upgrade chain

TheRasteri upgrades a single PC through every Windows version, from early releases through Windows 10, testing that old software keeps running. It is an updated version of the Chain of Fools experiment.

James Mickens of Harvard gives a funny lecture at HBS's Future Assembly arguing that blockchains are a very bad idea. He covers their trust, legal and practical shortcomings for real-world problems.

Andrew "bunnie" Huang examines how realistic hardware supply chain attacks are, from rogue insiders to nation states, in the wake of the Bloomberg Businessweek report. He explains how undocumented components could be hidden on boards and how hard they are to spot.

Andreas Antonopoulos explains how to tell Bitcoin-style blockchains from corporate blockchain hype. He argues the goal should be de-banking everyone rather than banking the unbanked.

Anders Brownworth gives a basic visual introduction to blockchain using an interactive web demo, covering SHA256 hashes, blocks, chains, distribution, tokens and coinbase transactions.

The opening lecture of MIT's Blockchain and Money course taught by Gary Gensler, covering the course plan, the history of failed digital currencies, cryptography and what a blockchain is.

TheRasteri installs MS-DOS and Windows 1.0, then upgrades in place through nearly every Windows version up to Windows 7, checking which programs survive. Even Doom from 1993 still runs at the end.

3Blue1Brown explains the math and mechanics behind Bitcoin visually: ledgers, digital signatures, proof of work and the blockchain, building up a decentralized payment system from first principles.

A short Harvard Online animated lesson on how the mitochondrial electron transport chain works. It shows proton pumping and the machinery that drives ATP synthesis.

A 36C3 talk by Bunnie Huang arguing that open source is necessary but not sufficient for trustworthy hardware, because verifying hardware is destructive and so creates a time-of-check/time-of-use gap. It surveys supply chain security and classes of hardware attacks, and presents the Betrusted approach to narrowing that gap.

Linus Tech Tips reviews the first Framework Laptop, a fully repairable and upgradeable machine. The reviewer expected a flimsy chunky device and was happily surprised.

A Veritasium video on how a feud between Russian mathematicians led to Markov chains and the modern prediction algorithms built on them. It covers the history and the math behind them.

Ian Miers' Devcon4 talk on failures in on-chain privacy for Bitcoin and Ethereum. It covers attacks on transparent and decoy-based schemes, including how Monero-style privacy can be eroded over repeated transactions.

Microsoft engineers Chiara Mooney and Shiven Mian describe the journey and challenges of building and consuming React Native for Windows inside Microsoft. It was given at Chain React 2023.

Scotty Allen of Strange Parts travels through Shenzhen's Huaqiangbei markets and learns to upgrade an iPhone 6s from 16GB to 128GB by swapping its flash chip. It is part 3 of his custom iPhone series and shows the difficulty of the hands-on repair work.

A 74-minute video of upgrading Windows 1.0 through every release up to Windows 8 on a real netbook rather than in a virtual machine.

Apple security head Ivan Krstic gives a Black Hat 2016 talk on iOS security, covering HomeKit, Auto Unlock and iCloud Keychain. He explains key hierarchies and how data can stay safe even in adversarial clouds.

Sam Zeloof shows the upgraded second iteration of his homemade silicon integrated circuit fabrication process, producing chips with around a thousand transistors in his garage. It is a short overview of what the home fab can now do.

A short BBC Earth clip from David Attenborough's Life of Birds showing a lyrebird imitating sounds, including a chainsaw and camera shutter, so accurately it is hard to tell from the real thing.

Asianometry explains that the worst of the 2021-22 chip shortage sits in trailing-edge semiconductors, not the leading-edge chips usually covered. It covers why those older-node fabs are so hard to expand and fix.

Wendover Productions explains the wave of supply shortages in 2021, arguing the causes go beyond COVID. It covers how just-in-time manufacturing was applied, container imbalances and the chip shortage.

Chandler Carruth's CppNow 2023 talk on modernizing compiler design for the Carbon toolchain, using data-oriented design and modern hardware assumptions. It covers lexing, parsing and compact data structures aimed at compiler performance.

Rory McCune's AppSec EU 2015 talk on security risks in modern software deployment. It covers weaknesses in package ecosystems like npm, RubyGems and PyPI, and repository compromise.

A Netflix engineer describes how Netflix uses Java in 2025, including Spring Boot, DGS/GraphQL, gRPC and keeping over 3000 services on the latest JDK. It covers generational ZGC upgrade experiences.

Tom Scott explains why electronic voting is a bad idea. Elections must be trusted by everyone and attacks on software scale in ways attacks on paper do not, so open source or blockchain fixes do not solve it.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day tries to manufacture a grill scrubber entirely in the United States. Along the way he runs into missing supply chains, tooling and institutional manufacturing knowledge.

A 38C3 talk on how advanced chips are made, centered on EUV lithography and the global supply chain behind it. It covers technical challenges from raw materials to finished chips and the geopolitical weight of semiconductors.

Rob Pike's GopherCon 2016 talk on the design of the Go assembler, explaining why Go uses a common assembly language translated to each architecture.

Gary Bernhardt's Cascadia Ruby Conference 2011 talk on using the Unix shell for practical problem solving. He builds pipelines interactively by iterative refinement, using small tools as levers.

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.

Designer Thomas Thwaites describes his attempt to build a toaster from scratch, from mining ore and deriving plastic from oil. It is a short TED talk on how much civilization a simple object depends on.

A UC Berkeley CS 161 lecture by Nicholas Weaver on cryptocurrency and blockchains, covering how they work and the case against them. It is aimed at a computer security course audience.

A two-minute clip in which Milton Friedman uses a humble pencil to show how thousands of strangers across many countries cooperate, without central direction, to make a simple product. It is a short visual version of the 'I, Pencil' essay's argument about free markets and dispersed knowledge.

A 35C3 talk presenting a proof-of-concept SPI bus hardware implant with capabilities like those alleged in the Bloomberg Supermicro story, plus countermeasures for detecting such modchips.

Veritasium tells the story of the XZ backdoor, how a patient attacker became maintainer and nearly compromised SSH on Linux systems. It also covers free software history and how encryption in SSH works.

A DEFCON 20 panel with NSA whistleblower William Binney, journalist James Bamford and ACLU lawyers on the NSA's mass collection of communications and its conflict with the Constitution.

Wendover Productions explains how overnight shipping works, covering the hub-and-spoke logistics of companies like FedEx and UPS and the use of cargo aircraft. It touches on the economics that make next-day delivery possible.

WIRED has UCLA professor Amit Sahai explain zero-knowledge proofs to a child, a teen, a college student, a grad student and an expert. Each round goes deeper into the cryptography and why it matters.

A long Gamers Nexus investigation into how volatile US tariffs affect the computer hardware industry. It interviews manufacturers and sellers about costs, margins and why moving production to the US is hard.

Lex Fridman interviews Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin about Ethereum, cryptocurrency and the future of money. The conversation also touches on technical topics such as quantum computing and mining.