20 random bookmarks

2026-01-09

50.

Decorative Cryptography

www.dlp.rip/decorative-cryptography

Last year, I came agross a Linux kernel feature called TCG_TPM2_HMAC. It claims to detect or prevent active and passive interposer attackers.
It all sounds really great. We should care about interposer adversaries. It’s great to use the TPM features that were invented to help us with these problems.

2025-12-17

49.

A security model for systemd

lwn.net/Articles/1042888

Poettering said that he does have a vision for how all of the security-related pieces of systemd are meant to fit together. He wanted to use his talk to explain ""how the individual security-related parts of systemd actually fit together and why they exist in the first place"".

2025-08-27

47.

Inside Windows 3

www.xtof.info/inside-windows3.html

Windows 3 is often said to be just an UI on top of DOS. This article presents some of the inner side of Windows 3.x and will show that it is more ambitious and advanced than that.

2025-07-07

46.

Rewriting Kafka in Rust Async: Insights and Lessons Learned in Rust | Rex Wang

wangjunfei.com/2025/06/18/Rewriting-Kafka-in-Rust-Async-Insights-and-Lessons-Learned#Summary

Achieving high-performance asynchronous Rust projects transcends mere usage of the async/await syntax; it fundamentally relies on a deep understanding of the underlying task scheduling, lock optimization, and architecture design principles.

2025-06-27

44.

How fast are Linux pipes anyway?

mazzo.li/posts/fast-pipes.html

Pipes are ubiquitous in Unix --- but how fast can they go on Linux? In this post we'll iteratively improve a simple pipe-writing benchmark from 3.5GiB/s to 65GiB/s, guided by Linux perf.

2025-05-22

43.

Collaborative Text Editing without CRDTs or OT - Matthew Weidner

mattweidner.com/2025/05/21/text-without-crdts.html

This blog post describes an alternative, straightforward approach to collaborative text editing, without Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) or Operational Transformation (OT). By making text editing flexible and easy to DIY, I hope that the approach will let you create rich collaborative apps that are challenging to build on top of a black-box CRDT/OT library.

2025-04-28

41.

Nick Appleton’s blog and stuff - Building a digital filter for use in synthesisers

www.appletonaudio.com/blog/2022/building-a-digital-filter-for-use-in-synthesisers

This is a tutorial on how to build a digital implementation of a 2nd-order, continuously-variable filter (i.e. one where you can change the parameters runtime) that has dynamic behaviour that mimics an analogue filter.

2025-03-10

39.

The power of interning: making a time series database 2000x smaller in Rust | Blog | Guillaume Endignoux

gendignoux.com/blog/2025/03/03/rust-interning-2000x.html

In this deep dive post, I’ll explain how I used the interning design pattern in Rust to compress this data set by a factor of two thousand! We’ll investigate how to best structure the interner itself, how to tune our data schema to work well with it, and likewise how serialization can best leverage interning.

2025-01-22

35.

Building a tiny Linux from scratch

blinry.org/tiny-linux

Last week, I built a tiny Linux system from scratch, and booted it on my laptop!

2024-11-22

32.

Protecting Signal Keys on Desktop

cryptographycaffe.sandboxaq.com/posts/protecting-signal-desktop-keys

This blogpost describes our investigation and proof of concept to enhance the security of Signal Messenger key management on desktop.

2024-11-20

31.

Why I love Rust for tokenising and parsing

xnacly.me/posts/2024/rust-pldev

Macros, iterators, patterns, error handling and match make Rust almost perfect

2024-11-07

28.

Model Predictive Control in the browser with WebAssembly | garethx

garethx.com/posts/cart-pole-mpc

Commentary on software, robotics, and computer vision.

2024-09-07

17.

Elixir Dev Environment With Nix Flakes

www.mathiaspolligkeit.com/elixir-dev-environment-with-nix-flakes

In a previous article, I described how to set use Nix and Niv to configure an Elixir dev environment. This setup can be simplified by using Nix flakes instead of Niv.

2024-09-04

16.

the spatula

www.thespatula.io/rust/rust_io_uring_echo_server

In this article we build off what we’ve already learned about io_uring and extend that to build an async echo server.

2024-08-29

14.

Overloaded fields, type safety, and you

educatedguesswork.org/posts/text-type-safety

The underlying problem we are facing here with all these examples is the same: having the same set of bits which can mean two different things and needing some way to distinguish those two meanings. Failure to do so leads to ambiguity at best and serious defects at worst. That's why you see so much emphasis in modern systems on type safety and on strict domain separation between different meanings.

2024-07-31

12.

Revealing the Inner Structure of AWS Session Tokens

medium.com/@TalBeerySec/revealing-the-inner-structure-of-aws-session-tokens-a6c76469cba7

TL;DR: A world first reverse engineering analysis of AWS Session Tokens. Prior to our research these tokens were a complete black box…

11.

Compiler Options Hardening Guide for C and C++

best.openssf.org/Compiler-Hardening-Guides/Compiler-Options-Hardening-Guide-for-C-and-C++.html

The Best Practices for OSS Developers working group is dedicated to raising awareness and education of secure code best practices for open source developers.

10.

Build your own SQS or Kafka with Postgres

blog.sequinstream.com/build-your-own-sqs-or-kafka-with-postgres

We're Sequin, an open source message stream built on Postgres. We think Sequin's cool, but you don't need to adopt the project to get started with streaming in Postgres. In fact, you can turn Postgres into a basic queue/stream pretty easily. Below, we share what we've learned so you

2024-07-15

7.

Calculating Position from Raw GPS Data | Telesens

www.telesens.co/2017/07/17/calculating-position-from-raw-gps-data

2024-07-07

6.

Optimizing Large-Scale OpenStreetMap Data with SQLite

jtarchie.com/posts/2024-07-02-optimizing-large-scale-openstreetmap-data-with-sqlite