This paper from Mark Terrano and Paul Bettner explains the design architecture, implementation, and some of the lessons learned creating the multiplayer (networking) code for the Age of Empires 1 & 2 games; and discusses the current and future networking approaches used by Ensemble Studios in its game engines. https:

The French creative aesthetic has always been a bit different from that of English-speaking nations. In their paintings, films, even furniture, the French often discard the stodgy literalism that is so characteristic of Anglo art in favor of something more attenuated, where impression becomes more important than objective reality. A

A detailed discussion about how the ethereum community plans to reduce the load on validating nodes by asking nodes to only store a specific subset of the blockchain data (a shard), while ensuring the security of the system. In particular, it talks about the challenges of atomic transactions across shards.

In the next weeks I will do some hacking with Termux on my Android phone. E.g. run nodejs server on it. Exciting! Form the project's homepage: Termux is an Android terminal emulator and Linux environment app that works directly with no rooting or setup required. A minimal

Deep Neural Networks, especially Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), allows computational models that are composed of multiple processing layers to learn representations of data with multiple levels of abstraction. These methods have dramatically improved the state-of-the-arts in visual object recognition, object detection, text recognition and many other domains such as drug

The bitcoin community has been discussing the concept of the Lightning Network for a year now. It is often cited in scalability debates as a solution to bitcoin's limited transaction throughput capabilities. However, it's a complicated concept and several parts of the implementation are still theoretical

Despite closely following the news about Bitcoin, I learned something about it quite recently. It's about splitting the secret key in multiple pieces, so that at least several of those pieces are required to be able to spend the funds. For instance, a 3 of 5 wallet will

[The authors] made a Bitcoin Roller Coaster Mover Prototype using a Raspberry Pi. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/76c8v2/we_made_a_bitcoin_roller_coaster_mover_prototype/

(...) Back in the 2000s, Songza kicked off the online music curation scene using manual curation to create playlists for users. “Manual curation” meant that some team of “music experts” or other curators would put together playlists by hand that they thought sounded good, and then listeners would just listen to

[Yesterday], The Intercept released documents on election tampering from an NSA leaker. Later, the arrest warrant request for an NSA contractor named "Reality Winner" was published, showing how they tracked her down because she had printed out the documents and sent them to The Intercept. The document posted

If I understood correctly, the privacy messaging app Signal  configured itself to be reached after a HTTP redirection from Google  servers, encapsulated in HTTPS traffic. This is a nice workaround. So Egypt, to enforce the ban of Signal, should now either ban Google or Man-In-The-Middle Google's traffic in

This paper makes a first step in understanding a fundamental question of configuration design: "do users really need so many knobs?" To provide the quantitatively answer, we study the configuration settings of real-world users, including thousands of customers of a commercial storage system (Storage-A), and hundreds of users

Yesterday at the WWDC keynote, Apple announced a series of new security and privacy features, including one feature that’s drawn a bit of attention — and confusion. Specifically, Apple announced that they will be using a technique called “Differential Privacy [https://www.wired.com/2016/06/apples-differential-privacy-collecting-data/]” (henceforth: DP) to

Two months ago, I bought a new battery for my Lenovo laptop (a ThinkPad X230T). I was about to go away on holidays and wanted a battery that could last me through a plane flight; the original battery was by then barely lasting ten minutes. Little did I know that

Have you ever plugged your phone into a strange USB port because you really needed a charge and thought: "Gee who could be stealing my data?". We all have needs and sometimes you just need to charge your phone. "Any port in a storm" as the

Since June, researchers have found and reported several dozen serious flaws in antivirus products from vendors such as Kaspersky Lab, ESET, Avast, AVG Technologies, Intel Security (formerly McAfee) and Malwarebytes. Many of those vulnerabilities would have allowed attackers to remotely execute malicious code on computers, to abuse the functionality of