input validation

A lecture from the 1980s by linguist Stephen Krashen on how people acquire language. He explains his comprehensible input hypothesis for second-language acquisition.

Meredith Patterson and Sergey Bratus argue that networked software stays insecure because protocols and inputs are too complex to recognize safely. They propose using formal language theory and grammars to build secure, verifiable input handling.

A demo of the 8pen, a gesture-based keyboard replacement for touchscreens that lets users enter text by moving around a circle. It is meant for phones, remotes and game controllers and mimics handwriting.

Stavros Korokithakis gives a FOSDEM 2018 talk on how hard it is to validate email addresses properly, taking a tour through RFC 5321.

A Microsoft Research demo from TechFest 2012 of a lab touch system that lets viewers feel the effect of different input latencies, down to about 1 ms. It shows how much more responsive dragging feels compared with typical 100 ms touch delay.

A 15-minute clip of linguist Stephen Krashen discussing language acquisition, drawn from the 1980s. It presents his input hypothesis and the distinction between acquisition and learning.

A live performance at AGDQ 2014 in which Super Mario World is made to execute arbitrary injected code, running other games like Pong and Snake on the cartridge. It is done through a TASBot feeding precise controller inputs.

Mirabai Knight's PyCon 2013 talk on Plover, a free cross-platform stenography engine that lets people write at up to 240 WPM on ordinary hardware, including a demo of coding by steno.

Google ATAP's 2015 introduction to Project Soli, a radar-based sensor on a chip that tracks sub-millimeter hand motions for gesture interaction in small devices.

A scene from Children of Men in which Theo visits Nigel in the Ark of the Arts to get transit papers. It features Nigel's line "I just don't think about it" and a one-handed chorded keyboard.

Ricardo Signes' YAPC::Asia Tokyo 2011 talk on the legends and horrors of email: how messy the SMTP and email standards are in practice. The first few minutes are Perl-specific, but the rest applies to anyone handling email.

Stuart Halloway shows how Clojure's spec library lets you build programs that are both agile and robust. He covers declarative, predicate-based specification layered on interactive REPL development.

A tool-assisted speedrun of Pokemon Yellow on Game Boy Color that uses glitches and frame-precise inputs to make the game execute an arbitrary program. It was later obsoleted by an improved run.

Tom7 explains and demos software that learns to play NES games by finding score patterns in memory and then searching for inputs that raise it. It is the video companion to his SIGBOVIK paper.

SethBling uses Super Mario World glitches to inject and run Flappy Bird code on an unmodified SNES, entering it purely with controller inputs. It was the first time a human completed this kind of exploit by hand.

Vsauce's Michael Stevens takes viewers past infinity using transfinite numbers, ordinals and cardinals, with input from mathematician Hugh Woodin. It is a fast-paced, mind-bending tour of different sizes of infinity.

Chris Lonsdale presents a TEDx talk on how adults can learn a language in about six months, centering on immersion, comprehensible input and a practical learning methodology.

A tool-assisted speedrun of Pokemon Yellow by MrWint that uses arbitrary code execution to push Game Boy hardware to its limits. Through crafted inputs it injects code and ends up running other programs, such as Tetris, inside the game.

A 3-minute demo of a tiny IOCCC 2012 winning C program that simulates fluid dynamics in an 80x25 terminal, using any text (including its own source) as input. The video shows the simulation running to Handel's Water Music.

A lightning-style conference talk by Ricardo Signes about the horrors of email: its protocols, formats and decades of accumulated quirks. It is delivered with a humorous horror theme to show why handling email correctly is harder than it looks.

Ned Batchelder's PyCon 2012 talk gives a quick overview of what Unicode is, then focuses on what a Python programmer needs to handle text correctly. It presents the 'Unicode sandwich' strategy: decode bytes at input, work with Unicode internally, encode at output.

Tom Scott shows a full-size real-life emoji keyboard built from 14 keyboards and over 1,000 hand-placed stickers, covering all of Unicode 8.

A short demo of the Deep Visualization Toolbox, which shows the activations inside a convolutional neural network as it processes live camera input. Viewers see individual units responding to edges, faces and text.

A tool-assisted run of Brain Age by TASBot, shown at Awesome Games Done Quick 2016. The bot gives deliberately deranged answers while exploiting the game's error-prone recognition.

Numberphile visits YouTube to learn why view counts on new videos used to freeze at 301. It explains that YouTube holds counts while it verifies views aren't from bots or fakes.

A tool-assisted speedrun of Super Mario World that achieves arbitrary code execution through frame-precise controller inputs, finishing in 2:25. It was also performed live on real hardware at AGDQ 2014.

A short demo of a 3D Wayland compositor built with Qt 5 and QtWayland, mapping input to and compositing the output of Wayland applications in a 3D scene, also running on a Raspberry Pi.