input validation

Peter Hutterer's linux.conf.au 2020 talk on creating libinput, the unified userspace input library, and the difficulties of handling the many quirks of input devices.

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 DEF CON 29 talk by Richard Henderson about encoding the EICAR antivirus test string into QR codes and barcodes and scanning them at real systems. Many systems that do not expect such input misbehave or collapse, including a parking garage system.

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.

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.

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.

David MacKay's 2007 Google Tech Talk presents Dasher, a text-entry system driven by continuous gestures and a language model, reaching about 35 words per minute with one finger and 25 hands-free. It explains the information-theory reasoning behind the design.

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.

Noodle explores how retro pixel art was designed for CRT displays and why games look different on LCDs, with input from pixel artists and CRT researchers.

Vsauce asks how many holes a human has and uses topology to show the answer depends on what counts as a hole, with animations and expert input.

Peter Zeihan speaks at Iowa Swine Day 2022 on geopolitics, the end of globalization and agriculture. He argues that supply chains, energy and farm inputs are all about to be disrupted.

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.

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.