Webtagr - Technology News Summarizer

Heap Overflow Vulnerability: A Potential System Catastrophe

2025-03-26

A critical heap overflow vulnerability has been discovered, potentially leading to system crashes or remote takeover. An attacker can use a tool called 'random-tool' to cause memory corruption in the 'atop' program on a target system, resulting in 'Segmentation fault' or other fatal errors. Worse, if the target user has root privileges, the attacker gains complete control. The author urges users to stop running the tool to prevent potential risks.

(rachelbythebay.com)

Development

The Curious Case of the Noisy 1670 Modem

2025-03-06

While testing a pair of VIC-20s connected via 1670 modems, the author discovered a peculiar noise emitted by the modems in dial mode. This noise isn't pulse dialing, nor is it a hardware malfunction; both modems, and one used back in 1988, exhibit the same behavior. The noise is a regular "pa-tink" sound occurring every 1.2 seconds. The author suspects the noise originates from the modem's local speaker, but hasn't determined if it's transmitted over the line. It remains an unsolved mystery, though functionally inconsequential.

(rachelbythebay.com)

Hardware modem noise

The Facebook 2014 Outage: Why 'War Rooms' Are Bad for Deep Investigation

2025-02-23

The author recounts the epic Facebook outage of August 1st, 2014, dubbed "Call the Cops." Working in a cramped, overheated 'war room', the author found it impossible to effectively troubleshoot the root cause. He ultimately retreated to his own comfortable workspace. After 18 days of investigation, he pinpointed the problem: a process called 'fbagent' incorrectly sent a termination signal to all processes, leading to system failure. This experience highlights the importance of providing a suitable personal work environment during emergencies and emphasizes the value of in-depth investigation over rapid fixes.

(rachelbythebay.com)

Tech Facebook Outage System Troubleshooting War Room

Smoothly Handling Leap Seconds: A Company-Wide 'Time Deception'

2025-01-12

In 2015, the author's company faced the risk of system crashes due to a leap second. To avoid a repeat of past failures, the author cleverly designed a 'time deception' system. Over 20 hours before the leap second, the system slowly adjusted the time on all company devices, making them one second behind world standard time, thus smoothly navigating the leap second. This process required precise calculation of time offsets and multiple tests, ultimately preventing system failures. This demonstrates the author's superior technical skills and creative problem-solving abilities.

(rachelbythebay.com)

Tech leap second system maintenance

Stubborn Feed Readers Bring Down Website

2024-12-22

A blogger experienced website unavailability, tracing it not to carriers or hosting, but to misbehaving feed reader software. These readers ignore best practices, sending unconditional requests and ignoring 429 errors (too many requests), ultimately causing the server to defensively shut down. The blogger resorted to a blog post urging users to check their feed readers, offering a tool called "Feed Reader Score" to analyze reader behavior and resolve the issue.

(rachelbythebay.com)

Development Feed reader server error website maintenance