C can be memory-safe

The idea of memory-safe languages is in the news lately. C/C++ is famous for being the world's system language (that runs most things) but also infamous for being unsafe. Many want to solve this by hard-forking the world's system code, either by changing C/C++ into something that's memory-safe, or rewriting everything in Rust.Forking is a foolish idea....

Feb 2023

I'm still bitter about Slammer

Today is the 20th anniversary of the Slammer worm. I'm still angry over it, so I thought I'd write up my anger. This post will be of interest to nobody, it's just me venting my bitterness and get off my lawn!!Back in the day, I wrote "BlackICE", an intrusion detection and prevention system that ran as both a desktop version and a network appliance....

Jan 2023

The RISC Deprogrammer

I should write up a larger technical document on this, but in the meanwhile is this short (-ish) blogpost. Everything you know about RISC is wrong. It's some weird nerd cult. Techies frequently mention RISC in conversation, with other techies nodding their head in agreement, but it's all wrong. Somehow everyone has been mind controlled to believe in...

Oct 2022

DS620slim tiny home server

In this blogpost, I describe the Synology DS620slim. Mostly these are notes for myself, so when I need to replace something in the future, I can remember how I built the system. It's a "NAS" (network attached storage) server that has six hot-swappable bays for 2.5 inch laptop drives.That's right, laptop 2.5 inch drives. It makes this a tiny server that...

Jul 2022

No, a researcher didn't find Olympics app spying on you

For the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, the Chinese government requires everyone to download an app onto their phone. It has many security/privacy concerns, as CitizenLab documents. However, another researcher goes further, claiming his analysis proves the app is recording all audio all the time. His analysis is fraudulent. He shows a lot of technical...

Jan 2022

Journalists: stop selling NFTs that you don't understand

The reason you don't really understand NFTs is because the journalists describing them to you don't understand them, either. We can see that when they attempt to sell an NFT as part of their stories (e.g. AP and NYTimes). They get important details wrong.The latest is Reason.com magazine selling an NFT. As libertarians, you'd think at least they'd get...

Dec 2021

Example: forensicating the Mesa County system image

Tina Peters, the election clerk in Mesa County (Colorado) went rogue and dumped disk images of an election computer on the Internet. They are available on the Internet via BitTorrent [Mesa1][Mesa2], The Colorado Secretary of State is now suing her over the incident.The lawsuit describes the facts of the case, how she entered the building with an accomplice...

Nov 2021

Debunking: that Jones Alfa-Trump report

The Alfa-Trump conspiracy-theory has gotten a new life. Among the new things is a report done by Democrat operative Daniel Jones [*]. In this blogpost, I debunk that report.If you'll recall, the conspiracy-theory comes from anomalous DNS traffic captured by cybersecurity researchers. In the summer of 2016, while Trump was denying involvement with Russian...

Oct 2021

Review: Dune

One of the most important classic sci-fi stories is the book "Dune" from Frank Herbert. It was recently made into a movie. I thought I'd write a quick review.The summary is this: just read the book. It's a classic for a good reason, and you'll be missing a lot by not reading it.But the movie Dune (2021) movie is very good. The most important thing to...

Oct 2021

Fact check: that "forensics" of the Mesa image is crazy

Tina Peters, the elections clerk from Mesa County (Colorado) went rogue, creating a "disk-image" of the election server, and posting that image to the public Internet. Conspiracy theorists have been analyzing the disk-image trying to find anomalies supporting their conspiracy-theories. A recent example is this "forensics" report. In this blogpost, I...

Oct 2021