Language choices doubly so The language used in financial markets is fascinating. Everything is about taking or making bets. If you take bets on how companies will do in the future, that's finance. If you take bets on sports, that's gambling. If you take bets on human misery, that's insurance. CARDS ON THE TABLE I used to work for a sports betting exchange . Or as the industry prefers to be …
CycloneDX SBOM indexer Cyclops is a tool to ingest, index and search through CycloneDX SBOMs. Point it to a directory containing CycloneDX files (and optionally an S3 bucket path) - it will index the files and makes them searchable through a simple command line interface. Database engine is SQLite, for two reasons: No need to set up external DB for what should be a simple, local only tool The…
Learning without thinking is useless. Thinking without learning is dangerous. -- C.
Prometheus/Dogstatsd compatible, minimalistic monitoring agent Gent is a simple application telemetry collector & exporter. It Ingests both regular StatsD and its extended variant, DogStatsD messages and generates Prometheus-compatible telemetry. It is designed to be reasonably small with no external dependencies. It can be built with nothing beyond Go standard library. Gent is intended to be run…
The AI bubble of 202x is waiting to pop With both of the big names ( OpenAI & Anthropic ) announcing their speedy IPO plans, the only sensible conclusion to draw is that the bubble is about to burst. The companies in question know it. Their investors know it. The public at large knows it. The investor class expects it but is looking at trajectory based on history. 1 The sentiment among the …
The zeroeth rule of thumb for infosec professionals You are not cynical enough. No, not even you. Not even after adjusting for the above.
Reading the tea leaves Listening to political winds and reading the tea leaves in the UK make one thing disturbingly clear. The country is about 6 years away from brownshirts, and 9 years from camps. Long-term investment is looking at razor wire and heating element manufacturing as a growth sector.
Artificial Misanthropy A misanthrope is someone whose view of the world can be distilled into a simple sentence: "I hate people in general, and everyone in particular." And it's a common enough condition in expressed writing that even AI has picked it up .
New hotness: Unvalidated Assumptions Vulnerability scanners, in the year 2025 - and the companies flogging them to unsuspecting customers victims - are defective by design. The latest trend in flooding the already substandard spewage with even more useless noise is to run CI-time checks against non-CI systems. A "modern"[tm] scanner, upon finding a build manifest source code file with listed…
Scribbling at $dayjob, again Some time ago ( cough several months cough ) I wrote a piece at work. As part of a bigger set of reader friendly updates, I knew I needed the option to link to a concise piece that explains what takes place in the event of an online breach. And that piece could not be too specific, or tied to any single vendor or system. Among other things …
The global IT outage was only a matter of time Friday, 2024-07-19. Large parts of the world come to a screeching halt, when Crowdstrike, a "security and endpoint protection solutions company", deploys a broken signature update. 8.5 million Windows machines crash and do not recover. Crowdstrike caught the bullet and the blame, but this could have been any one of the vendors in the same sector. They…
OSS project governance demands, distilled Hi, I'm from Entitled Inc. You know that unpaid labour of yours, which we benefit from? You should do more of it. Oh, and you should add all this red tape so that we don't have to do anything ourselves. We're still not going to pay you. We also demand that you sign our Modern Slavery statement.
Visions of future past Year is 2041. Freshly elected Tory government, with nothing left in the country to sell off, find a solution to their prison overcrowding problem. State sanctioned organ harvesting becomes an overnight export success. Medical facilities are caught by surprise, consistently outbid by the pet food industry.
Three steps to a life of success Be born to the right parents Nepo Coast
Things written in times past I used to write things for a previous employer's tech blog, but the old URLs may succumb to bitrot. These should work as long as Medium works: The challenges of running a betting exchange (2016) Notes on interviewing engineers (2016) -- This one was also picked up by a recruiter's blog. DevOps is culture, not a title prefix (2017) Security and Devops - a natural fit…
Dedicated to Cause UK government's refusal to negotiate with the NHS staff can only be taken as dedication to monarchy. They want to make sure that King Charles's coronation will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience for as many people as possible.
Audits explained A pentest is like going to the GP for a check-up. An audit is like having a month-long colonoscopy.
Not your grandfather's MVC This was perfectly predictable. CoPilot generates insecure code, as expected. Machine Learning, the magic pixie dust of the past decade, is all about volume. And writing secure code is harder than writing insecure code. So by sheer volume there will be a lot more insecure code around. Given that a lot of code in the wild is essentially a minimum viable copypaste from the…
Lusikoitavaa chiliä Arvioitu valmistusaika: 1,5h Muokattu Guardianin reseptistä Ainekset Reilu 300g tuoreita chilejä 1kg hienosokeria Pektiiniä 400ml siideriviinietikkaa Muut tarvikkeet Hillopurkkeja 5l kattila Soseutin Esivalmistelut Mittaa reilu 5g pektiiniä ja sekoita hienosokeriin. Keitä purkit ja kannet erillisessä kattilassa. Ota syrjään ja pidä veden alla kunnes hillo on valmista. Valmistus…
SSH (Yubi)Key Authentication SSH with private keys coming from secure hardware. What's not to like? You've read the How-To . You've changed the pin with: yubico-piv-tool -a change-pin You're generating a resident key with: ssh-keygen -t ed25519-sk -O resident -f ~/.ssh/yubi_ed255_key After entering your pin, the above command breaks with "enrollment failed: invalid format". Surely you're doing…
Be honest Planning to travel to visit your family in these plague-ridden times, you're really saying: "I miss my family so much they will see me if it's the last thing they do."
Page from an undated journal Daddy's crying. Mommy has a black eye. Little sister's hiding under her bed. Yep, it's christmas.
Misunderstood Indexing Holding the number-one spot on Corruption Perceptions Index tells nothing about how well a country is doing. It merely highlights how bad the situation is even for the runner-up.
Ground rules for acceptable ads online The following is an edit of a piece originally written in November 2015. The pinnacle of non-intrusive online ads were the original Google search ads. They were out of the way, clearly marked as ads - and hence could be visually filtered out. They were pure text, so could be neatly included as elements on the rendered page. And they were always targeting an…
Visions of future past In our lifetime we will have seen the Western countries not just close but to barricade their borders. Should an unannounced ship approach, carrying desperate human beings fleeing the wars and the devastation, we won't be even allowed to think about accepting them. The ships will be, not stopped and turned around, but torpedoed and sunk on sight. The drowned will be…