Igor Moura

Hijacking Steam's lancache for faster CDN downloads

As a long-time Steam user with a speedy 1Gbit internet connection, I recently decided to buy a new game and play it, as people often do. Clicked ‘Install’, got a pop-up for the 50GB download, big but apparently reasonable by today’s standards. However, to my surprise, the download speed hovered around just 7MB/s — approximately 160Mbps, or merely 16% of my total bandwidth. This was significantly lower than what my actual internet connection can actually handle.

8 queens puzzle with genetic algorithms on an embedded device

For some time now I’ve been fascinated with the whole idea of bio-inspired computing, where we try to build algorithms that mimic the behavior of something found in nature. You may have heard of some studies and projects related to it, such as neural networks (which used to try to mimic the brain), or genetic algorithms (GA). As you probably guessed from the title, we’re going to talk about the latter.

Word raking with tf-idf and Python

This year I started working in a startup that focuses on various solutions for law firms. During the development of one of those solutions, I stumbled on a problem where I had to rank words for a specific legal document, considering the relevance of each word when compared against all of the others in a set of documents. How did I manage to solve this?

Making your own DDNS

First of all, you must be wondering what a DDNS is. It stands for Dynamic DNS, and it’s basically a way to automatically update the IP address a domain points to.

Toying with a PS3 in 2019

I recently bought a PS3 for the sake of it. I didn’t even plan to play games on it, however, I wanted to see how hackeable it actually is. Since I got a FAT model (a CECHG to be exact), it is possible for it to suffer from the infamous YLOD, so the first thing I did was to open it up and replace the thermal paste.

Playing with a random cargo tracker

This week a work colleague brought us a device that he found inside the packaging of a TV he bought. It seemed to be a tracker of some sort due to the presence of a SIM card, a GSM module and a 18650. Considering that I was procrastinating a lot had nothing better to do, I decided to try to mess a bit with it.

Intel's UXA, SNA and weird screenshots

For a while I’ve faced a weird problem with my screenshots where they would glitch, creating a weird image containing part of my desktop background with a black area on top instead of the actual window that I wanted to capture, as seen below.

Using ADB to quickly simulate touch events

Notice: this requires that you have root access in your phone

What kills, voltage or current?

tl;dr: current is what kills, but at least some voltage is required in order for it to go through your body.

For a better explanation from an actual electrical engineer, I recommend you to watch this ElectroBOOM video.

A rant in favor of C

That’s a story I copied from some anonymous poster on 4chan’s technology board about how stuff used to be before we had all kinds of abstractions to help us use a computer, along with a shorter story on his grandfather who worked at Kodak.