https://suricrasia.online/iceberg/

The Cursed Computer Iceberg Meme

this is not a hall of shame.
the intent is to awaken you to many of the peculiarities and
weirdness of computers.
hopefully, after reading these articles, you will have learned a lot
and will embrace chaos.

Blackle Mori (@suricrasia) - 2021

Above the iceberg

  * y2k
  * brainfuck
  * Little Bobby Tables
  * TCP/IP over carrier pigeon
  * year 2038 bug
  * spectre/meltdown
  * ternary operator
  * md5 rainbow tables
  * DOOM on a toaster
  * self-modifying code
  * undefined behaviour
  * hungarian notation
  * emoji variables
  * tracking pixels
  * heisenbugs
  * perl golf
  * parsing XML with a regex
  * tar bomb
  * all web browsers pretend to be each other
  * sidechannel attacks
  * rowhammer
  * bogosort
  * sleepsort

On the iceberg

  * typeof(NaN) === "number"
  * quines
  * javascript was designed in 10 days
  * unintentionally Turing complete languages
  * :(){ :|:& };:
  * human gene renaming due to MS Excel
  * numbers that start with zero are interpreted as octal
  * hardware backdoors
  * Falsehoods programmers believe about time
  * manual loop unrolling
  * the Sony BMG rootkit
  * ping of death
  * no computers are turing complete because memory is finite
  * fonts can be malicious
  * Intel Management Engine
  * the 500 mile email
  * fast inverse square root
  * the "Wat" talk
  * "a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors"
  * self-hosting languages
  * total_hours_wasted_here = 42

Below the water

  * X5O!P%@AP[4\\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!
    $H+H*\n
  * /usr/bin/[
  * the FDIV and F00F bugs
  * magic the gathering is Turing complete
  * smart cards run Java
  * c++ templates are Turing complete
  * "lp0 is on fire"
  * PHP's fractal of bad design
  * SVG supports JavaScript
  * array[i] == i[array]
  * rm -rf $STEAM_ROOT/
  * Postscript and PDF are Turing complete
  * illegal numbers
  * reflections on trusting trust
  * INTERCAL
  * polyglot programs
  * Powerpoint is Turing complete
  * cold boot attack
  * zero-knowledge proof
  * malbolge
  * Van Eck phreaking
  * CAP theorem
  * etherkiller
  * null island

Middle of the iceberg

  * font hinting is Turing complete
  * Therac-25
  * adversarial patches
  * x86 mov is Turing complete
  * FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8
  * PDP-10 "more magic" switch
  * Duff's device
  * Tony Hoare's billion dollar mistake
  * Super Mario Flappy Bird
  * are floats for money really that bad?
  * "Thank you for playing Wing Commander!"
  * OpenOffice does not print on Tuesdays
  * square waves do not exist
  * program code can be read by hand off decapped chips
  * 42.zip
  * most cpu instructions are unused by compilers
  * COMEFROM
  * c trigraphs
  * ADSL over wet string
  * Aphyr's technical interviews
  * gps week rollover
  * "das ist ein Game-Boy Advance..."

Bottom of the iceberg

  * no elegant solution to FizzBuzz exists
  * Actually Portable Executable
  * ouroboros programs
  * soviet ternary computers
  * SQL raytracer
  * The Story of Mel
  * return to libc attack
  * tainted canvases
  * SIGBOVIK
  * billion laughs attack
  * "You fool. You absolute, unmitigated, unadulterated, complete and
    utter, fool."
  * Dual_EC_DRBG
  * javascript's father, son, and holy spirit
  * reverse indentation
  * killer poke
  * YAML vs Norway
  * HTTP referer header typo
  * Wikimedia flower DDOS
  * "The Birth and Death of JavaScript" predicted the future
  * python number redefinition
  * non-local goto
  * The Basilisk Collection

