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The 300-Year Unbreakable Cipher That Got Broken — Vigenère, Enigma, and What Every "Unbreakable" Cipher Has in Common
Height and Sports Performance: The Physics Behind Why It Matters Differently in Each Sport
Taller athletes have mechanical advantages in basketball, volleyball, and rowing — shorter athletes have rotation advantages in gymnastics and weight advantages in motorsport. Here's the sports physics behind height advantages, why wingspan often matters more than height, and what body dimensions actually determine athletic career trajectories.
ReDoS: How Catastrophic Backtracking in a Single Regex Can Take Down a Server
A single regex with a crafted input knocked Stack Overflow offline for 34 minutes and caused a global Cloudflare outage. Here's how catastrophic backtracking works, which patterns are vulnerable, how to test for ReDoS, and how to write safe alternatives.
Why JSON Gets Double-Encoded — and How to Detect and Fix It
Double-encoded JSON — JSON strings where objects were expected — happens when serialisation runs twice at different layers. Here's how it happens, how to detect it, how to fix it programmatically, and what the common Unicode escape sequences mean.
ISO 8601 and Date Handling Mistakes: The Bugs That Surface Months Later
"06/07/2024" means different dates in the US and UK. ISO 8601 solves this unambiguously. Here's the standard, common date handling mistakes (adding months with timedelta, DST in date arithmetic), storing UTC in databases, and the MySQL 2038 timestamp problem.
Why Calorie Counting Is Less Accurate Than You Think — And Still Useful
Calorie counts have ±20% label tolerances, cooking changes calorie availability, gut bacteria affect absorption efficiency, and trackers overestimate burns by 30–90%. Here's what that means for how you should actually use calorie tracking.
Why bcrypt: The History of Password Hashing, Cost Factors, and When Argon2 Is Better
SHA-1 and MD5 are fast by design — which is why GPUs crack them in hours after a breach. bcrypt's deliberate slowness and automatic salting are its defence. Here's how bcrypt works, the 72-byte limit, choosing a cost factor, and when Argon2 is the better choice.
Password Managers: How Zero-Knowledge Encryption Works and Which One to Choose
Credential stuffing is the main threat, and unique passwords are the defence — but only a password manager makes that practical at scale. Here's how zero-knowledge encryption works, Bitwarden vs 1Password vs KeePass compared, and how to set up recovery.
URL Structure: Query String Parsing Ambiguities, Punycode, and Open Redirect Vulnerabilities
A URL has five components — and bugs come from confusing which part you're encoding. Here's query string parsing ambiguities between frameworks, IDN Punycode for international domains, URL normalisation for comparison, open redirect vulnerabilities, and relative URL resolution edge cases.
Length Converter — mm, cm, Metres, Kilometres, Feet & Miles Explained
Learn the key metric and imperial length conversions, why 1 inch is exactly 25.4mm, how to convert height and distance quickly, and how to use a free length converter for construction, fitness, and travel.
Measurement in Engineering: Tolerances, Why Metric Dominates, and the Mars Crash That Unit Confusion Caused
A unit confusion caused the $327 million Mars Climate Orbiter to crash in 1999. Here's why metric dominates engineering globally, how manufacturing tolerances work, what CNC achieves, and why the US never fully metricated.
Fahrenheit vs Celsius: Why the US Kept One Scale and the Rest of the World Chose the Other
The US uses Fahrenheit by historical accident, not informed choice. Here's the origin of both scales, why Fahrenheit defenders have a point about weather ranges, absolute zero and superconductivity, food safety temperatures, and the one point where both scales agree.
Data URLs and Base64: When to Embed Resources Inline vs Link to Them
Data URLs embed files directly in HTML and CSS as Base64 strings — no separate HTTP request. Here's when that's faster, when it makes things worse, how JWT tokens use Base64URL, and how inline images in emails work around image blocking.
