Newcastle University Blogs

Here's an example of a monoidal structure used in the design of an elegant algebra for manipulating graphs (the network-of-nodes kind) https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/andreymokhov/an-algebra-of-graphs/ Representing graphs is a bit of a problem in Haskell, due to the difficulty of creating/working with cyclical structures, and the previous solutions were not really convincing. So in some ways this might be seen as a problem immutable data purists created for themselves. (Not my opinion) But, either way, the ability to reason about and derive algebraic models for some problem domain is worth pursuing in general. Mathematically structured software is a fast track to robust, reliable, verified solutions to problems. That's propaganda but there's a fair amount of support for it. An idea that comes up in functional programming that has a similar algebraic quality to monoids etc. is the notion of a type which contains only one value (usually called "Unit") and a type which contains no values ("Bottom" or _|_). The latter is described as "uninhabited" and is used, among other things, to usefully describe the type of a function which never returns. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottom_type Unit represents a value which is like a point in a space which contains only one point. It gets used to send signals with no content. For example, in predecessors of Go, there's the pattern of sending on a "channel of unit" as a way to essentially indicate an event to the receiver. Obviously in that…

oh, and Andrey Mokhov since works at Jane Street on the build system Dune: https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/andreymokhov/moving-to-jane-street/

In the topic of classifying build systems, there was a really interesting paper about that published at ICFP last year https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/andreymokhov/build-systems-a-la-carte/ They classify it based on how the build system detects what needs to be rebuilt and how the build system chooses the order things should be built in

Presuming it's not formally verified assembly code https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/andreymokhov/spacecraft-control/

For further reading, Andrey Mokhov has a useful collection of blog posts[0] and a paper[1] on Algebraic Graphs, including his Haskell package Alga[2] which implements these ideas. [0]: https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/andreymokhov/tag/algebra/ [1]: https://github.com/snowleopard/alga-paper/blob/master/README.md [2]: https://github.com/snowleopard/alga

Source with more details: https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/security/author/b2031864/

One of my professors worked on the key exchange protocol [0], used in Nest. When discussing that particular point, he was very complimentary of Google's security practices, especially when it comes to Nest. [0] https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/security/2015/07/28/j-pake-built-into-google-n…

Please check out: https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/security/2014/08/30/every-vote-counts-ensuring… This is a paper describing an end-to-end verifiable self-enforcing electronic voting system called DRE-i (Direct Recording Electronic with Integrity). In my opinion this is a superior solution to any other electronic voting system developed to date.

TPM's true owner is the NSA, not you or I. https://www.stat.rice.edu/~dobelman/kstorm.txt https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6337282 https://www.militaryaerospace.com/computers/article/16711478/nsa-teams… https://www.businessinsider.com/leaked-german-government-warns-key-ent… https://supplychaindigital.com/technology/nsa-trusted-computing-group-… https://redmondmag.com/articles/2013/08/22/windows-8-security-issues?m… https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/security/2015/07/29/on-the-trust-of-trusted-co…