The biggest smallest JPEG-XL image possible
The smallest JPEG-XL image I could make is only 14 bytes. Then I tried making it the biggest smallest possible.
Hackerbirds
The personal website and blog of the hackerbirds
Latest posts
On a quest to make Signal Desktop reproducible
My attempt at making Signal Desktop more secure and trustless for everyone.
Breaking the borrow checker
A brief explanation on lifetimes in Rust, and how you can use your newfound knowledge to Fuck Shit Up.
Why elliptic curves
Hackerbirds speaking. We've been taking interest in elliptic curve crytography recently. Here's an introduction to it.
Signal "group conference" WIP feature screenshots
Hackerbirds speaking. The Signal Devs Don't Want You To Know This, but we have some sweet looking screenshots of a big upcoming feature (and no, it's not usernames). Go check out our screenshots.
Usernames on Signal is more challenging than you think
Hackerbirds speaking. Signal began their public beta testing phase for usernames. We're just as excited as you, but it leaves us all wondering 'Why did it take so long??'. Let's explain why.
Our revolutionary new Rust crate: try-unwrap
Hackerbirds speaking. try-unwrap is the revolutionary new crate that allows you to unwrap() something without your stupid software panicking. How did we do it? It's quite shrimple, really...
The most common birthdate passwords
Hackerbirds speaking. What's the birthdate that's used the most as a password? Come find out.
Connecting to Tor's onion services with .onion addresses
Hackerbirds speaking. Onion services are really cool, and also underappreciated. We want to change that, and decided to explain some of the cool properties behind .onion addresses. We also briefly show how to generate a vanity onion address using mkp224o.
Sharing contacts securely on Signal using NFC
Hackerbirds speaking. What if you could automatically verify your encrypted conversation with just a quick phone tap? We explored that by implementing it in Signal.
A single project taught us a lot
Hackerbirds speaking. We've been working on this cool project for a few months now. It's far from finished but we decided to share some thoughts on everything we've learned so far.
The death of the world wide web
Hackerbirds speaking. We think the world wide web will soon come to an end. Why? Read our rant to find out.
Our least favourite x86 instruction
Hackerbirds speaking. How are you doing ^>? Did you ever ask yourself: "Man, I wish I knew what was the hackerbirds's least favourite x86 instruction"? I'm glad you did! Come check out our new post.
Reasonably secure email client with Qubes OS
Hackerbirds speaking. Come check out our new blog post! This one is about setting up Split GPG in Qubes.
End-to-end verification, and a dream or two
Hackerbirds speaking. Come check out our new blog post! This one is about end-to-end encryption verification.