Random Memories for Random People

Centauri Medium

Aug 16, 2026 00:00

the first stellar-mass black hole in the massive globular star cluster Omega Centauri

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope have discovered the first stellar-mass black hole in the massive globular star cluster Omeg…

Bermuda Medium

Aug 16, 2026 00:00

Carnegie Science researchers have discovered a hidden layer of rock more than 12 miles thick sitting just below Bermuda's oceanic crust

Carnegie Science researchers have discovered a hidden layer of rock more than 12 miles thick sitting just below Bermuda's oceanic crust. This buoyant "underplate" may exp…

X.509 Medium

Aug 14, 2026 00:00

X.509

A crafted X.509 certificate chain with duplicate self-signed certificates can force Python's cryptography library into exponential path exploration. The validator spends …

Python Medium

Aug 14, 2026 00:00

Python's cryptography library prior to 46.0.5 accepted elliptic curve public key

Python's cryptography library prior to 46.0.5 accepted elliptic curve public keys from small-order subgroups without validation. An attacker supplying such a weak key can…

Side-channel attacks Medium

Aug 14, 2026 00:00

Side-channel attacks

Side-channel attacks extract cryptographic keys by observing how a system behaves rather than by breaking the mathematics of the algorithm itself. Timing variations, powe…

breaches in 2026 Medium

Aug 14, 2026 00:00

breaches in 2026

Seventy-five percent of breaches in 2026 involved compromised credentials rather than network intrusion, fundamentally shifting the attack paradigm to identity exploitati…

cryptographic library vulnerabilities stem from me Medium

Aug 14, 2026 00:00

cryptographic library vulnerabilities stem from memory safety failures

A 2026 study found that 37.2% of cryptographic library vulnerabilities stem from memory safety failures while only 27.2% arise from actual cryptographic flaws. This means…

Raft and Paxos Medium

Aug 11, 2026 00:00

Raft and Paxos

Raft and Paxos are both consensus protocols, yet Raft was explicitly designed to be understandable before it was designed to be optimal. This is rare in distributed syste…

Linux Medium

Aug 11, 2026 00:00

Linux cgroups

Linux cgroups were originally developed by Google engineers in 2006 to solve a resource accounting problem, not isolation. The container revolution that followed was a si…

DNS Medium

Aug 11, 2026 00:00

DNS

DNS is one of the oldest distributed systems still running at global scale, and it was never designed for the security model of the modern internet. The protocol assumes …