Serving a static site over Tor from your own server
A hidden service in ten lines of config The “dark web” sounds exotic, but the mechanics of putting a site on it are closer to a reverse proxy config than anything exotic. David Alvarez Rosa published a walkthrough of self-hosting a personal site as a Tor hidden service, and the whole setup is small enough […]
Inside the Intel 8087’s Tangent Algorithm: CORDIC With a Polynomial Twist
Ken Shirriff has published another die-level deep dive, this time reverse-engineering how the Intel 8087 computes tangents. The 8087 was Intel’s 1980 floating-point coprocessor for the 8086 and 8088, the chip you soldered into an empty socket on an IBM PC motherboard to make spreadsheets and CAD stop crawling. It computed a tangent in about […]
Uber’s fix for retry storms: only retry the errors you own
Uber published a post this week on retry storms that is worth your time if you operate anything with more than two services in a call chain. The interesting part is not the math, though the math is good. It is the admission that the industry-standard fixes, backoff, jitter, retry budgets, all manage the volume […]
The signing keys in US driver’s license barcodes were hiding in plain sight
Flip over a US driver’s license and you will find a PDF417 barcode that encodes your name, birth date, license number, and a pile of jurisdiction-specific fields. Most states leave it as plaintext. A few sign it. Security researcher Ryan Fahey has now shown that for the states whose cards are made by Canadian Bank […]
Cutting eBPF CPU cost by 90 percent with inode memoization
A developer working on an eBPF-based security agent found that the most expensive thing his agent did was not enforcing policy decisions. It was figuring out which policy applied in the first place. The fix, an inode-level cache inside the kernel, cut kernel CPU cost by about 90 percent in benchmarks, and the whole thing […]
RSA-260 falls to GPU sieve built and run by coding agents
Cognition published a factorization of RSA-260 this week, a 260-digit number from the old RSA Factoring Challenge. That makes it the largest publicly solved RSA challenge number, beating RSA-250, which had held the record since February 2020. The interesting part is not the number itself. It is who did the work and what it cost. […]
Running a 2.8T parameter model from SSDs on a MacBook Pro
A 2.8 trillion parameter model just ran on a laptop, and it didn’t fit in RAM when it did. A project on Hacker News streamed Kimi K3’s weights off four SSDs at about 1 token per second on a MacBook Pro, which is slow by chatbot standards and remarkable by any other measure. What Kimi […]
Signing TLS Handshakes Inside a TPM: Hardware-Bound Keys in Go
A recent post by Christian Bshaatsbergen walks through a technique more Go developers should know: terminating TLS with a private key that exists only inside a TPM and never touches process memory. The post, Signing TLS handshakes inside a TPM, demonstrates the whole chain with a small library, and the mechanics are worth unpacking. Why […]
Azure Launches 248 and 372 vCPU Sizes for D and E v7 Virtual Machines
Massive Compute Densities Reach General Availability Azure has officially made the largest tiers of its Dlsv7, Dsv7, and Esv7 virtual machine lines generally available, offering VM configurations scaling up to 248 and 372 vCPUs. Powered by Intel Xeon 6 6973PC processors (Granite Rapids architecture), these instances represent a significant leap in raw CPU core density […]
seL4 Microkernel Completes Full Formal Security Proofs on AArch64 Architecture
Formal verification represents the gold standard in software security, replacing probabilistic testing with mathematical proofs that code behaves exactly according to its formal specification. Proofcraft, in collaboration with the seL4 Foundation and supported by the UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), has announced the completion of formal security proofs for the seL4 microkernel on the […]
Bridging Reverse Engineering and AI Agents: Deep Dive into the x64dbg MCP Server
Reverse engineering native binaries on Windows has traditionally been an intensely manual discipline, requiring reverse engineers to step through disassembly, inspect register states, analyze memory dumps, and reconstruct control flow graphs line by line. The release of the x64dbg-mcp-server project brings the Model Context Protocol (MCP) directly into the x64dbg debugger ecosystem. By exposing native […]
Securing Windows Named Pipes: Defending Interprocess Communication from Local Privilege Escalation
Interprocess communication (IPC) on Microsoft Windows relies heavily on named pipes for exchanging structured data between local services, administrative tools, and user-space applications. Because named pipes function across session boundaries and provide network accessibility via SMB, they represent a persistent target for adversaries seeking local privilege escalation (LPE), lateral movement, and defense evasion. New defensive […]