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Topic Review
Solar Symbol
A solar symbol is a symbol representing the Sun. Common solar symbols include circles (with or without rays), crosses, and spirals. In religious iconography, personifications of the Sun or solar attributes are often indicated by means of a halo or a radiate crown. When the systematic study of comparative mythology first became popular in the 19th century, scholarly opinion tended to over-interpret historical myths and iconography in terms of "solar symbolism". This was especially the case with Max Müller and his followers beginning in the 1860s in the context of Indo-European studies. Many "solar symbols" claimed in the 19th century, such as the swastika, triskele, Sun cross, etc. have tended to be interpreted more conservatively in scholarship since the later 20th century.
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  • 25 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Foreshadow (Security Vulnerability)
Foreshadow (known as L1 Terminal Fault (L1TF) by Intel) is a vulnerability that affects modern microprocessors that was first discovered by two independent teams of researchers in January 2018, but was first disclosed to the public on 14 August 2018. The vulnerability is a speculative execution attack on Intel processors that may result in the disclosure of sensitive information stored in personal computers and third-party clouds. There are two versions: the first version (original/Foreshadow) (CVE-2018-3615) targets data from SGX enclaves; and the second version (next-generation/Foreshadow-NG) (CVE-2018-3620 and CVE-2018-3646) targets virtual machines (VMs), hypervisors (VMM), operating systems (OS) kernel memory, and System Management Mode (SMM) memory. A listing of affected Intel hardware has been posted. Foreshadow is similar to the Spectre security vulnerabilities discovered earlier to affect Intel and AMD chips, and the Meltdown vulnerability that also affected Intel. However, AMD products, according to AMD, are not affected by the Foreshadow security flaws. According to one expert, " lets malicious software break into secure areas that even the Spectre and Meltdown flaws couldn't crack". Nonetheless, one of the variants of Foreshadow goes beyond Intel chips with SGX technology, and affects "all [Intel] Core processors built over the last seven years". Foreshadow may be very difficult to exploit, and there seems to be no evidence to date (15 August 2018) of any serious hacking involving the Foreshadow vulnerabilities. Nevertheless, applying software patches may help alleviate some concern, although the balance between security and performance may be a worthy consideration. Companies performing cloud computing may see a significant decrease in their overall computing power; individuals, however, may not likely see any performance impact, according to researchers. The real fix, according to Intel, is by replacing today's processors. Intel further states, "These changes begin with our next-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code-named Cascade Lake), as well as new client processors expected to launch later this year ." On 16 August 2018, researchers presented technical details of the Foreshadow security vulnerabilities in a seminar, and publication, entitled "Foreshadow: Extracting the Keys to the Intel SGX Kingdom with Transient Out-of-Order Execution" at a USENIX security conference.
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  • 25 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Forensic Identification
Forensic identification is the application of forensic science, or "forensics", and technology to identify specific objects from the trace evidence they leave, often at a crime scene or the scene of an accident. Forensic means "for the courts".
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Topic Review
MRCI (Microsoft)
DriveSpace (initially known as DoubleSpace) is a disk compression utility supplied with MS-DOS starting from version 6.0 in 1993 and ending in 2000 with the release of Windows Me. The purpose of DriveSpace is to increase the amount of data the user could store on disks by transparently compressing and decompressing data on-the-fly. It is primarily intended for use with hard drives, but use for floppy disks is also supported. This feature was removed in Windows XP and later.
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Topic Review
Sandcastle
Sandcastle is a documentation generator from Microsoft. It automatically produces MSDN-style code documentation out of reflection information of .NET assemblies and XML documentation comments found in the source code of these assemblies. It can also be used to produce user documentation from Microsoft Assistance Markup Language (MAML) with the same look and feel as reference documentation.
  • 536
  • 25 Oct 2022
Topic Review
International Obfuscated C Code Contest
The International Obfuscated C Code Contest (abbreviated IOCCC) is a computer programming contest for the most creatively obfuscated C code. Held annually, it is described as "celebrating [C's] syntactical opaqueness". The winning code for the 27th contest, held in 2020, was released in July 2020. Previous contests were held in the years 1984–1996, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2004–2006, 2011–2015 and 2018–2020. Entries are evaluated anonymously by a panel of judges. The judging process is documented in the competition guidelines and consists of elimination rounds. By tradition, no information is given about the total number of entries for each competition. Winning entries are awarded with a category, such as "Worst Abuse of the C preprocessor" or "Most Erratic Behavior", and then announced on the official IOCCC website. The contest states that being announced on the IOCCC website is the reward for winning.
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  • 25 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Internet Pornography
Internet pornography is any pornography that is accessible over the internet, primarily via websites, FTP servers peer-to-peer file sharing, or Usenet newsgroups. The availability of widespread public access to the World Wide Web in late 1990s led to the growth of internet pornography. A 2015 study finds "a big jump" in pornography viewing over the past few decades, with the largest increase occurring between people born in the 1970s and those born in the 1980s. While the study's authors note this increase is "smaller than conventional wisdom might predict," it's still quite significant. Those who were born in the 1980s onward are also the first to grow up in a world where they have access to the internet beginning in their teenage years, and this early exposure and access to internet pornography may be the primary driver of the increase. The sex and tech conference series Arse Elektronika dedicated their 2007 conference to what they call pr0nnovation. The con presented a keynote by culture theorist Mark Dery and published a reader about the subject. (As of 2018), a single company, MindGeek, owns and operates many popular pornographic websites, including video sharing services Pornhub, RedTube, and YouPorn, as well as adult film producers Brazzers, Digital Playground, Men.com, Reality Kings, and Sean Cody, among others, but does not own the websites xHamster and XVideos. It has been alleged to be a monopoly.
