I found a pretty nice explanation of Heartbleed for the layman in this XKCD comic. Heartbleed is a recent and alarming vulnerability found in the OpenSSL toolkit that serves most of the application/websites today. To quote Schneier:
"Catastrophic" is the right word. On the scale of 1 to 10, this is an 11.
Here's the comic:
And if you want to dig a bit more into it, you can read some more explanations on security.stackexchange.
..We're proud to welcome Dr. Condoleezza Rice to our Board of Directors. When looking to grow our board, we sought out a leader who could help us expand our global footprint. Dr. Rice has had an illustrious career as Provost of Stanford University, board member of companies like Hewlett Packard and Charles Schwab, and former United States Secretary of State. We’re honored to be adding someone as brilliant and accomplished as Dr. Rice to our team.
People are not happy with that news.
When I knew you at Stanford I had the greatest admiration for your abilities and good sense. But now I cannot help but express to you my chagrin that the warm feelings I once had have basically evaporated. I hope you can pause to try to understand why this might be the case.
Don Knuth's open letter to Condoleezza Rice
A message some users of Virwox received:
Hello,
here is what has happened:
Similar to other exchanges, our servers are protected from DDOS-attacks by an external service provider. While our own servers themselves were not vulnerable to the "Heartbleed" attack, the proxy servers of the DDOS provider were. They have fixed the problem already and we have turned on the service again.
The good news is that our own server was NOT hacked, and none of our secrets or bitcoins were stolen. However, the attacker was able to get to the session cookies of in total 20 users who were logged in yesterday (between about 8am and 11am), and used this to try to withdraw the money they had in their account in the form of bitcoins.
They don't say how much loss they have suffered, but they have reimbursed the victims.
My blog
posted April 2014
I wanted to learn Python, so a few months ago (I forgot to post about it here!) I redid my old blog in Django.
It's way different than PHP but it was a lot of fun :) I love learning different technologies. You can check it out here but be careful, it's in french!
Here's a list of what I want to learn right now:
- QT with C++
- Unity
- Android applications
Brackets
posted April 2014
I recently advised a colleague to try Brackets since he's learning html, css, etc...
But I've never really used it myself for a project. I've tried it, found it really cool, but never had a chance to start a project with it yet.
As I was trying to convince my colleague to give it a try I ran into this cool video from Jeffrey Way the guy who made Tutsplus (and the amazing sublime text tutorial)
Check it out!
There's a few reasons for this. First, the Tarsnap client-server protocol does not use TLS
I was also lucky: The Tarsnap webserver happens to be running an older version of OpenSSL which never had the vulnerable code
http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2014-04-09-tarsnap-no-heartbleed-here.html
For those who are curious about the protocol that Tarsnap uses : it's explained here
So, I've learned about Fourier every year in my bachelor of Mathematics and I'm learning about the efficient algorithm dealing with the Fourier Transform in my class of Algebra right now.
I found a really nice video explaining really quick what it is, concretely.
Here's wikipedia way of showing that 
made by LucasVB, this crazy guy doing all those math gifs you've probably seen before :) more here
There's also a visualization in d3.js here: http://bl.ocks.org/jinroh/7524988
I remember reading about how the newly facebook chat was made using long pollings, years ago. Now with HTML5 with have sockets and webhooks made easy. I wonder if they're still using long polling now...
Anyway, Zapier. A start up that is making APIs easy, is writing a lot of interesting tutorials these last few months. Their new Chapter 7 was released and it's about polling and web hooks. And as usual it's great!
https://zapier.com/learn/apis/chapter-7-real-time-communication
