Wednesday 16 October 2019

really simple syndication

A contributing author, Jamie Zawinski, refers us to a collection of nominations from scientists, historians, programmers and journalists for the most consequential pieces of code, which affects and informs society as much as any custom, convention or creation, though more aloof by design with few able to incant such spells.  
Though not exhaustive, the list and associated stories are pretty comprehensive and cover the classic milestones (often taken for granted) starting with the invention of the programmable loom in the early eighteenth century to JPEGs, GeoCities, RSS feeds, wikis and a whole host of viruses. One rather elegant vector we’re introduced to is the recursive single line of code (pictured) that is called a fork bomb or a wabbit for its prolific nature. This string of instruction (these are not the magic words, please don’t type them) launches a denial-of-service attack by repeating itself until all system resources have been taken up.