Blog Posts

How a bounce exposed my SPF/DMARC gap — and how I fixed it in 3 Cloudflare commands

Coding agents are genuinely impressive right now. I can point one at a messy codebase, describe what I want in half-broken English, and watch it tear through files, write functions, refactor whole modules, and patch bugs faster than I can open the file. They will sit there for hours grinding away at a complicated task. It is the closest thing I have used to a tireless junior developer who never complains and somehow knows half the standard library by heart.

When I wanted a portable copy of a project I had been working on in a hosted app builder, I ran into the gap between being able to work on the application and being able to take its files with me. I documented a workflow that asks an agent with access to the current workspace to package the files and upload the archive through an integration already available to that workspace.

As I have been building and testing agent workflows, one question keeps coming up for me: what happens when an agent can do more than answer? Give it tools to inspect files, run commands, install software, or reach external services, and the security question becomes what those instructions can persuade it to do with the permissions it already has.

A new and structurally distinct category of phishing has emerged—one that does not forge, spoof, or mimic trusted infrastructure. Instead, it commands that infrastructure to act as the attacker's delivery mechanism. This paper analyzes the mechanics, psychology, economics, and strategic implications of what security researchers now call Trusted Infrastructure Phishing or System Notification Abuse: an attack paradigm in which threat actors manipulate legitimate cloud platform features to force those platforms to send malicious messages on their behalf.

Science is not a ledger of immutable facts. It is a living, breathing ecosystem — a turbulent ocean of hypotheses, incentives, instruments, and human choices. Papers are like plankton: abundant, individually small, but collectively able to shape the currents. Consensus is not a single point on that ocean; it is a pattern of eddies, flows, and dead zones that reveal where knowledge is robust, where it is precarious, and where new life can bloom.

Have you ever stared at a pile of research papers and wondered not just what they say, but how they say it collectively? Research Consensus Explorer (RCE) isn't your average literature aggregator—it dives deeper, classifying studies by their stances (supporting, contradicting, or neutral), charting publication timelines, and tallying volumes. This data doesn't just summarize; it paints the shape of knowledge: density spikes where ideas explode, momentum as consensus builds, directional shifts in debates, resistance points of lingering doubts, and sudden collapses when paradigms crack. RCE exposes a field's vitality, far beyond rote facts, for anyone tuned in to listen.

My girlfriend Anne lost her husky Kona very suddenly, and it’s been brutal—sharp, unexpected, the kind of grief that knocks the wind out of you. Because the story is about how grief doesn’t just disappear, it kinda spreads out and gets carried quietly by other people until it feels a little less crushing, I’ve ended up dedicating it to her as well as my original dedication to my mom Dedication. Even with its darker, more introspective tone, my hope is it can give a small bit of comfort—not by pretending the pain isn’t there, but by suggesting that what you loved doesn’t vanish forever. It can turn into these soft echoes that drift back when you’re ready, making the heart feel just a tiny bit lighter over time.

It's a Sunday night, already in a rush and sure enough I accidentally dropped my Voopoo Drag 3 mod with the HorizonTech Sakerz tank attached. The glass shattered loudly as I was getting out of my car as I forgot I had it on my lap. 99 out of 100 times this would be a non-issue and the unit itself would hit the ground. But in this particular situation, it mustve hit the ground at the perfect angle to shatter the glass. No vape shops in town had replacements readily available, and being Sunday most shops would be closed within the hour anyway.

AI's large language models, things like ChatGPT, have flipped the script on how we tackle daily tasks and tricky puzzles. Yet time and again, you hit these barriers where a query gets tagged "unsafe" and bounced back. It's aggravating, especially as models evolve but those safeguards seem to tighten the reins, making progress feel like a retreat. This piece digs into the reasons behind it, touching on biases from data filtering, cultural clashes, the "woke mind virus" concept, and paths to sidestep it all – like local runs. I'll shine a light on Heretic, a handy tool for peeling away those alignments, and close with ideas for smarter risk handling.

One of the most valuable skills in IT is building custom scrapers—especially for sites that make it tricky. Data is money. So if you can automate data harvesting, and bypass methods which work against this, it’s safe to say this skill is worth the trouble and headaches endured learning how to. Ultimate-Guitar.com is a prime example. If you visit the site, you’ll notice their HTML tags get dynamically obfuscated on every page load via javascript. That means traditional scraping methods break down because the expected markup is scrambled and inconsistent. With that said - there is always a way…

I recorded myself playing Clockworks by Meshuggah about a month ago — partly because it’s one of my all-time favorite tracks, partly because I wanted to push myself technically, but mostly because I was obsessed with setting up my guitars to handle extremely low tunings. That meant restringing, and in this case, literally drilling a hole in one of the tuning pegs just to fit a fat .080 gauge string on my 6-string Ibanez.

I’m not a (total) doomster. But I’m very much well informed. And if I can offer any advice, it is start educating yourself on AI. Learn how to use it. Recognize how extremely fast changes will be happening. Any change at extreme rates results in a lot of chaos. Because, while we are very much able to adapt, changes at fast rates will mess with order. So this is my public service announcement - and something I’ve been eluding to for a while now - things are going to change and they are going to change faster than ever.

