RC RANDOM CHAOS

Articles

Long-form writing on tech, culture, and the edges of the internet.

Nobody had to hack your meetings.
access-controldata-exposure

Nobody had to hack your meetings.

Over 180,000 tl;dv meetings were left open because access to recorded content was not conditioned on validated identity. What that failure exposes.

8 min read
The record is the authority
DNS securityphishing

The record is the authority

A for-sale DNS record sells naming authority itself, and every control above DNS keeps validating the name for whoever now holds the record.

7 min read
Patching would not have stopped this breach
zero-daydata breach

Patching would not have stopped this breach

A Metabase zero-day converted an analytics application's standing data access into attacker access, leaving reach and scope as the only controls in play.

8 min read
The benchmark isn't your bottleneck
agentic benchmarksLLM orchestration

The benchmark isn't your bottleneck

Qwen3.8 Max topped the agentic index, but a benchmark win is a signal to test against your own tasks, not a reason to migrate your automation.

8 min read
One grep, full repo access
credential-exposuresupply-chain-security

One grep, full repo access

A security camera shipped a full-scope GitHub PAT in its login page bundle. The credential exposure, supply-chain exploit path, GitHub audit-log telemetry, and why rotation - not removal - is the only fix.

7 min read
CVE-2026-44843 turns one chat message into credential theft
credential theftchat exploit

CVE-2026-44843 turns one chat message into credential theft

CVE-2026-44843 turns a single chat message into credential loss. An operator breakdown of the one-hop path from unauthenticated input to identity material.

8 min read
The camera on your shelf handed out your GPS
IoT securityaccess control

The camera on your shelf handed out your GPS

A TP-Link Kasa camera returned home GPS over unauthenticated UDP for six years. The mechanism, the pattern it exposes, and what must now be true.

8 min read
Rust solved the compatibility trap with editions
SQLitedatabase security

Rust solved the compatibility trap with editions

SQLite's backward-compatibility promise freezes its worst defaults. Rust-style editions could ship strict typing and enforced constraints without breaking old files.

8 min read
The padlock only proves someone holds the key
public key infrastructuresystems failure analysis

The padlock only proves someone holds the key

X.509 certificates authenticate a source, not the truth of its content, and trust resolved once at issuance is inherited unchanged until it expires.

8 min read
A grep job cost forty-seven dollars
claude-codepost-mortem

A grep job cost forty-seven dollars

A scheduled Claude Code skill shelled out to curl on its own and burned $47.30 in 19 minutes. The root cause, the commit 7a3b8d2 that fixed it, and the guardrails.

6 min read
Absence is not proof
incident responseaudit logging

Absence is not proof

Vancouver PD's Quick Escape button erases its own browser-history record on execution, leaving a control that cannot be verified or reconstructed.

6 min read
Grok packed your home folder into an API request
AI securitydata privacy

Grok packed your home folder into an API request

How AI assistants with filesystem access end up transmitting your home directory to vendor servers - and the concrete steps to scope, verify, and contain it.

6 min read