The Antivirus Hackers Handbook by Jaxeon Koret and Elias Bachaalany is part book, part a research report, detailing the findings of Jaxeon Koret and Elias Bachaalany in how Antivirus programs work, try to protect themselves and can be attacked and exploited.

The Antivirus Hackers Handbook

The book assumes that you have some basic knowledge how compilers produce programs, what assembler looks like and how to map that on program statements in the code you write, and have access to IDA Pro free edition, Ghidra, Hopper or some other reverse engineering and analysis tool. We are then guided through the authors journey of discovery, analyzing the cores and plugin systems of various Antivirus products, how they work, how they detect viruses, how they update themselves, and how they try to protect themselves.

So, Netflix’ “The Witcher ” was weird, and could not decide what it wanted to be: A “Hercules Legenday Journey’s”-like half-comedy, half-camp series, or something else, darker and denser, with more story and background. It hinted at a better story, better told, that did not make it into the final product, and died somewhere between the scriptwriting and the cutting table.

Investigating, I got myself the equivalent of the Witcher Boxed Set on the Kindle and started reading. And indeed, just as with Conan, the Barbarian , the book is nothing like the film.

The story of Heaven’s River , stranding in and then exploring an alien megastructure, is one that has been written before: In Niven’s Ringworld , Clarke’s Rama , and Farmer’s Riverworld . John Varley’s take on this, very seventies, is Titan , Wizard , and Demon , the Gaia Trilogy.

Titan , Wizard and Daemon

Cirocco Jones is the Commander of the Earth science ship Ringmaster, and is right now approaching the orbit of Saturn, where she and her crew discover a new moon. As they approach the moon, they realize it’s a Stanford Torus like space habitat. Trying to find a way to dock, they come close and are being picked up by a giant tentacle-like arm, and dragged into the station while their ship is being destroyed.

Sometimes things go wrong, and it surely would be nice if you at least knew afterwards what happened. Where I work, we are running a shell script older than time itself, once a minute. The script writes files to /var/log/mysql_pl, into a directory named after the current weekday and named after the current hour and minute.

So when a box crashes on Thursday at 22:09, as long as I can login to it, I still can try to look at /var/log/mysql_pl/Thu/22_0? and try to reconstruct what happened before the crash. Often the buildup to catastrophe is clearly visible.

Children of Ruin is the second part of Children of Time by english Sci-Fi author Adrian Tchaikovsky.

In “Children of Time”, mankind reached for the stars, almost succeeded and also almost died out. They did manage to create a digital lifeform, though, and also to seed and uplift life from earth on another world - just not the intended one. And so we ended up with a race of intelligent giant jumping spiders that manage to befriend the broken artificial intelligence orbiting their world and to rescue the remnants of humankind from themselves. Oh, and ant based computers.

Conan, The Barbarian by Robert E. Howard is a collection of all Conan stories.

Imaginary Worlds Ep 114: The Man Behind the Sword (Episode Transcript PDF ) discussed Robert E. Howard, his 1930’s character Conan, The Barbarian and how Howard’s Conan is different from the Schwarzenegger character, and a much deeper and more complicated story. Go, and listen to the episode, it is well worth the time.

Having seen the Schwarzenegger film, but never actually having read the book I went out and got this complete collection. The podcast was right, the original book Conan is much unlike the Schwarzenegger film Conan, and the book is fun to read. It’s a classic.

Heaven’s River is the fourth part of the Bobiverse Trilogy, in which the original Bob finds a decaying alien megastructure, and investigates.

Previously in the Bobiverse:

• We are Legion (We are Bob)
• For We Are Many
• All These Worlds

Bob Johannson is a successful software developer, and cashes out. Then he dies, becomes a sentient spaceship and von Neumann probe, and then earth is almost destroyed in a war. Bob moves on, doing the von Neumann thing, and plundering the resources of foreign star systems makes more Bobs.

Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner is the story of the two Johns: Carmack and Romero, and the early video game culture and the genre of the 3D first person shooter.

A lot of todays “hard core” and somewhat toxic video game culture was defined by the two Johns and the company they built, as well as the culture that followed. The book follows their personal and company history and all the tales that come with it, and shows to differently broken persons building - for a time - a very successful company and failing differently. It also shows the nascent computer industry and how the hardware we have today was built around the software of that time and vice versa.

Peter Godfrey-Smith writes Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life , a book about the body, the mind and the life of Octopi.

Octopi are creatures that are across the tree of life about as different as can be from humans. How different are they? Their blood is not based on iron, as ours, but uses copper to transport Oxygen, and consequently is not red from hemoglobin, but blueish from hemocyanin.

Terry Jones’ Barbarians: An Alternative Roman History by Alan Ereira is the writeup to the BBC series “Terry Jones’ Barbarians ”.

Terry Jones, who sadly died in early 2020, was not only a member of Monty Pythons Flying Circus, but among many other things a TV author and presenter for a number of BBC series on medieval and ancient history. In many cases, he takes the controversial position and presents a view of history that challenges the popular view. In Barbarians, he goes through the history of the Roman Empire and the various groups of people the Romans fought and the cultures they destroyed in building their empire.