Building and breaking systems
1. Bitcoin as a measure of distrust Many narratives exist around the intrinsic value of Bitcoin. There is the sound-money/inflation-hedge view served with a good measure of Austrian-school of economics. There is the censorship resistant, peer-to-peer payment interpretation favored by crypto-anarchists. On the other side of the spectrum are the skeptical “no-coiner” stance that there […]
For the majority of time blockchains have been around, holding cryptocurrency necessarily involved jumping through hoops and doing business with a Wild West of unknown, unregulated fintech startups that specialized in providing on/off-ramps to digital assets. Some of those emerging startups grew into household names. Others spectacularly imploded in security incidents, insider fraud or compliance…
Learning the wrong lessons from Internet Exploder [sic] Previous posts have alluded to the role certificate authorities play— or at least are expected to play when operating effectively— in response to discovery of digitally signed malware. Part of the bargain for inclusion in the Windows code-signing ecosystem is that CAs have an obligation to revoke […]
A malleable operating system Windows often gets a bad rap for pulling in other Microsoft technologies and services for providing functionality—think Edge defaulting to Bing. Yet the underlying design of the operating system has been historically modular to a fault, containing an abundance of extensibility hooks. These are interfaces where third-party software can augment or […]
[This is a follow-up on a previous blog post on QCC, the Quining C Compiler which is designed to transform any single-file C program into a valid quine.] Recall that a quine is a program that can print its own source code, or more generally, perform some meaningful computation that includes its own source code […]
Is it possible to create an application that behaves differently based on which website it is downloaded from? At first glance, this seems impossible if the problem is interpreted strictly: the downloaded content must be identical byte-for-byte. (It would be trivial if each site was allowed to alter the contents.) The success criteria could be […]
There is great uncertainty about when “Q-day” arrives for blockchains— when a cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC for short) will exist that can recover private keys that control major digital assets, such as bitcoin and ethereum. Reflecting that uncertainty, there is a wide range of opinions on the urgency of post-quantum transition. Some voices are […]
An earlier post from 2025 covered the case of ScreenConnect, a popular remote-administration utility developed by the vendor ConnectWise for IT administrators to remotely manage Windows PCs. Such applications are inherently “dual-use:” they work equally well for legitimate IT departments to manage their corporate PCs as they do for criminals looking to take over unwitting […]
Often the first application of a technology turns out to be its worst proving grounds. During the 2021 crypto craze, NFTs have achieved dubious notoriety as one of the more inane use-cases of blockchains. Pixelated images of primates trading for outsize sums invited comparisons to the Dutch tulip mania. Once prices crashed many of the […]
Backed into a corner Blockchains are confronting the challenge of quantum computing with renewed urgency as more researchers continue to sound the alarm. Denial is giving way to anger and bargaining. As the first and largest cryptocurrency, Bitcoin has always benefited from a certain immunity against criticism over its original design decisions and selection of […]