2018-06-24

Java and its silly war against unsigned integers

Short story: Java hasn't (primitive) unsigned integers because Gosling thinks that too many programmers don't get what goes on with unsigned, what unsigned arithmetic is. Good solution: teach and make them aware, fix the problems of the education system which hasn't taught them, and so on. Bad solution: treat everybody as a stupid unable to learn, remove the feature and disappoint programmers who understand what goes on with unsigned, what unsigned arithmetic is, and those who think they can still learn. End of the story.

Not only zip bombs

Crawling around few corners of the net I've found a file named something like do not uncompress me unless you're a bot dot gz. It is, as per extension, a small gzipped file (26 kBytes), but — and this explains the suggestion — it expands into a 10 GBytes long files.

A sort of modest zip bomb, but for gzip.

You can find more on

Public domain image of an explosive device

Beware, those files can be dangerous if not handled properly! Do whatever you want at your own risk. Be safe.