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humanity has built the records of FATE by accident
Sep 2, 2026 · original
Chrono Cross was one of my favorite games from my childhood. In it, the protagonist, Serge, travels between two dimensions that resulted from a fracture in the timeline. This essay isn t about Serge, however. It s about the ordinary people who inhabit El Nido, the archipelago where the story takes place. On the El Nido archipelago, people consult mysterious devices known as the Records of FATE. These devices are spread throughout the islands of the archipelago, and people routinely visit them for guidance about their lives. They consult the Records when considering where to go and what to do. Consulting the Records is not considered strange or remarkable, but rather an obvious thing to do. It is simply a normal fact of life for the residents of El Nido. But what are the Records of FATE, anyway, and why does FATE suspiciously look like an acronym? As it turns out, the Records aren t mysti
Why I am looking for Jellycat alternatives now
Mar 28, 2026 · original
Many readers of my blog will note that I used to be quite enthusiastic about Jellycat stuffed animals , especially their Bashful series, but I haven t talked much about them lately. Outside of being well-designed, they also supported small business: the overwhelming majority of my collection has been purchased from independently-run stores, including one run by a close friend of mine in downtown Seattle. Unfortunately in the past few years, Jellycat have pursued a “brand elevation strategy” (their words, not mine), incrementally dropping small businesses from their network in favor of large chains and directing people to their website instead. In 2025, this included dropping hundreds of independent shops; around 100 of these were in the UK alone , with no option for appeal, explicitly as part of this strategy. Many of these retailers had supported the brand for decades, and described the
Why leaders often disappoint us
Jan 22, 2026 · original
There s an old saying about not meeting your heroes. In practice, leaders tend to confirm this over time. This is true across domains, and it s rarely a single gaffe that does it. The interesting question is why the disappointment usually takes the same shape. Disappointment does not always show up in the form of a bad conversation. Often there isn t any conversation at all, at least not in the way people imagine one. As space disappears, interaction collapses into reaction. Responses come faster, positions are stated rather than tested, and dialogue gives way to declaration. At a certain distance, leadership becomes parasocial by default, taking the form of broadcast. There is nothing to push back on, only things to react to. By the time the gaffe happens, the system has already collapsed. The accumulation of influence Much of the time, leadership emerges through accumulated influence:
vm.overcommit_memory=2 is always the right setting for servers
Dec 17, 2025 · original
The Linux kernel has a feature where you can tune the behavior of memory allocations: the vm.overcommit_memory sysctl. When overcommit is enabled (sadly, this is the default), the kernel will typically return a mapping when brk(2) or mmap(2) is called to increase a program s heap size, regardless of whether or not memory is available. Sounds good, right? Not really. While overcommit is convenient for application developers, it fundamentally changes the contract of memory allocation: a successful allocation no longer represents an atomic acquisition of a real resource. Instead, the returned mapping serves as a deferred promise , which will only be fulfilled by the page fault handler if and when the memory is first accessed. This is an important distinction, as it means overcommit effectively replaces a fail-fast transactional allocation model with a best-effort one where failures are only
Rethinking sudo with object capabilities
Dec 12, 2025 · original
I hate sudo with a passion. It represents everything I find offensive about the modern Unix security model: like su , it must be a SUID binary to work it is monolithic: everything sudo does runs as root , there is no privilege separation it uses a non-declarative and non-hierarchical configuration format leading to forests of complex access-control policies and user errors due to lack of concision it supports plugins to extend the policy engine which run directly in the privileged SUID process I could go on, but hopefully you get the point. Alpine moved to doas as the default privilege escalation tool several years ago, in Alpine 3.15, because of the large attack surface that sudo brings due to its design. Systems built around identity-based access control tend to rely on ambient authority: policy is centralized and errors in the policy configuration or bugs in the policy engine can allo
I want you to understand
Dec 3, 2025 · original
I want you to understand what it is like to be transgender during this time. I want you to understand the threat to doctor-patient confidentiality. In June, the Department of Justice began targeting clinics and health systems which provide treatment for gender dysphoria with subpoenas requesting personally identifying information about patients. While these subpoenas currently target clinics which provide services to minors, it is clear that they are testing the waters for expanding their inquiry to adult patients. Although compliance with these subpoenas is likely illegal as disclosure of these records would violate HIPAA, I worry that I will be included on a list of transgender individuals and targeted for discrimination as a result. I want you to understand the threat to medical care for trans people more broadly. Like with the subpoenas, these efforts are starting with trans children
Two weeks of wayback
Jul 8, 2025 · original
A poorly kept secret is that the X11 graphics stack is under-maintained as resources shift towards the maintenance of Wayland s graphics stack instead. To some extent, technical steering committees in major distributions have been watching this situation develop for the past few years with increasing concern, as limited maintenance becomes a security risk: bugs accumulate and already burdened distribution security teams have to carry the security maintenance load in an absence of new releases. In Alpine, we have been discussing the sunset of the standalone X.org server implementation for several years for these reasons to come up with a strategy that allows us to keep supporting X11-based desktop environments in a world without the X.org server. Recently, a group of neofascist reactionaries announced a fork of the X.org server which, amongst other things, has introduced new security bugs