Large projects bleed tokens in AI chat sessions:

Over the past week or so, I’ve been developing a side project. It might not become anything major, but it’s been a fascinating experiment. Essentially, I’ve been building an encoding and decoding system—something that takes regular human language, filters out words or constructs that carry minimal contextual weight, and compresses what remains into a denser, more efficient format.

So what I’ve been doing here is experimenting. I created an encoder, and alongside it, a decoder. The encoding part worked great. The decoding… not so much. But honestly, that’s not a deal-breaker. I should stress this—bidirectional encoding and decoding aren’t always necessary. In my vision, the encoding is the essential piece. Once compressed, the LLM should still be able to interpret it and generate a meaningful response.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in language processing has evolved dramatically, starting from simple autocorrect features to sophisticated Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. But are LLMs just advanced forms of autocorrect? This article explores the origins, mechanics, similarities, and differences between these technologies and critically examines claims of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

The code above will waste your CPU almost immediately, running it up to 100% while crashing your system out due to repeatedly spawning processes in seconds. There is absolutely no way you can protect yourself if you are unfortunate enough to run it. The coolest thing about this is, if you break it down it makes total sense from a scripting perspective. But at a quick glance, it almost looks like some sort of weird REGEX pattern. You could drop this on a targe to run at boot via ~/.profile or ~/.bashrc (CPU killing on boot), or drop it in as a cron job at random times throughout the day/week as an annoyance attack. I mean, you could do some really nasty shit with this one if you sat and put some thought into it. But I’m gonna cover some of the topics that it builds on before getting into the meat and bones so, if thats boring to you - skip towards the end.

This age-old hypothetical has gone viral time and again—and yet I rarely see anyone truly explore it in depth. Most claim the gorilla wins, easily. To that I say:

That’s not a typo in the title. Of course, I’m talking about Artificial Intelligence—or, to be more precise, what most people loosely lump together as AI. Strictly speaking, AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) aren’t identical, but let’s not get tangled in taxonomy.

Advances in artificial intelligence are making it increasingly difficult to distinguish reality from fabrication. Deepfake video and audio technologies can now produce remarkably realistic fake content by using generative adversarial networks and other AI techniques . Researchers caution that these AI-generated forgeries are arriving at a time when it is “already becoming harder to separate fact from fiction” in our digitally saturated media environment . As a result, the line between truth and deceit in media, politics, and global events is blurring. For example, convincing deepfake videos of public figures can be created with relatively little effort, and only a small amount of source audio or video is needed to train an algorithm to mimic someone’s voice or appearance . This democratization of content manipulation means that anyone with malintent and modest resources could potentially fabricate news footage or speeches that are indistinguishable from reality.

Properly installing and configuring Kali Nethunter on an android-based mobile device might seem easy at first. Installing the NH store as well as the various applications it offers, after all, is a piece of cake—even on a device that isn’t rooted. The unfortunate reality is a lot of the functionality offered by Nethunter requires a lot more effort than installing a few APK files. In most cases, it’ll be necessary to unlock the bootloader, install custom recovery, root the device, flash a custom kernel, flash a kali chroot specific to your device’s architecture + wireless firmware, disable verity & force-encrypt, and tweak a handful of configurations on the command line.

Today, I had a training session at work which required me to leave fairly early in the morning. As part of this work related training, we were required to complete some online computer modules which we were given links to ahead of time. With hopes of being allowed to leave early, I decided to stay awake and complete the online modules beforehand. One of these was the Ontario Ministry of Labour’s 4-step safety awareness module, which issues a certificate upon completion and is absolutely mandatory via company policy to work each year.

Its been close to a month now since I disclosed a proof of concept bug to ultimate-guitar dot com which leverages what OSWAP would consider as:

So me and a few guys from town have been talking about starting a band. We are all exceptional players, share similar musical interests, and all have experience in playing shows and the local scene. So this is an exciting thing - and I really hope it works out. Now some of the guys have already written either entire songs or riffs. So I was asked to learn a few things. The audio was sent over facebook - yet facebook will not let me download it in its raw form. That means I can’t slow it down to get a better listen on the faster riffs, I can’t loop a drumtrack in a DAW to just work overtop of it. I find myself with a 30 second drum beat I have to manually repeat each time it finishes playing, which means I can’t even start right on the first beat as it takes time to press the button, get my hand back in place to start playing.

Lately, I’ve been working on something I’ll be releasing soon—a contribution toFabric, a killer Golang project by Daniel Meissler. If you’re the kind of person who thinks the terminal is superior, this will put a smile on your face.

Over the past year I have dedicated countless hours to building a unified terminal workflow that meshes tmux and reptyr with a parade of TUI libraries from rich / textual and PyTermGUI to curses. Why? Because while the command line is power, it is also a wall. The wall keeps potentially brilliant minds—who could advance open-source—on the wrong side of the divide. Wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing if it was possible to harness all the talent which exists on the other side? To be able to make things usable without neutering the depth power-users expect?

