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HPSHELTON

Programming, Privacy, Politics, Photography

Mar 27, 2025

Undergraduate Upends a 40-Year-Old Data Science Conjecture →

A young computer scientist and two colleagues show that searches within data structures called hash tables can be much faster than previously deemed possible.

Mar 26, 2025

The Ford Executive Who Kept Score of Colleagues’ Verbal Flubs →

For more than a decade, O’Brien kept a meticulous log of mixed metaphors and malaprops uttered in Ford meetings, from companywide gatherings to side conversations. It documents 2,229 linguistic breaches, including the exact quote, context, name of the perpetrator and color commentary. 

Feb 22, 2025

You're thinking about passkeys wrong →

Straightforward design suggestion that works around the complexities of syncing and portability of passkeys that’s just a mess today. Use magic links on new endpoints, passkeys on existing ones.

Feb 21, 2025

When Your Last Name Is Null, Nothing Works →

The Nulls of the world, it turns out, endure a lifetime of website bouncebacks, processing errors and declarations by customer-service representatives that their accounts don't exist.

Feb 20, 2025

An inside look at NSA (Equation Group) TTPs from China’s lense →

I was curious to explore what China publishes about Five Eyes operations. This led me down a rabbit hole of research into TTPs that Chinese cybersecurity entities have attributed to the NSA – or, as they coin “APT-C-40”.

Jan 23, 2025

Court rules FBI’s warrantless searches violated Fourth Amendment →

"Querying a Section 702 database in connection with a US person generally requires a warrant, even where the initial interception was lawfully conducted," DeArcy Hall ruled, partly because US persons maintain "a legitimate expectation of privacy."

"The government cannot circumvent application of the warrant requirement simply because queried information is already collected and held by the government."

Jan 23, 2025

The Nearest Neighbor Attack: How A Russian APT Weaponized Nearby Wi-Fi Networks for Covert Access →

Volexity believes this represents a new class of attack that has not previously been described, in which a threat actor compromises one organization and performs credential-stuffing attacks in order to compromise other organizations in close physical proximity via their Wi-Fi networks.

Oct 11, 2024

Conservatives Must Resist Musk-ification →

But the deeper problem with making Musk the face of government "efficiency" is that efficiency is not an end unto itself. How well government operates is one question — an important one. But what government is for is a very different question.

Oct 9, 2024

The Disappearance of an Internet Domain →

On October 3, the British government announced that it was giving up sovereignty over a small tropical atoll in the Indian Ocean known as the Chagos Islands. The islands would be handed over to the neighboring island country of Mauritius, about 1,100 miles off the southeastern coast of Africa. 

The story did not make the tech press, but perhaps it should have. The decision to transfer the islands to their new owner will result in the loss of one of the tech and gaming industry’s preferred top-level domains: .io.

Oct 7, 2024

“U.S. Wiretap Systems Targeted in China-Linked Hack" →

A cyberattack tied to the Chinese government penetrated the networks of a swath of U.S. broadband providers, potentially accessing information from systems the federal government uses for court-authorized network wiretapping requests.

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H. Parker Shelton

I'm just an ordinary thirty-something who's had some extraordinary opportunities. I graduated from Johns Hopkins University, work for Microsoft in Silicon Valley, code websites and applications, take the occasional photograph, and keep a constant eye on current events, politics, and technology. This blog is the best of what catches that eye.

 
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