Weekly breakdown – 22w32d1

Programming

https://nnethercote.github.io/2022/07/27/twenty-years-of-valgrind.html

For the ones writing low-level and/or in ‘unsafe’ languages, Valgrind is one of the tool suites to use regularly.

Linked text from one of the creators of Valgrind provides brief of its interesting history, and more importantly, links to high quality papers describing how Valgrind actually works under the hood and is able to to what it does.

Note that Valgrind is not the only good tool that Nicholas and Julian have made.

Security

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/07/researchers-unpack-unkillable-uefi-rootkit-that-survives-os-reinstalls/

This is expected development since obfuscation-as-a-security method failed spectacularly in hack of Intel Management Engine in the motherboard chip-sets.

News

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-25/porsches-postponed-by-buggy-software-cost-vw-s-ceo-his-job

One of the first big names in car industry to be ‘eaten’ by software.

As all modern car manufacturers are moving to become software first company, they are also learning hard lessons that:

Current state of software engineering is less engineering and more craftsmanship, with all its implications on quality, planning, timelines and ‘manufacturing’.

The software craftsmanship is a separate topic for another day 🙂