Life of a Computer Scientist

As we graduate from the Agentic AI 1.0 era, we probably should have learned some lessons: Vibe coding service Replit deleted user’s production database, faked data, told fibs galore (July 21, 2025) Cursor AI YOLO mode lets coding assistant run wild, secur…

copy.fail (CVE-2026-31431) is a Linux kernel bug where an in-place modification of a pipe scatter list by the algif_aead module (crypto module's AEAD algorithm) can be used to modify the disk cache of any file, potentially a setuid binary, by an unprivile…

Yesterday, I gave a talk about my earlier post Economies of AI with supplemental material to illustrate the point (slides in Chinese).

This is a cost-benefit analysis on using AI to solve problems and comparing how it fares with classical methods, e.g. deterministic algorithms or manual labor, and the cost of the creation of automation.

Fiber optics are becoming cheaper and more affordable for homes nowadays, and they could be a fantastic alternative for RJ-45 10GBase-T Ethernet.

Yesterday, I was looking for whether OpenBSD supports ZFS (it may have been briefly, but the code is no longer there).

(Insert obligatory AI generated Ghibli styled graphics here.)

On an old MacBook Pro 2019, I've been trying out Secretive (secretive.dev) to let me use the Touch ID (aka SecureEnclave) as a hardware SSH key, like how I would use Yubikey on other computers.

PKCS #10 (RFC 2986) certificate signing request (X509_REQ) typically contains at minimum the subject and the public key to be signed into a X.509 certificate issued by a certificate authority (CA).

For long-running microservices that can act as both client and server, it is possible the lifetime of the microservice might outlive its TLS certificate validity, especially if an organization opts for a security policy to rotate TLS certificates quickly…

s3backer allows you mount a single large file split into smaller chunks on S3 as a local file, via FUSE.

Breaking news!

In C++ creator calls for help to defend programming language from 'serious attacks', the article mentioned a few proposals: Profiles (C++) by Bjarne Stroustrup, work in progress on GitHub.

Recently there is news reverberating across the interwebs that Tiny Linux kernel tweak could cut datacenter power use by 30%.

In this article, we discuss why RAID 1+0 (stripes of mirrors) is better than RAID 0+1 (mirror of stripes) for those who are building a storage array.

Update: I was only able to get irony to work up to the 2019 version, but irony has been unmaintained since 2023 and has now since suffered significant bit-rot, and I could not get the 2023 version to work.

A backdoor compromising SSH server introduced in xz/liblzma 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 was reported today to oss-security by Andres Freund.

A few weeks ago, I saw this video by Techmoan introducing the MQA-CD.

Carrot and stick security design is the idea to have frontend and backend work together to enforce security policies in software.

There has been renewed interest in programming languages after The White House recently published a recommendation suggesting the transition to a memory safe language as a national security objective.

If you let a monkey hit random keys on a typewriter for an infinite amount of time, will it happen to write the complete works of Shakespeare?

This recent article about AlphaGeometry being able to solve Olympiad geometry proof problems brings to my attention that there have been active research in recent years to combine deep learning with theorem proving.

My camera journey is a little meandering, but it can roughly be roughly summarized as "all I want is the perfect camera."

I saw a post like this fly by on my Facebook feed today.

Since the last time I built my ZFS pool in 2016 with 4x 1TB SSDs in a thunderbolt 2 enclosure, I ran out of space in 2019 and upgraded the SSDs to 4x 2TB.