Below the iceberg

  * SAT solvers keep getting faster
  * perl parsing is undecidable
  * Jsfuck
  * void *alloca(size_t size);
  * x86 instruction set is unbounded
  * chucknorris is an HTML color
  * TIMTOWTDI
  * fractional bits
  * CMake raytracer
  * nasal demons
  * "samy is my hero"
  * the Effective Power bug
  * cross-language string escaping
  * MicroSD cards are Turing complete
  * no-knowledge proof
  * isUserAMonkey();
  * EVE Online vs boot.ini
  * RAID write hole
  * page fault handling is Turing complete
  * weird machine
  * black dot of death
  * POPCNT: the NSA instruction

Deep water

  * GPS chip maximum speed
  * radiation hardened quines
  * sandsifter
  * 00000000000000000021e800c1e8df51b22c1588e5a624bea17e9faa34b2dc4a
  * Spyro YOTD is booby-trapped
  * Jazelle DBX
  * HotJava
  * all build systems have a bug with unicode BOM
  * airplane ticket mainframe pointers
  * NSA ANT catalog
  * exploiting linux with 6502 assembly on the NES
  * GIFARs
  * diverse double compiling
  * Wii sensor bar LOLSERIAL
  * FJCVTZS
  * the scary devil monastery
  * 8 and 9 were valid octal digits in pre-ANSI C
  * radioactive chip packaging materials
  * witchcraft compiler collection
  * kleptography
  * "Moving online webserver using public transport"
  * Crash Bandicoot quantum corruption
  * GIF MD5 hashquine

The abyss

  * unicode on punch cards
  * .fr-016c: fuenf (in your face)
  * Coding Machines
  * Mario Wolczko's unix recovery
  * WebMIDI permits arbitrary code execution
  * "I no longer trust the constants."
  * The Bitter Lesson
  * infinite loop inlining bug
  * Bedlam3
  * Alexander Rhatushnyak broke Kolmogorov complexity and won 8000
    euros
  * ClueBot NG's emergency stop button
  * The Infamous Japanese Postal CSV
  * Orson Welles' in-band signaling attack
  * C64 Safe VSP
  * USERSEEUSERDO
  * Adrian Thomson's primordial silicon
  * BANCstar
  * lost FOCAL interpreter
  * Toby Ord's "Complete Turing Machine"
  * GCJ-02
  * "The single most useful macro in Praat"
  * if your computer bug isn't a moth jammed in a relay, it's not a
    bug. it's just a sparkling error.
  * computers are flattened sand with lightning inside


Additional Cursed Content

Supplemental Bathysphere #1 (February 2022)

  * Lies, damned lies, and scans
  * wtfjs
  * Minesweeper logic gates
  * preprocessor_fun
  * left-pad
  * The DAO
  * The FORTRAN-hating gateway
  * stuxnet
  * Producing Wrong Data Without Doing Anything Obviously Wrong!
  * argc == 0
  * ambiguous PNGs
  * Binary Banshees and Digital Demons
  * Linux in a pixel shader
  * ambiguous URLs
  * Explaining the Entombed Algorithm
  * Arbitrary Code Execution in the Universal Turing Machine
  * ace w/ fopen
  * ubuntu's surprisingly innocuous compiler bug
  * c++ "-->" operator
  * A Turing Machine whose behavior is independent of ZFC
  * radr://5614542
  * exact reals converge to 6, floats converge to 100
  * programming down on bare metal / head crash radio


Supplemental Bathysphere #2 (June 2022)

  * Lace card
  * Cursed computer memory hierarchy
  * The wrong error message
  * Hertzbleed
  * strfry
  * main is usually a function
  * The C++ Iceberg
  * sinkhole
  * The Apple GPU and the Impossible Bug
  * Black Sunday Kill
  * Array.prototype.contains
  * Polyglots
  * 80 columns
  * the liminal space between fork and exec
  * unexec
  * 1900 is a leap year
  * Escaping HTML
  * Mr Self Destruct
  * The most vexing parse
  * set_trace_func
  * aux.h
  * C Integers Quiz