I made my VM think it has a CPU fan
Why bother? Some malware samples are known to do various checks to determine if they are running in a virtual machine. One of the common checks is to look for the presence of certain hardware components that are typically not emulated in virtualized environments. One such component is the CPU fan. One of the observed […]
Performance Debugging with LLVM-mca: Simulating the CPU
Some time ago I had a performance problem that wasn’t easy to explain by just looking at the code, since the version I expected to be faster was actually slower. Since the problem is simple yet illustrative, I am using it as a showcase on how to debug performance issues using llvm-mca. According to it’s […]
Bloom Filters by Example
简体中文 A Bloom filter is a data structure designed to tell you, rapidly and memory-efficiently, whether an element is present in a set. The price paid for this efficiency is that a Bloom filter is a probabilistic data structure: it tells us that the element either definitely is not in the set or may be […]
Show HN: Octelium – FOSS Alternative to Teleport, Cloudflare, Tailscale, Ngrok
Table of Contents What is Octelium? Octelium is a free and open source, self-hosted, unified platform for zero trust resource access that is primarily meant to be a modern alternative to remote access VPNs and similar tools. It is built to be generic enough to not only operate as a zero-config remote access VPN (i.e. […]
Implementing fast TCP fingerprinting with eBPF
In this article I want to document my journey implementing fast TCP fingerprinting in a golang webserver, using eBPF. Just to provide some background, TCP fingerprinting is one of the many techniques that can be used to detect unusual or identifying informations about a web request when implementing an anti-bot solution.This has been a hot […]
Did lead poisoning create a generation of serial killers?
Under Review Did Lead Poisoning Create a Generation of Serial Killers? Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, and many other notorious figures lived in and around Tacoma in the sixties. A new book argues that there was something in the water. By Gideon Lewis-Kraus June 25, 2025 Illustration by Hokyoung Kim Save this storySave this story Save […]
Using the Internet without IPv4 connectivity
2025-06-27 A few days ago my ISP broke the IPv4 connectivity from my router after a power cut. Fortunately IPv6 connectivity still worked fine, but only a small fraction of websites were accessible. In this post I’ll cover how Linux, WireGuard, and Hetzner came to the rescue – keeping the whole internet usable with only […]
Google Gemini is about to control your messages and calls, even if you say no
On July 7, Google’s Gemini assistant will be able to send a WhatsApp message, place a call, adjust your volume, or set a timer, even if you’ve told it not to track what you’re doing. And no, it’s not something you need to opt into, nor can you opt out of it; it’s the new […]
More on Apple’s Trust-Eroding ‘F1 the Movie’ Wallet Ad
This is a funny gag from Claude Zeins, but if you think about it, it shows just how destructive Apple’s decision was to send a push notification from the Wallet app promoting F1 The Movie. It’s a fact that no company can inject an ad into your physical wallet. It just can’t happen. So if […]
Embabel Agent Framework for the JVM
Embabel (Em-BAY-bel) is a framework for authoring agentic flows on the JVM that seamlessly mix LLM-prompted interactions with code and domain models. Supports intelligent path finding towards goals. Written in Kotlin but offers a natural usage model from Java. From the creator of Spring. Key Concepts Models agentic flows in terms of: Actions: Steps […]