C SBOMs, and how pkgconf can solve this problem
Feb 9, 2025 · original
I recently attended FOSDEM, and saw a talk in the SBOM devroom about a software engineer s attempts to build an SBOM for a C project . There are a number of reasons why the C ecosystem is difficult to reflect in SBOMs, but the largest problem is that the C ecosystem is fractured across a handful of build systems: GNU Autotools, CMake and Meson are the primary build systems used by projects but there are hundreds of others in the long tail. A key thing that these build systems have in common is that they can integrate with pkg-config, which is a database that describes available build dependencies and their use. This database, naturally, is of significant relevance to SBOM generation, because it already has most of the relevant information needed to generate an SBOM. pkgconf has a bomtool utility which is intended to generate SBOMs using pkg-config data . But how can this be leveraged in
The XZ Utils backdoor is a symptom of a larger problem
Apr 2, 2024 · original
On March 29th, Andres Freund dropped a bombshell on the oss-security mailing list : recent XZ Utils source code tarball releases made by Jia Tan were released with a backdoor. Thankfully, for multiple reasons, Alpine was not impacted by this backdoor , despite the recent source code tarball releases being published in Alpine edge . But what lessons do we need to learn from this incident? The software supply chain is not real As a community of hackers, we have built an exhaustive commons of free software released under various free licenses such as the GPL and the Apache 2.0 license. Software packages in this commons have taken over the corporate world, because it enabled more rapid innovation by allowing developers to focus more on the business logic of their applications, rather than low-level details. This has been overall a good thing for society: from the open commons we have spawned
Most breaches actually begin in corp
Dec 7, 2023 · original
Readers of my blog will note that while I believe Rust is an excellent tool for developers to leverage when building software, that there is a disconnect between the developers leveraging Rust features to improve their software and many of the advocates who talk about the language, which I believe is counterproductive when it comes to Rust advocacy. For example, I see takes like these frequently, which generally advocate that if only we adopted memory safe languages, we would solve all security problems in computing forever: If it s estimated that writing in a memory safe language prevented 750 vulnerabilities (in just one codebase!) and IBM calculated [1] the average cost of a data breach is $4.45 million, that s over $3.3 billion saved by moving to memory safety. Don t get me wrong: it sure would be nice to change to a memory safe language and save $3.3 billion in losses, but in realit
Writing portable ARM64 assembly
Apr 13, 2023 · original
An unfortunate side effect of the rising popularity of Apple s ARM-based computers is an increase in unportable assembly code which targets the 64-bit ARM ISA. This is because developers are writing these bits of assembly code to speed up their programs when run on Apple s ARM-based computers, without considering the other 64-bit ARM devices out there, such as SBCs and servers running Linux or BSD. The good news is that it is very easy to write assembly which targets Apple s computers as well as the other 64-bit ARM devices running operating systems other than Darwin. It just requires being aware of a few differences between the Mach-O and ELF ABIs, as well as knowing what Apple-specific syntax extensions to avoid. By following the guidance in this blog, you will be able to write assembly code which is portable between Apple s toolchain, the official ARM assembly toolchain, and the GNU t
Help migrate a community from Discord to something else
Mar 8, 2023 · original
During the height of the pandemic, I set up a community using Discord. Since then, it has evolved into being one of the most active (yet tight-knit) technical communities on Discord: members ranging from all around the world and from all sorts of technical and social backgrounds participate in conversations every day on a variety of topics. Why leave Discord? The current situation sounds pretty good, right? Well, as Richard Stallman warned, proprietary services masquerading as software do not necessarily act on behalf of the user. In this specific case, despite paying money to Discord for its services, there have been many instances where it has been transparently obvious to myself and the rest of our team that Discord is not really acting in the interest of our community. Some examples: Discord has banned the accounts of several community members over the past 18 months. When pressed on
pkgconf, CVE-2023-24056 and disinformation
Jan 24, 2023 · original
Readers will have noticed that two maintenance releases of pkgconf were cut over the weekend, 1.9.4 and 1.8.1 respectively, to address CVE-2023-24056 , a pkg-config specific variation of the now-classic billion laughs attack . While fixing software defects is important, a lot went wrong with how this CVE was reported and the motivations behind its disclosure, and for my own catharsis, I want to talk about this. The origin of pkgconf To hopefully explain why I am so bothered by all of this, let s first understand the history of pkgconf: a project I began noodling on in March 2011. 2011 was a particularly rough year for me. In January, my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and declined to disclose this to anyone. When I came back to Oklahoma to visit my parents in early March, I walked into my dad s house and found him jaundiced. I drove him to the emergency room, and was informe
Building fair webs of trust by leveraging the OCAP model
Dec 3, 2022 · original
