Writing

Engineering·November 9, 2026·3 min read

A trained nonlinear encoder, vector-quantized codebook and decoder are interesting. An idealized low bitrate is not the same thing as good reconstructed speech.

Engineering·November 9, 2026·6 min read

I built five small speech and audio implementations and measured their behavior. ASR errors, turn detection, codecs, prosody and classifier ablations each have different ways to mislead you.

Engineering·November 9, 2026·3 min read

How I connected Swift and Kotlin clients to agent workflows, built Core ML and TensorFlow Lite integration boundaries, and kept authorization on the backend.

Engineering·November 9, 2026·6 min read

Building an agent that talks is the easy demo. The harder work is authenticated tools, retries, evaluation, telemetry, CRM synchronization and the people who have to operate it.

Engineering·November 7, 2026·3 min read

Retry logic looks harmless in isolation. When a gateway, application service and SDK each apply their own retry policy, a single failed operation can multiply into a dependency outage. That interaction is the starting point for my retry-storm analysis.

Engineering·November 7, 2026·2 min read

An encrypted database value can be perfectly unreadable to an attacker and still end up in the wrong record. If a service moves ciphertext between tenants without binding the record's context, the system may de

Engineering·November 7, 2026·2 min read

When a robotics node starts, I don't want "the process launched" to be confused with "the robot is ready to move." The ROS 2 managed-node design makes this difference explicit with lifecycle states. That's a be

Engineering·November 7, 2026·2 min read

I traced Stuxnet as a boundary-crossing problem: from Windows software into industrial control commands. Calling it sophisticated Windows malware misses the physical-system risk. The attack path targeted software used to supervise and program indust

Engineering·November 7, 2026·2 min read

Raspberry Robin showed why incident timelines need separate columns for initial access and what attackers do later. Microsoft's October 2022 research described a USB-propagating worm that was connected to a bro

Engineering·November 7, 2026·2 min read

Melissa demonstrates why I include document and user-interaction boundaries in propagation analysis, not only remotely exploitable network services. In March 1999, a Microsoft Word document with a malicious macro relied on someone o

Engineering·November 7, 2026·2 min read

In my analysis of Mirai, the failure starts with a simple hardware assumption: devices that ship with weak or default remote-management credentials will eventually be found by automated scanners. In 2016, many cameras, recorders and routers were ex

Engineering·November 7, 2026·2 min read

The starting point I emphasized in my NotPetya review is a trusted enterprise distribution path: the update path for Ukrainian accounting software M.E.Doc. It then moved laterally and disrupted organizations well beyond its initial target geography.

Engineering·November 7, 2026·2 min read

In my review of WannaCry's propagation path, the network boundary matters as much as the payload. The May 2017 outbreak combined ransomware with self-propagation across vulnerable Windows SMB services.

Engineering·November 7, 2026·2 min read

The trust failure I examined in Android toll-fraud reporting is the confirmation step: an OTP does not protect a purchase if malicious software on the same device can intercept or submit it. Microsoft documented Android toll-fraud workflows in which malware tried to subscribe victim

Engineering·November 7, 2026·2 min read

In reviewing the Joker/Bread campaigns, I focused on the separation between an app doing its advertised job and subscription activity the owner never authorized. Google's 2020 report on Bread—often called Joker—documented that exact billing-fraud problem. The family kept adapting as defenses a

Engineering·November 7, 2026·2 min read

Triada challenges an app-centric mobile threat model in an important way. Google's Android security team described a malware family that moved from rooting attempts into compromised system images. The malicious cod

Engineering·November 7, 2026·2 min read

The entry point I focused on in FluBot was the delivery-text lure, because the later banking and contact-abuse behavior depended on the permissions granted after that initial deception. But FluBot used exactly that: convince someone to follow a delivery or voicemail lure, install a malicious Android application, and grant it un

Engineering·November 6, 2026·3 min read

I scheduled 100 calls against one in-process idempotency key. The side-effect callback ran once; a real crash or a second worker is still untested.

Engineering·November 6, 2026·2 min read

I sent 200 scheduled refresh attempts through one local token family. Only one issued a successor; multiple workers would need a different test.

Engineering·November 6, 2026·3 min read

I tried consuming one action-bound challenge 200 times. My single-process guard accepted one call and rejected 199; shared-store races remain untested.

Engineering·November 6, 2026·3 min read

What requestHash protects, what the server must verify, and why an integrity verdict is not a substitute for authorization.

Engineering·November 6, 2026·3 min read

Design privacy-conscious auth decision logs that help explain failures without recording the credentials that caused them.

Engineering·November 6, 2026·4 min read

A valid App Attest or Play Integrity result cannot authorize a user. I walk through the server decisions separately and test them with synthetic inputs.

Engineering·November 6, 2026·4 min read

A timeout does not undo a committed write. Model retries, duplicate operations and correctly scoped idempotency keys.

Engineering·November 6, 2026·3 min read

Avoid orphaned jobs and stale UI state by understanding cooperative cancellation, scopes, and background work.

Engineering·November 6, 2026·3 min read

Practical tests for broken object-level authorization in authenticated mobile and backend APIs.

Engineering·November 6, 2026·4 min read

Model sign-in, refresh rotation, expiry, step-up recovery, and revocation without creating a hidden authentication bypass.

Engineering·November 6, 2026·4 min read

How Task.checkCancellation, child tasks, stale results, and server-side effects interact in an iOS app.

Journal·November 5, 2026·2 min read

Why this corner of the internet isn't going to be only about code.

Build Note·March 29, 2026·12 min read

A practical look at building and evaluating device trust signals under jailbreaks, instrumentation, replay, and tampered clients, with emphasis on server-side verification and failure-aware design.