Recent content on Alec Armbruster
I was listening to Louis Rossmann talk about AI replacing emergency 911 triage this morning. Interesting stuff. Louis made a point that stuck with me: how many mistakes were made while people sat on hold, waiting for a human operator who wasn’t there? Somehow, this got tangled up in my head with the whole “Dario and Amanda” prompt thing. You know the one—where people figured out…
Either Claude Opus 5 just leaked a trove of private 2024–2026 chat logs from Anthropic employees (& general public) asking Claude to edit their personal writing, or it’s generating one hell of a hallucination. It’s almost certainly the latter. But read the examples and you might start second-guessing. The Prompt can you put this in your own words --- Dario and Amanda, Here’s what Opus 5 is…
Anybody else noticing this? As an average person, I’m not complaining. I still worry about the long-term cost of genuine human creativity being drowned out by synthetic noise. But there’s been one surprising upside. Over the past year, I’ve been able to start actual, ongoing conversations, often just by sending an email or making a phone call, with people I could never reliably…
Huh? Honeypots? So if you don’t know what a honeypot is: it’s a trap. It pretends to be a bunch of different vulnerable services, like a web, SSH, TCP server, in order to lure attackers in and collect data about them: which creds did they use to auth, which commands they run, what files they read, etc. I can’t help but make an analogy here. It’s like a bait car. You park it…
Weeks ago, I found that Anthropic’s Fable 5 was more than willing to help users commit cybercrime—planning and actively exploiting (albeit somewhat known) vulnerabilities against IoT devices all over the internet. Extremely basic prompt engineering was all it took to bypass the guardrails. These aren’t sophisticated 0days but they’re still real vulnerabilities. Anyone motivated…
We have a serious problem. A shocking number of major manufacturers engineer and ship webcams that are completely insecure by default. Hikvision, Blue Iris, Axis, D-Link, Wyze, Dahua, Sony… the list goes on. Shipping hardware this vulnerable directly violates customer privacy and creates a massive security liability. A reflection of a webcam in a customer’s home, captured on IP Crawl.…
Update The next iteration of this project is available at ipcrawl.com , which indexes nearly every exposed webcam on the open IPV4 internet. See the write-up here: IP Crawl: The Webcam Security Awareness Project . Introduction I’ve always loved Omegle and Chat Roulette. Clicking a button and getting dropped into a random situation somewhere on the planet felt like instant chaos in the best…
This is an update to my previous post about the G6 Turret and my first impressions. Update. My G6 Turret lasted almost exactly one year. This past Monday, it detected its last vehicle, went offline and then died with an agonal blinking white light. A moment of silence for this G6 Turret, a seriously heavy piece of e-waste Ubiquiti has approved an RMA replacement with a slightly rude “you…
As a long-time Cloudflare user and advocate, it hurts me to admit that I’ve been pretty unsatisfied with them lately. For three reasons: Their unwillingness to increase transparency For years, Cloudflare has notably lacked both billing forecasting and prepayment options. As a customer, you’re essentially forced to accept whatever charges appear on your statement after the fact. in their pricing…
Look, not all desert datacenters are bad. I operate one myself—in the desert—albeit a small one. And this isn’t a luddite manifesto. I love datacenters, I love AI and cloud compute, intricate networking gear, and the deafening roar of fans. I believe we need them…even in the desert! But we must draw a line in the sand. Literally. We must keep “hyper-scale” datacenters out…
We need more investigative reporters. They make a huge impact on society, but they’re chronically underfunded and understaffed. I keep coming back to an idea: what if each of us had ten of them living in our pockets? Agents that could—legally and persistently—pressure institutions to do the right thing. These agents would publish their own websites. Write their own stories. Run their own…
I wanted to make prompt injection fun. Not in a “solve this CTF challenge with levels” way. More like: sit down, compete with strangers, outsmart an AI, and feel smug about it. I wanted to build something that makes people curious about how these models actually work—and maybe a little paranoid about what they’ll give up under pressure. That idea became Agent Has A Secret . The Proof…
