Articles
Long-form writing on tech, culture, and the edges of the internet.
GitHub breached. Scope unknown.
GitHub disclosed an internal data breach with no mechanism stated. Operator analysis of confirmed facts, structural exposure, and required tenant action.
How GCC 4.3 deleted a NULL check in 2009
How undefined behavior in C lets compilers delete safety checks, why it drives most memory-safety CVEs, and what it means for AI-generated code.
March 2019 changed who reads binaries
Free disassemblers and decompilers changed who can audit binaries. The defender, attacker, and AI safety implications are now playing out in practice.
Microsoft issued a login code no one requested
A single-use Microsoft code arriving unrequested is evidence an identity boundary acted without its owner - a control that must be verified, not trusted.
SMS 2FA was never authentication
Microsoft is replacing SMS one-time codes with passkeys. M. Hale defines what failed, why it failed, and where the boundary still leaks.
The 2021 bucket that sat open for nine years
Abandoned files, forgotten buckets, and stale subdomains are the cheapest way attackers get in. Here is how to find yours before they do.
The breach isn't the leak. It's the leaker.
A board-level reading of a U.S. cybersecurity agency credential exposure on GitHub, framed as runtime control failure and institutional risk.
The extension on your dock just shipped malware
A compromised VSCode extension reached GitHub. Breakdown of the trust boundary that failed and what developer endpoints actually expose.
The watermark proves almost nothing useful
OpenAI's adoption of Google's SynthID watermark is a useful but partial signal. Here's what it actually means for forensics and security teams.
What a $5 VPS honeypot taught me
An open-source honeypot probe database queryable via curl, HTTP, and MCP - what it catches, why it helps small defenders, and where the risks actually sit.
Your bot defenses just failed
A board-level view of how a stealth Playwright build erodes the assurance value of anti-bot and CAPTCHA controls across the business.
Zero-click chains broke the user-in-the-loop model
Zero-click malware does not need user action. It needs a reachable parser. What fails, why it fails, and what must be true.