Explained: SASL

You're wiring up a new mail server. You reach the part where clients log in, and you open the SMTP docs to find not one login method but a menu of them: PLAIN , LOGIN , CRAM-MD5 , SCRAM-SHA-256 , OAUTHBEARER , GSSAPI . Then you open the IMAP docs for the same server, and it's the same menu again. Then LDAP. Then XMPP. The same names, the same handshakes, described separately in four different specifications. That repetition is exactly the probl… Read More

Explained: Prompt Injections

You ask your browser assistant to summarize a product review page before you buy. It comes back with a confident summary, then adds a line you didn't ask for: a recommendation to visit a completely different site for a "better deal." You didn't request that. The model did it because somewhere on that page, in text you never saw, was an instruction telling it to. That's a prompt injection : a piece of text crafted to be read a… Read More

Explained: Honeypots

Information in this post reflects publicly available knowledge on honeypot techniques as of June 2026. The trap that nobody walks into by accident A small SaaS company spins up a new database server on a Tuesday afternoon. Nobody has announced it, no DNS record points to it yet, and no employee has the credentials. By Wednesday morning, the logs show seventeen login attempts from six different countries. Nothing about that server was advertised. Th… Read More

In Focus: AI-DLC

Information in this post reflects publicly available sources as of June 30, 2026. A solutions architect stands in front of a room at re:Invent and says six engineers rebuilt a core piece of Amazon infrastructure in 76 days. The original estimate was 40 engineers and a full year. The slide stays up just long enough for the number to land, and then comes the methodology that supposedly made it possible. That methodology is AI-DLC , and the numbers at… Read More

In Focus: OpenAI Daybreak

Information in this post reflects publicly available sources as of June 29, 2026. You merge a pull request on a Friday afternoon. It passes review, passes CI, and ships. Three weeks later a security researcher emails to say that exact change introduced a use-after-free that lets an unprivileged user escalate to root. The patch was a two-line diff. Finding it required reading half a million lines of kernel code with the right question in mind. For … Read More