Quake's shareware CD contained the games you still had to buy
In 1996, unused CD capacity became a local software store: the payload was already on the disc, while a phone call sold permission to unlock it. The trust boundary was the fragile part.
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Tech · page 13
IRZ Tech archive, page 13.
A carefully sized hole can become a tiny engine
At EPFL, tuned cavities convert external sound into an air jet. The motor is not simply miniaturized: part of the machine is moved into its environment.
No supplier would tool up for this C‑17 part. So the factory became the inventory
A nose panel no supplier wanted to tool up for could have grounded a C‑17 for years. The Air Force formed one without a dedicated die, pointing to a different model for keeping old machines alive.
Select the words, cut the matching audio
Vocal Slice transcribes a voice recording on your machine, then lets you cut the audio by selecting text in the transcript. The waveform stops being the timeline; the words become it.
A website can describe you before you click: the quiet machinery of fingerprinting
A single page can build a detailed profile of your browser before you click anything — no cookie, no permission, no consent dialog. The banner is the visible part; fingerprinting is the part that survived it.
A Nokia DCT3 emulator boots real firmware without patching it
The DCT3 project models the chips, display, SIM and even a synthetic GSM network. Nokia firmware is neither bundled nor patched: users bring their own .fls image.
Two lasers reheat each FDM layer before the next one arrives
An experimental toolhead reheats the previous layer just before the nozzle arrives. In the creator’s tests, ABS reached up to 94% of the strength measured in the other orientation.
The Famicom modem survived. Its network had to be rebuilt around it
The 1988 hardware still works. Giving it something to talk to required a new flash card, two CPUs worth of reverse engineering, a simulated phone line and a replacement for a vanished server.
PyPI can prove where a package came from. Not yet that it matches the source code
A study of 12,180 PyPI releases shows why provenance, byte-for-byte identity and build equivalence answer three different trust questions.
On embedded Linux, logs are memory you have to design before failure
A deployed device cannot record everything. Its logging system must decide in advance which evidence will survive the next incident.