I have a piece of code that has been living, rent-free, in my head for the past 30 years or so.In middle-school (I was 12 - 13 at the time), I was taught Pascal as the entry level programming language. I found that to be a really fascinating topic, as you can imagine. One of the things that I did was to try to read other people’s code and see what sense...

I ran into this fascinating article (I wrote another blog post discussing it) and that got me thinking. How would I approach building a dead-drop implementation? For that matter, what do we need from a dead-drop system?I think that the following are reasonable (loosely based on what Secure Drop aims for):Completely anonymous:No accounts, no registrations.No...

I just read this (excellent) introduction to the Secure Drop protocol, meant for journalists to have a way to safely accept anonymous information from sources. Using Tor and something like Tails (with a pretty good guide on how to connect to it from an unusual location) you can probably get to the right website in an anonymous manner. With the current version...

Take a look at this wonderful example of foresightedness (or hubris).In a little over ten years, Let’s Encrypt root certificates are going to expire. There are already established procedures for how to handle this from other Certificate Authorities, and I assume that there will be a well-communicated plan for this in advance. That said, I’m writing...

I got a really interesting comment on a blog post talking about query optimization. The context was that working with dates makes it much easier for a query engine than working with date & time on millisecond granularity. You can read the details on that in the post, what I wanted to talk about here is the modeling difference between the two. If...

Corax is the new indexing and querying engine in RavenDB, which recently came out with RavenDB 6.0. Our focus when building Corax was on one thing, performance. I did a full talk explaining how it works from the inside out, available here as well as a couple of podcasts.Now that RavenDB 6.0 has been out for a while, we’ve had the chance to complete...