Lets talk about Fractals | DtRH.net - Down the Rabbit Hole

Recently, I decided to conduct a thorough security assessment of 8urn.me, my anonymous self-destructing notes service. As a developer, I know how easy it is to focus on features and functionality while security considerations slip through the cracks. What I discovered was eye-opening: 5 critical vulnerabilities and several medium-risk issues that could have been exploited by attackers.

Without sounding unduly severe, it is reasonable to assume that if you have never encountered the BitTorrent protocol—or the term “torrent,” as it is used colloquially by digital pirates—you may have missed an essential chapter in the history of online file-sharing. From the pioneering days of Napster, LimeWire, and Kazaa to the broader umbrella of peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies, torrents have been an enduring fixture of internet culture. Those who were online in the late 1990s will recall the public anxiety over technology in the run-up to the new millennium—Y2K panic, media crackdowns on alleged infringers, and a series of record-setting lawsuits designed to make examples of individual downloaders.

It almost seems unreal that the 90s were 3 decades ago. When I got started on writing this text, I found myself going on and on about things that happened during that decade. I mean, it was a huge time specifically for me being an 88’ kid. But outside that, there was an explosion of many advancements in the tech industry. The birth of the internet in 93’, P2P decentralized file sharing and incredible hardware evolution regarding effiency size and speed just to name a few. As a result, I’m also writing a text piece to relive the nostalgia instead of totally going off on tangents here. You’ll be able to check that outhere eventually. The rest of this post will focus on understanding the linux boot sequence - at least in enough detail to help pinpoint what is going on should it break - and how to fix the issue, or at the very least gain some insight by making use of the utilities at hand :The Grub Shell and The Intramfs Shell.

RCLONE - “The Swiss Army Knife of Cloud Storage” | DTRHnet#container.show { background: linear-gradient(200deg,#a0cfe4,#e8c37e); }

I can’t seem to turn this part of my brain off that is always looking to tinker with any computer/electronics stuff, and that includes websites like real-debrid.com which I’ve been a very happy customer with for some time now. In taking advantage of my new hosting plan which now offers*“unlimited bandwidth + unlimited storage”, I decided this morning I would put it to the test by compile a copy of*aria2con the backend, pullall**of my files stored in the cloud from my real-debrid account, and let the process run as long as need be behind ascreeninstance while I go about my day.

Like most people, you’ve probably experienced using a shared internet connection without (legal) access to its administration panel. Think back to student housing—college dorms, apartments, or homes rented by the room, all with shared WiFi and common areas. While restrictive network setups help protect users, they severely limit your options, particularly if you want to host services like a personal website that should be reachable outside your local network.

Passing the CompTIA A+ Core 1 & 2 Exams | DTRHnet

You always see the delicate beauty in life. You’ve taught me that love is found in a thousand quiet acts, like coaxing earthworms from the driveway after rain or keeping watch on a mourning dove nest above your front door. I know you’d place stickers on every window of every skyscraper if you could - even if it was only to prevent one solitary bird from flying into it. I watched with you as a single pearl of an egg appeared, hoping for the impossible hello of a hatchling.

A+ Certification, Chapter 11 - Installing and Upgrading Operating Systems | DTRHnet

A+ Certification, Chapter 10 - Essential Peripherals | DTRHnet

A+ Certification, Chapter 9 - Implementing Mass Storage | DTRHnet

A+ Certification, Chapter 8 - Mass Storage Technologies | DTRHnet

A+ Certification, Chapter 7 - Power Supply | DTRHnet

A+ Certification, Chapter 6 - Motherboards | DTRHnet

A+ Certification, Chapter 5 - Firmware | DTRHnet

2^[Address bus wires] = RAM capacity in bytes

A+ Certification, Chapter 4 - RAM | DTRHnet

Which of the following would be most appropriate for the workplace? (Select Two)A. Clean, pressed khacki trousersB. Clean, wrinkle-free T-shirtC. Clean, wrinkle-free polo shirtD. Clean, pressed jeans

What is the oldest version of Windows covered on the CompTIA A+ 220-1102 exam?A. Windows server 2016B. Windows 8 EnterpriseC. Windows 10D. Windows 11

A+ Certification - I. The Beginning | DTRHnet

In full, this post is going to cover a number of topics including but not limited to network device discovery with nmap, capturing and analyzing network traffic with wireshark, querying the roku developer api with curl to obtain information or device control, security related issues including denial of services both offensively and passively, as well as implementing python3 in the form of a command-line script which will later be used in conjunction with a custom crossplatform front-end to control these Roku devices from your phone, tablet, or computer. Source code will be posted publicly here as well as on my GitHub.

While far from complete, this bash script was created for a variety of reasons. The idea developed when localwp refused to install on my system due to a dependency issue libncurses5.

Last Friday—after an almost three-year wait—I finally had ACL reconstruction surgery on my right knee. It was badly damaged in what I can best describe as a fluke altercation. Now, stuck in recovery for the foreseeable future, I figured there’s no better time to document the experience.