Since the beginning of the Internet, determining the trustworthiness of participants and published information has been a significant point of contention. Many systems have been proposed to solve these underlying concerns, usually pertaining to specific niches and communities, but these pre-existing solutions are nebulous at best. How can we build infrastructure for truly democratic Webs of Trust? Fairness in reputation-based systems When considering the design of a reputation-based system, fairness must be paramount, but what is fairness in this context? A reputation-based system can be considered fair if it appropriately balances the concerns of the data publisher, the data subject, and the data consumer. Regulatory frameworks such as the GDPR attempt to provide guidance concering how this balance can be accomplished in the general sense of building internet services, but these framewo
Twitter's demise is ActivityPub's future
Nov 12, 2022 · original
Earlier today, I deleted all of my tweets and left Twitter forever. While I plan on leaving a nightlight thread for a while, I will eventually close my account, assuming Elon doesn t do it for me. The past week has been an emotional rollercoaster for me as I have watched everything play out. I was one of the original fediverse users when Indymedia UK stood up the indy.im StatusNet instance at the end of 2010. After some time, Evan Prodromou got bored with the StatusNet code base and started Pump instead, with the network losing the largest instance at that time, identi.ca . With the network fragmented as a result of that switch, I got bored of it and started using Twitter instead. Eventually StatusNet was forked by Matt Lee and a few other FSF staffers and became GNU Social. I was not really around during this time, but it was around that time that GamerGate happened, which created a net
The internet is broken due to structural injustice
Oct 27, 2022 · original
Over the past few years, I ve come to realize that the Internet as we know it is utterly broken. Lately, I ve also been pondering how participants in the modern Internet have enabled and perpetuated harm to society at large. Repeatedly, we have seen the independence of the commons chipped away by powerful men who wish for participants to serve their own whims, while those who raise concerns with these developments are either shunned, banned or doxed. On Friday, October 28th, we will see another demonstration of these structural injustices where the commons takes another loss to the whims of a powerful man. Last time, it was freenode s takeover by Andrew Lee , and this time it will be Twitter s takeover by Elon Musk. No, really, the deal is already concluded: TWTR will be delisted from NASDAQ on Friday . Will this be the end of Twitter? Probably not, but it will be the end of the current
So you've decided to start a free software consultancy...
Aug 11, 2022 · original
Recently a friend of mine told me that he was planning to start a free software consultancy, and asked for my advice, as I have an extensive background doing free software consulting for a living. While I have already given him some advice on how to proceed, I thought it might be nice to write a blog expanding on my answer, so that others who are interested in pursuing free software consulting may benefit. Framing the value proposition There are many things to consider when launching a free software consultancy, but the key aspect to consider is how you frame the value proposition of your consultancy. A common mistake that new founders make when starting their free software consultancies is to frame the value proposition toward developers. Rather than doing this, you should frame your value proposition towards management. For example, my friend described the value proposition of his cons
Free software grows as a function of social utility
Aug 6, 2022 · original
A frequent complaint I see from users and inexperienced contributors concerning free software projects is that they are allegedly not doing enough to grow the userbase, sometimes even asserting that a fork is necessary to right the course of the project. Are these complaints missing the point, or do they have merit? How do free software projects grow their userbase into thriving communities? In general, these complaints go something like this: [PROJECT] developers have explicitly said they do not want the project to grow. The [PROJECT] is its own worst enemy, and this is just the latest example of it I ve seen. I don t trust the direction of [PROJECT], and neither should you. The experienced maintainer understands that we must play the long game, not the short game. Tactics such as embrace, extend, extinguish are largely only effective when maintainers are looking at the short term pictu
Migrating away from WordPress
Aug 4, 2022 · original
Astute followers of this blog might have noticed that the layout has dramatically changed. This is because I migrated away from WordPress last weekend, switching back to Hugo after a few years. This time around, the blog is fully self-hosted, rather than depending on GitHub pages, and the deployment pipeline is reasonably secure. Perhaps we can call it a secure blog factory with some further work, even. When most people deploy static websites anymore, they use a service like Netlify, or GitHub pages to do it. These services are reasonable, but when you do not own your own infrastructure, you are dependent on a third party continuing to offer the service. With the latest news that GitLab has decided to delete user data that has not been touched in over a year , depending on third party services may be something to start considering in your security and reliability posture. Migrating back
How efficient can cat(1) be?
Jul 17, 2022 · original
There have been a few initiatives in recent years to implement a new userspace base system for Linux distributions as an alternative to the GNU coreutils and BusyBox. Recently, one of the authors of one of these proposed implementations made the pitch in a few IRC channels that her cat implementation , which was derived from OpenBSD’s implementation, was the most efficient. But is it actually? Understanding what cat actually does At the most basic level, cat takes one or more files and dumps them to stdout . But do we need to actually use stdio for this? Actually, we don’t, and most competent cat implementations at least use read(2) and write(2) if not more advanced approaches. If we consider cat as a form of buffer copy between an arbitrary file descriptor and STDOUT_FILENO , we can understand what the most efficient strategy to use for cat would be: splicing. Anything which isn’t doing

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