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Yes, the modifications you need to support it are trivially obvious (literally just replace “4 bytes” with “8 bytes” everywhere in the spec) and have been implemented by a number of authors, some of which this page links to. I guess it’s nice that they’ve been “officially” acknowledged, though.

And update the hash algorithm, yes?

In answer to my own question, no, except for the trivial expansion to 64-bits. https://cdb.cr.yp.to/cdb-20251021/cdb_hash.c.html with constants at https://cdb.cr.yp.to/cdb-20251021/cdb.h.html .

CDB is an interesting format, optimized for read-heavy write-rarely[1] random lookups on slow media. This isn’t a very common requirement these days, but it’s convenient for very specific use cases.

[1] You “update” by overwriting the entire file. This is remarkably fast and means that there’s no overhead/tracking for empty space, but it does mean you probably want this to be a fairly rare operation.

I rolled my own cdb reader library for a project a few years ago, and wrote up my notes on the format and its internals here: https://search.feep.dev/blog/post/2022-12-03-cdb-file-format


We have no idea whether the signal had a pattern because the only recording we have of it consists of averages over 10-second samples, so any modulation <10s (or patterns larger than the 72s recording) would have been lost. It could have been an AM broadcast of a herd of circus elephants playing the William Tell Overture for all we know.


True. That's why I hedged with "seems to". Our only measurement of it is consistent with it being a single pulse


No they really are trying to enumerate all 230 billion possible shortlinks; that’s why they need so many people to help crawl everything.


Got a source? I don’t see details one way or another


From the article:

> there are about 230 billion* links that need visiting

> * Thanks to arkiver on the Archive Team IRC for correcting this number.

Also when running the Warrior project you could see it iterating through the range. I don't have any logs handy since the project is finished but they looked a bit like

  https://goo.gl/gEdpoS: 404 Not Found
  https://goo.gl/gEdpoT: 404 Not Found
  https://goo.gl/gEdpoU: 302 Found -> https://...
  https://goo.gl/gEdpoV: 404 Not Found


I know puns are considered the lowest form of humor, but I still appreciate the occasional bit of levity to lighten the mood in serious discussions.


Gee sometimes it's hard to know what's going to be considered egregious vs whimsical by this community! I've taken off the penalties.


All good and sorry. I get that there is a risk of this board turning into Reddit if too many whimsy/joke comments are permitted. It would indeed be bad if that happened. I'll be more watchful with my posts in the future.


I think what you want is to just make a function and pass it the values:

  const template = ({name}) => `hello ${name}`;
  const n1 = template({ name: 'joe' });
(Tagged templates won’t help here because the bit in curly braces is an expression which is evaluated to a value first; you’d need some kind of macro system to get access to the original variable name at runtime.)


The judge’s report[1] lists twenty-eight different classes of failure, including:

- Confusing and buggy UI causing clerks to duplicate or mis-enter transactions

- Inventory getting “stuck” in branches after the product was discontinued; the attempt to remove it hid the inventory but caused its value to reappear on the books again each accounting period

- Failing touch screens entering spurious purchases overnight

- Incomplete rollback of distributed transactions

- Byzantine failures during hardware replacement causing multiple transactions to be assigned the same ID and overwrite each other

- Fujitsu employees with unaudited write access to the production database making one-off modifications

- The point of sale system simply telling the clerk to give too much change back to the customer

There’s no “one bug” here; the main failure was that those responsible continued to dismiss any problems as users being either in error or outright malicious, despite massive amounts of evidence that the system had technical flaws. Better quality software would have reduced the problems, but no system is bug-free and in many cases very little effort was made to identify the root causes of problems, much less to prevent similar ones from happening again.

[1] https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/bates-v-...


Thanks


Expecting Friends Journal to explain quakers is like wanting the IETF to tell you what a computer is; the target audience for this article are people who are way beyond needing an introduction to the topic, though of course on the Internet articles can end up in unexpected places.

A brief and reductive explanation: The Religious Society of Friends (colloquially “Quakers”) are a religious movement (nominally Christian, in practice often agnostic) which originated in England circa 1650. A core part of the theology is that God might speak to anyone, so worship generally consists of sitting around in silence until someone hears from Him and stands up to repeat the message, hence why the article is drawing parallels between that practice and Zen Buddhism.


You might be thinking of Mormons? I’ve never heard of the CIA recruiting Quakers and I don’t think it would go particularly well if they did.


No. I mean Quakers. Their global humanitarian work and connections to communists and socialists the world over made them particularly interesting to the CIA. The CIA has directly used and manipulated Quakers for these purposes. This was especially true during the Cold War.

The majority of people "recruited" by the CIA are used for information or for their specific field of expertise.

A forgotten history I guess.


For whatever it’s worth, zeekstd seems to come with a CLI tool: https://github.com/rorosen/zeekstd/tree/main/cli


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