Writing about energy, technology, and the systems behind everyday life
On June 22, 2026, a signature ordered the retirement of signatures. The finale of this series: what the executive orders actually require, why keys must move before signatures, why elliptic curves fall before RSA, and what the migration looks like from inside a certificate authority. The bombe is in a museum. The next machine will not take its enemies by surprise.
Everything that makes a qubit powerful also makes it die at a touch. This post is the reality check: what error correction actually costs, where the machines really are in 2026, and the honest answer to the question everyone asks about Q-Day. It is not a date. It is a race closing from both ends.
Shor's algorithm has a heart, and it is a prism. This is the payoff post of the series: how a quantum computer makes every wrong answer cancel itself out and leaves the hidden rhythm standing alone. The room of shouters goes silent, the tuning fork answers, and the opera singer finally breaks the glass.
Hiding inside every factoring problem is a completely different problem, one that repeats like a heartbeat. In 1994 Peter Shor found it, and the discovery converted the wall protecting RSA into a rhythm. This post walks the bridge, with nothing but clock arithmetic and one worked example you can check by hand.
The last time you bought something online, your computer agreed on a secret with a total stranger while the whole world watched, and the math behind that moment has never been broken. This post is about why. RSA, ECC, and the one lever the industry has always pulled when it gets nervous: bigger keys. Classically, that lever is magnificent. The next post is about the hidden flaw that breaks it.
On July 15, MISO declared the first summer EEA2 in its modern record. The headlines said record heat. The data I archived while it happened says 4,475 megawatts of generation vanished from the books between breakfast and mid-afternoon. This is the anatomy of an emergency that worked.
Quantum computers do not try every possibility at once. A qubit is not a coin that is both heads and tails. Most explanations of quantum computing are wrong in specific ways that matter. This post is the working model that the popular explanations refuse to give you.
The Germans built a cipher with 159 quintillion possible settings and concluded it could never be broken. Alan Turing's team at Bletchley Park broke it within the hour, day after day, not by counting through the possibilities but by exploiting a single tiny structural flaw in the math. This is the first post in a series on how the same kind of move is about to happen to the cryptography that…
I was getting ready for an upcoming trip to Europe and picked up my laptop's power brick to check the voltage. The label said 100 to 240V, which was fine. But then I noticed something odd: who runs on 100 volts? The answer turned out to be one of the best pieces of accidental history I've ever stumbled into.
I run Pi-hole on my home network. Most days I don't think about it. But one stray entry in the query log caught my eye, and what I thought would be a five-minute mystery turned into a seven-year-old bug in Charter's authoritative DNS infrastructure that nobody at Charter is going to find from the inside.