NSA (but then I am not American and not a security researcher). Does the NSA not employ qualified people to look for vulnerabilities as their day job? Is that...

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Attack by Compiler
Pascal Cuoq on 20 May 2013

The title of this post, “Attack by Compiler”, has been at the back of my mind for several weeks. It started with a comment by jduck on a post earlier this year. The post's topic, the practical undefinedness of reading from uninitialized memory, and jduck's comment, awakened memories from a...

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Contrarianism
Pascal Cuoq on 14 May 2013

If I told you that when n is a positive power of two and d an arbitrary number, both represented as double, the condition (n - 1) * d + d == n * d in strictly-IEEE-754-implementing C is always true, would you start looking for a counter-example, or start...

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Big round numbers, and a book review
Pascal Cuoq on 11 May 2013

Nearly 15 months ago, according to a past article, this blog celebrated its 15-month anniversary, and celebrated with the announcement of minor milestones having been reached: 100 articles and 50 comments. Fifteen months after that, the current count is nearly 200 articles and 200 comments. Also, the blog managed to...

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A 63-bit floating-point type for 64-bit OCaml
Pascal Cuoq on 9 May 2013

The OCaml runtime The OCaml runtime allows polymorphism through the uniform representation of types. Every OCaml value is represented as a single word, so that it is possible to have a single implementation for, say, “list of things”, with functions to access (e.g. List.length) and build (e.g. List.map) these lists...

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