Sven Krasser's Blog

After announcing our joint work between Meta and CrowdStrike at LlamaCon in April, we finally released our new LLM benchmark for cybersecurity applications, CyberSOCEval, this month at Fal.Con. You can read our paper here.

Better late than never. Here is a preprint of the chapter on malware detection using machine learning that I mentioned previously. You can get the final paper with a number of revisions and additions on the publisher’s website.

Now that all electronic issues are resolved, it’s time to update the PCB for my expansion board that adds a W65C22S Versatile Interface Adapter (VIA) to my Commodore 64. Besides fixing the clock issue uncovered in the last post, there are a couple of other changes I made.

In my last post, I discussed wiring up a modern Versatile Interface Adapter to the expansion port of the Commodore 64. Unfortunately, I ran into timing issues and the design did not work. In this post, we’ll get it to work with the help of two extra chips, a breadboard, and a bunch of ribbon cable.

It has been a while that I embarked on an electronics project (our soldering iron has not seen use since Shannon built her Arduino-powered space pants). For my next project, I decided to hook up a VIA to the expansion port of the Commodore 64 that I put together during the pandemic. What’s a VIA? Well, it’s the Versatile Interface Adapter, an integrated circuit that provides such niceties as timers and GPIO pins to 6502-based systems. I’ve used one in my homebrew 6502 breadboard computer, so this sounded like an easy target. Spoiler alert: there’s still a lot to get wrong, so we won’t see it working in this post just yet. But there’s a lot to learn along the way, so keep on reading if you want to follow along on this journey.

Some quick updates on new and upcoming publications I co-authored: today the Journal of Cyber Policy published an article on data localization risks, i.e. the risks to cybersecurity if pertinent data cannot be shared globally due to regulatory constraints. The article is titled “Risks to Cybersecurity From Data Localization, Organized by Techniques, Tactics, and Procedures” and is freely available through the Taylor & Francis open access program.

Last Sunday I flew out eastwards to meet Shannon in Nashville to view the eclipse. I just managed to get a brief glimpse of the city, visiting Broadway the night of my arrival (see picture below). The next morning, we drove towards Paducah, Kentucky, which is close to the eastern border of the zone of totality. After getting breakfast, we actually ended up making camp just north of the Ohio river at Fort Massac State Park in Metropolis, Illinois. Yes, that’s a thing—and I am happy to report that Superman also wore protective eyewear (see also below).

Early in 2021, I set out to write a game for a 40-year-old computer, the venerable Commodore 64. The game, Cab Hustle, was finally released in the fall of 2022 after sporadic progress over the months. Early in 2023, I also released a PC version of the game.

In this post, I want to share some insights into how the game came to be, a stroll down memory lane about the motivations, some learnings I made along the way, some thoughts about game development in general, and an update on the proliferation of 8-bit software piracy in the 21st century.

The PC version of my Commodore 64 game Cab Hustle is now available on Itch.io. You can download it for free at the link below.

Just a minor update: version 1.2 for Cab Hustle for the Commodore 64 is now on available on Itch.io. You can download it at the link below. Read on for information on the changes.