Backdrifting

Memory: Allocation Schemes and Relocatable Code Posted 4/26/20 This Spring I’m a graduate teaching assistant for an operating systems course.

Lambda Calculus: A gentle introduction and broader context Posted 3/22/20 I TA’d a course on programming languages in Fall 2019, and consistently got questions about lambda calculus.

Consensus Models in the Pursuance Paradigm Posted 2/9/20 I’ve written a lot recently about defining group dynamics in Pursuance.

The Soviet Cybernetic Economy Posted 1/30/20 The Soviet Union designed and redesigned a national computer network that would deliver all economic information to a central database, input it into a feedback loop cybernetic economic model, and make autonomo…

Pursuance Group Dynamics Posted 9/9/19 In the past several posts I’ve written about the technical design of Pursuance in terms of the permissions and communications systems, and how this allows collaboration between different groups on the platform.

Pursuance Task Management Posted 7/23/19 Pursuances are built around specific goals, or “pursuances”, so it makes sense for the Pursuance platform to be task oriented.

Pursuance Roles Posted 7/14/19 Pursuance is a collaboration tool for activists, journalists, and other groups seeking positive change.

Pursuance Prototype: Email?

Pursuance Project Initial Impressions Posted 6/21/19 I recently had a conference call with several excellent people at the Pursuance Project, a platform facilitating collaboration between users working towards shared social goals, and enabling collaborati…

Group-Grid Theory for Classifying Social Groups Posted 6/13/19 I’ve recently been introduced to Group-Grid Theory, a framework from anthropology for classifying group dynamics and power structures.

Steganography and Steganalysis with Fourier Transforms Posted 5/8/19 This post is a high-level introduction to hiding messages in images using Fourier Transforms on the color data.

Infection and Quarantine Posted 10/23/18 Network Science is a relatively young discipline, which uses a small number of basic models to represent a wide variety of network phenomenon, ranging from human social interactions, to food webs, to the structure…

Patching Registration Checks, An Introduction Posted 7/31/18 Taking a break from recent social architecture posts, here’s some more technical security content.

Democratic Censorship Posted 4/22/18 There’s been a lot of discourse recently about the responsibility social media giants like Facebook and Twitter have to police their communities.

Hacker Community Espionage Posted 1/7/18 I recently got to see a talk at the Chaos Communication Congress titled “When the Dutch secret service knocks on your door”, with the following description: This is a story of when the Dutch secret service knocked…

Alcoholics Anonymous as Decentralized Architecture Posted 1/6/18 Most examples of decentralized organization are contemporary: Black Lives Matter, Antifa, the Alt-Right, and other movements developed largely on social media.

Halftone QR Codes Posted 12/19/17 I recently encountered a very neat encoding technique for embedding images into Quick Response Codes, like so: A full research paper on the topic can be found here, but the core of the algorithm is actually very simple: G…

Cooperative Censorship Posted 8/19/17 I have long been an opponent of censorship by any authority.

Braess’s Paradox Posted 8/8/17 I had the great fortune of seeing a talk by Brian Hayes on Braess’s Paradox, an interesting network congestion phenomenon.

Port Knocking Posted 7/17/17 Port knocking is a somewhat obscure technique for hiding network services.

Merkle’s Puzzle-box Key Exchange Posted 7/17/17 Cryptography is fantastic, but much of it suffers from being unintuitive and math-heavy.

Decentralized Networks Posted 7/9/17 A solution to the acyclic graph problem has been found!

Ruggedized Networks Posted 7/6/17 This post adds to my posts on modeling social organizations with Neural Networks (post 1) (post 2) The Problem The original model defined the objective as minimizing communications costs while getting an estimate of the e…

Cryptocurrency Tutorial Posted 7/5/17 I was recently asked to give a talk on bitcoin and other related cryptocurrencies.

Social networks should not be DAGs Posted 6/23/17 This post continues the discussion of modeling social organizations using Neural Networks.

Optimizing Network Structure Posted 6/14/17 We want to develop an “optimal” network.

Network Coding Posted 6/6/17 I was recently introduced to the idea of Network Coding, a relatively obscure and rarely implemented technique for simplifying routing and increasing network throughput and security.

Captcha Posted 5/25/17 Recently I was working on a MUD, or Multi-user-dungeon with a friend.

SnailDoor, the Socketless Backdoor Posted 3/7/17 Imagine a system where users can ssh in, but once logged in cannot create any sockets (or at least, all connections are blocked by a firewall).

The Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange Made Simple Posted 1/10/17 To send encrypted messages to one another we need one of two things: Public/Private Keypairs A Shared Secret The Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange is a technique for generating a shared secret securely,…

Puddle Posted 11/14/16 Puddle is a prototype anonymity network designed and implemented by a friend (Taylor Dahlin) and myself.

Traceroute is Black Magic Posted 8/17/16 Traceroute is a utility for detecting the hops between your computer and a destination server.

Let’s talk about touch-tone telephones!