Latest Posts

Information Security

The Sony NW-A300 Walkman/woman/child 🤖

16 October 2026

I’m taking a break from several unfinished posts, one about the new CodeLLM and General LLM that Apple bundles with macOS and how you can use them to deterministically rebuild shellcode or, well, anything offensive; one about squints the unfinished 4th chapter on the Dorabella cipher. The tragedy of research is that unless there is a sufficiently satisfying conclusion to it I tend to move on to something else leaving some valuable information on the cutting-room floor. It be like that.

Information Security

BLE vs DLP 🤖

4 October 2026

Modern organisations have an ongoing battle with document control and preventing information getting to the wrong systems and people. The solution arrived at by multiple vendors is to tag files (Office documents, email etc) and then establish zones (corporate network vs general internet) which allows for policies to be defined and enforced, e.g “Top Secret” marked documents should never leave “Nuclear Bunker LAN”.

Rants

Grooming Thought: Truthfulness & AI 🤖

29 September 2026

In 2026 we depend on our peers a little less than we do on technology for moral direction. Social media and content farms have moved those peers out of our local communities and social circles onto YouTube, rumble, facebook and so on. Our relationships to these people are complicated, audience capture grooms them and their play to those attention bubbles grooms us. The concepts of truthfulness and the possibility of comprehending “facts” have been under active attack for decades, so much so that political leaders have trained swathes of any populace with the “fake news” defense for anything they simply disagree with.

Stories

Night Radio: Call to the Mercurial spirit

28 September 2026

In the dead hours of a city night, foxes gather in car parks and scatter as I approach and trigger the automatic lights. Mounting a story high wall to drop over the other side, on a road sided by houses, the sign says “Watch out for patrolling guard dogs”. The ambient street lights are now gone, and so pass the hours, first cautiously and then arrogantly.

Development

A Cup of Tea - Part Two

24 September 2026

I would like to decouple the UI elements from the work I will need to do to write the threads, the stories. The game world will contain rooms, which will contain objects and events, which will contain descriptions, state and actions which then change item state. I would like the story writing (I might be so pretentious as to call it “thread weaving”…) to be decoupled, as I said earlier, from the UI. This would allow me to worry less about the cogs and bolts required for scripting and scheduling and just focus on the flow of words.

Development

A Cup of Tea - Part One

11 September 2026

I spend a good chunk of my coding time working with LLMs. The thinking and creativity skills required for coding have been deteriorating in favour of just broad thinking. I don’t feel attached to the projects those sessions produce. They’re interesting, but they’re also the thinking equivalent of negative calories.

Cryptanalysis

Edward Elgar: The Dorabella Cypher - Part Three 🤖

27 August 2026

I reviewed my work from last night and spotted some gaps. First, I didn’t cover the bruteforcing of triad positions to derive a best-fit decryption key, under the assumption that Elgar used some rejigged version of the naive substitution cipher for the Dorabella Cypher. Based on the geometry of the mechanism and the evidenced configurations I bruteforced possible ordering for the triads as well as the read order for a triad (1,2,3 vs 3,2,1, etc).

Cryptanalysis

Edward Elgar: The Dorabella Cypher - Part Two 🤖

23 August 2026

I am still sick and still working on this since I posted earlier today. I am going to split the Dorabella Cipher into two sections, which I will call the “body” and the “key”. The body is every character leading up to the “.” character on line 3; the key is everything afterwards.

Development

Language & Encryption Method Analysis via Machine Learning 🤖

23 August 2026

Analysing sufficiently complex encryption schemes is a battle against possibilities. How many different ways can you shuffle the English alphabet? Or shuffle the columns of a 10 by 10 grid? Does the seemingly random collection of characters in front of you display patterns and are they reflective of real structure or chance?