# Summary of IRC Log from August 7, 2014

* Two academic papers from MIT Press journals were shared and archived through paperbot, though their specific content wasn't discussed in the conversation.

* A significant paper on "A million spiking-neuron integrated circuit with a scalable communication network and interface" was shared from Science magazine, with brief discussion noting it used packet-based routing but lacked plasticity.

* An open-source tool called McSema was announced, which converts x86 machine code to LLVM bytecode, with additional IDA/idapython/LLVM integration capabilities useful for reverse engineering.

* A security vulnerability in the Bitcoin mining Stratum protocol was discussed, where attackers could inject packets to redirect miners to rogue pools using the "client.reconnect" command, which netted one hacker $84,000.

* A security tool called "screwSSH" was shared that demonstrates how to easily deny access to OpenSSH servers in default configurations by exploiting the conservative default MaxStartups value of 10.

* A link to an artificial retina project was shared where physicists created an interface between optical fibers and retina cells.

* There was a brief philosophical discussion about biological accuracy in neural simulations, with the observation that it's unclear which biological processes can be safely dismissed when modeling neural systems.