Stories about: Xor

In the 19th century, British mathematician Charles Babbage invented the "difference engine," a mechanical computer that had an enormously complex arrangement of levers, ratchets and gears. Had this prototypical chunk of steampunk machinery ever been completely built, it would have weighed several tons.

It was 1996, the bandwidth between Australia and the rest of the world was miserable, and Andrew Tridgell had a problem. He wanted to synchronize source code located in Australia with source code on machines around the world, but sending patches was annoying and error-prone, and just sending all the files was painfully slow. Most people would have just waited a few years for trans-Pacific bandwidth to improve; instead Tridgell wrote rsync, the first known instance of content-based addressing (also known as content-addressed storage, or compare-by-hash), an innovation which eventually spread to software like BitTorrent, git, and many document storage products on the market.

A Trojan has been discovered that attempts to evade detection by sending stolen data back to its criminal creators using the ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) back channel.

Despite losing significant funding support from the US Department of Defense for its research and development, the OpenBSD Project has pushed ahead with the release of version 3.3 of its open source software, boasting of new features and improvements across almost all of the operating system.