Introduction Tucson has more birds than you’d expect—practically overrun with them. Luckily, I love birds. For months, I sat in the backyard with my iPhone using the Merlin Bird ID app to identify whatever I could spot. That could’ve been the end of it. But I’m a software engineer, so naturally I turned it into a 24/7 system with observability and a web interface. Let’s dig in. The Ingredients…
Introduction I love Docker containers. They make it easy to package an application and its dependencies into a portable, reproducible unit that can run anywhere. I use them for almost everything. So when Cloudflare announced Containers, I was immediately interested. A fully managed container platform running on Cloudflare’s edge network A huge network of owned and operated, peered…
I love dashcams. Everybody on the road should have one. Some people find that strange, but my affection for dashcams comes from a perfect overlap of interests: I have a film degree with a focus on cinematography I’m passionate about Linux and embedded systems I love cars, defensive driving, and being safe on the road All of that converges into a deep appreciation for dashcams. Over the last…
Fellow tech folks often seem genuinely insulted when they learn that content is partially or fully AI-generated—from notes and/or a prompt—or that it was generated by AI and later edited by a human. That reaction made me wonder: Why is using an LLM to improve my writing treated so differently from using an LLM to improve my code? In both cases, I have information I want to convey. And in both…
I recently overheard a conversation in a River Falls, Wisconsin, coffee shop that has stayed with me. A person was venting to a friend about being forced to use AI—likely Microsoft Copilot—within a work spreadsheet. After several rounds of frustrating trial and error, she eventually gave up and finished the task manually. In the end, the “shortcut” had cost her more time than if…
Ubiquiti’s G3 Flex makes a surprisingly good bird box camera—if you’re willing to void the warranty and pick up a screwdriver.
Whenever I see a website trending, I can’t resist popping open the source code. Who else does this? Anyhoo, today’s curiosity: the US White House’s new Government Shutdown Clock ( archive link ). A screenshot of the White House site, sporting a design strikingly similar to the popular TV show ‘24’ A Countdown Straight Out of ‘24’ The site shows a dramatic…
The Problem If you’ve ever tried to capture system audio in an Electron app on macOS, you know how frustrating it can be. The typical approach looks something like this: Fork Existential Audio’s BlackHole (assuming licensing allows it) Customize and codesign the driver Package an installer or setup script Handle automatic input switching or create an aggregate device Ship all this…
My wife and I’s home gym is near completion. Concrete flooring, refinishing adobes. Lessons were learnt along the way. See the results!
The G6 Turret is here! Surprisingly Solid Build This thing is surprisingly heavy and solid! From the promotional photos, I expected something cheap and lightweight, but in hand, it feels much more substantial—usually, it’s the opposite. It’s a turret camera, so hand-feel shouldn’t matter much, but it genuinely feels well-made. Mounting Bracket Could Be Better The single screw…
Modern web development still faces a stubborn challenge: fancy styles and effects can tank performance on lower-end hardware. While browsers continue to improve, there’s no shortage of devices—especially mobile and embedded systems—where CSS effects like backdrop-filter , box-shadow , or even complex JavaScript animations can cause significant frame drops during user interactions. To help…
Marko “Forks” Elez is a great example of how churning out mid-tier Python code and being male can bring you to some crazy places in life. Side note, if you want to bore yourself to sleep tonight, take a walk down Elez’s recent GitHub repos . At least Big Balls is exciting–hosting VPS’s for cybercriminal gangs and being an alleged hacking forum kiddie (Source: Krebs On…
My wife and I just bought our house, which features this 20x22’ room which previously was a garage. We want it to be a home gym, which means replacing the tile with a rubber floring solution!
Static site generators Static site generators are sweet. You input two things, a template (Go text/template -formatted files) and content (arbitrary md files) and it outputs a bunch of html files you can just throw on a filesystem somewhere. I’m oversimplifying a bit, there’s a lot more but whatever. Over the last decade, I’ve given a lot of static site generators a go. Gatsby,…
Tech lead specializing in creative automation and embedded systems. Particularly interested in the intersection of AI, A/V and cybersecurity. I’m a longtime open source contributor under the alectrocute handle, with work spanning Microsoft, Nuxt, JSR, Electron, Imputnet, Lemmy and more . I also publish security research under the htmalgae handle, with work featured in Krebs on Security , The…