The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for March 4th, 2026

UTF-8, Explained Simply – YouTube

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/04

Cool interesting video: [Wayback/Archive] UTF-8, Explained Simply – YouTube

It covers both history from the late 1800s Baudot Code (also known as ITA1) via 1930s ITA2 and 1950’s EBCDIC / FIELDATA ages through 7-bit ASCII in the 1970s  and incompatible UCS-2 (now UTF-16) of the 1990s to the current day and age of UTF-8 (which actually started out on a placemat in 1992).

Though mentioning 8-bit encoding, it skips details of extended ASCII encodings like ISO/IEC 8859 and Windows-1252.

It goes to quite some length on decoding UTF-8 and showing how forgiving the UTF-8 standard is. Yes, it is a self-synchronising code thanks to the venerable Ken Thompson.

Definitely worth watching as it also covers the Zero-width joiner which is not just important for combining Emoji, as it is used by many people nowadays, but got in fact implemented to support various scripts like Arabic script or any Indic script.

Oh, the placemat story: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in ASCII, Development, EBCDIC, Encoding, ISO-8859, Software Development, UCS-2, Unicode, UTF-16, UTF-8, Windows-1252 | Leave a Comment »

Odido-router verzamelt analytics van je huishouden en stuurt het door naar AI toko lifemote

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/04

Dit is net zo nalatig als de Odildo hack waar alle klantgegevens mee op straat kwamen te liggen: [Wayback/Archive] Odido-router verzamelt analytics van je huishouden

Bevindingen in het kort

  • De Odido-router haalt bij een nieuwe WAN-verbinding een bash-script op over een onversleutelde HTTP-verbinding.
  • Je kan dit script manipuleren om een root shell op je router te krijgen.
  • Als je TLS-verkeer mitm’t zie je analytics-data over de lijn gaan; de scripters hebben TLS-validatie uitgezet (`curl -k`) dus je kan dit ‘versleutelde’ analytics-verkeer inzien.
  • Je router stuurt namen en MAC-adressen van devices in je huis door naar Lifemote. Verder deelt het ding de SSID’s en MAC-adressen van WiFi-netwerken in de buurt. En wat analytics-stats over je dataverbruik. Lifemote adverteert met “AI-Powered Home Wi-Fi Solutions for ISPs”. Het voelt wat vies dat zij AI’s gaan trainen met data uit mijn huishouden. Daar vind ik wat van.

--jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, bash, bash, Development, ISP, Odido (ex Dutch T-Mobile), Power User, Python, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

dasm – macro assembler for 8-bit machines

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/03/04

Finding a reference to DASM while researching yesterday’s post @jpluimers on Twitter: “@b0rk @jilles_com Acids vs bases.”, it felt even more like a trip like memory lane as I had used it in the 1980s on Apple ][ and Apple //e after mainly using EDASM. Lisa and Merlin.

I am glad that it is still alive and kicking with home page at [Wayback/Archive] dasm – macro assembler for 8-bit machines and repository at [Wayback/Archive] dasm-assembler/dasm: Macro assembler with support for several 8-bit microprocessors.

Especially this history section on the home page rang a bell:

  • Matthew Dillon started dasm in 1987-1988.
  • Olaf “Rhialto” Seibert extended dasm in 1995.
  • Andrew “Dr.Boo” Davie maintained dasm in 2003-2008.
  • Peter Fröhlich maintained dasm in 2008-2015.
  • In 2019, the dasm source code and releases were moved to GitHub.

More links from this trip down memory lane:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in //e, 6502 Assembly, Apple, Apple ][, Assembly Language, Development, History, Power User, Software Development | Leave a Comment »