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  • 25 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication
The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), legally S.W.I.F.T. SCRL, provides a network that enables financial institutions worldwide to send and receive information about financial transactions in a secure, standardized and reliable environment. SWIFT also sells software and services to financial institutions, much of it for use on the SWIFTNet network, and ISO 9362 Business Identifier Codes (BICs, previously Bank Identifier Codes), popularly known as "SWIFT codes". As of 2018, around half of all high-value cross-border payments worldwide used the SWIFT network. (As of 2015), SWIFT linked more than 11,000 financial institutions in more than 200 countries and territories, who were exchanging an average of over 32 million messages per day (compared to an average of 2.4 million daily messages in 1995). SWIFT transports financial messages in a highly secure way but does not hold accounts for its members and does not perform any form of clearing or settlement. SWIFT does not facilitate funds transfer: rather, it sends payment orders, which must be settled by correspondent accounts that the institutions have with each other. Each financial institution, to exchange banking transactions, must have a banking relationship by either being a bank or affiliating itself with one (or more) so as to enjoy those particular business features. SWIFT has been criticized for its inefficiency, with the Financial Times observing in 2018 that transfers frequently "pass through multiple banks before reaching their final destination, making them time-consuming, costly and lacking transparency on how much money will arrive at the other end". SWIFT has introduced its own improved service, called "Global Payments Innovation" (GPI), stating that as of 2018 it had been adopted by 165 banks, and was completing half of its payments in under 30 minutes. SWIFT is a cooperative society under Belgian law owned by its member financial institutions with offices around the world. SWIFT's headquarters are in La Hulpe, Belgium, near Brussels. The main building was designed by Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura and completed in 1989. The chairman of SWIFT is Yawar Shah, originally from Pakistan , and its CEO, since July 2019, is Javier Pérez-Tasso, originally from Spain. SWIFT hosts an annual conference, called Sibos, specifically aimed at the financial services industry. SWIFT has at various times attracted controversy for enabling the US government to monitor and in some cases interfere with intra-European transactions. (See: U.S. government involvement.)
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Topic Review
Evolutionary Theory of the Self
When trying to understand the self in terms of the brain, neuroscientists have found contradictory results and paradoxes. Nevertheless, Gonzalo Munevar has argued that neuroscience in an evolutionary context can give a proper explanation of the self. His Evolutionary Theory of the Self depends on, “the ability by the brain to coordinate new sensory information in light of the organism’s internal states and in the context of its personal history and genetic inheritance." His theory is an alternative conception for the explanation of the self, which takes into account the evolutionary biology of the brain. Organisms that are highly complex execute the function of telling self from other with the brain and the immune system. To fulfill the function of recognizing self from other, the brain uses past experiences and genetic inheritance (e.g. survival, reproduction). The self is defined by these functions that distinguish an organisms from other organisms, which allow them to act as one whole entity in social and physical environments. Simply put, the theory revolves around the idea that the brain constitutes the self, which represents itself in a variety of internal states. The brain/self evolves for action to be able to interact with social and physical environments. It is suggested that the brain performs a complex list of tasks to complete these interactions to distinguish self from other. This defines the brain to be characteristically distributive to complete complex tasks, and thus suggests that the self is also distributive. Therefore, the Evolutionary Theory of the Self detours from the traditional conceptions that include the self being a centralized, unitary mechanism that is both conscious (sense of self) and compiled of a collection of episodic memories. Alternatively, it suggests that the conception of self is mostly unconscious, and the brain evolves from past experiences and genetic inheritance to create the evolutionary self. In Munevar’s study, “fMRI Study of Self vs. Others’ Attributions of Traits Consistent with Evolutionary Understanding of the Self,” he aimed to demonstrate the experimental feasibility of this conception of the self as a distributive system, and discovered results complimenting the Evolutionary Theory of the Self while resolving the contradictions and paradoxes of traditional conceptions of self.
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  • 25 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Phase Field Models
A phase field model is a mathematical model for solving interfacial problems. It has mainly been applied to solidification dynamics, but it has also been applied to other situations such as viscous fingering, fracture mechanics,, hydrogen embrittlement, and vesicle dynamics. The method substitutes boundary conditions at the interface by a partial differential equation for the evolution of an auxiliary field (the phase field) that takes the role of an order parameter. This phase field takes two distinct values (for instance +1 and −1) in each of the phases, with a smooth change between both values in the zone around the interface, which is then diffuse with a finite width. A discrete location of the interface may be defined as the collection of all points where the phase field takes a certain value (e.g., 0). A phase field model is usually constructed in such a way that in the limit of an infinitesimal interface width (the so-called sharp interface limit) the correct interfacial dynamics are recovered. This approach permits to solve the problem by integrating a set of partial differential equations for the whole system, thus avoiding the explicit treatment of the boundary conditions at the interface. Phase field models were first introduced by Fix and Langer, and have experienced a growing interest in solidification and other areas.
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