µBlog Archive (2026)
Site Update
February 28, 2026
As returning visitors may have noticed, the site has changed for better or worse with a few new sections in the past month or so. Notably: Book Recommendations: random non-fiction books I liked and would recommend for anyone interested in computer science Blog: My long form content that I have been maintaining from my former blogsite. Hopefully I resolved all the issues when it comes with migration including photos and internal links Archives for µBlog as it was getting a bit too overwhelming to display all the micrblogs in one giant page UI Changes: With the help of AI (I...Singularity Rootkit
February 19, 2026
An interesting yet scary piece of software I read about on the weekly Linux news is Singularity, an open-source rootkit, which can hide itself from being detected, at least does a decent job at it. It hides its existence by removing itself from the list of active kernel modules, and also attempts to hide attacker-controlled processes, network communication, and related files. As it has kernel-level access, it can hook and intercept syscalls that could reveal files that singularity wishes to hide from. Not totally related but this reminds me of a shared library exploit whereby the shared library intercepts the...Digital Signatures on PDF
January 17, 2026
Recently, I came across my electronic copy of my degree and transcript from several years ago and remembered that it was digitally signed. I previously wrote about how to manually verify an email signature 2 years ago and that got me thinking: how can I verify the signature of my degree and transcript to ensure that it has indeed come from my University and that it has not been tampered with? Note: When referring to digital signatures on PDFs, I am not referring to e-signature i.e. the graphical signature that contains a name for instance For this post, I won’t...2025 - The End of Two OS
January 9, 2026
December 31st marked the end of HP-UX. Apparently released in 1982, it was mainly used in the enterprise world from what I know. I do not have much fond memories of this platform due to my work compiling (building) security fixes (PSIRT - Product Security Incident Response) when I was at IBM many years ago, though no fault to HPUX itself. At IBM Db2, we called HPUX builds hpipf32 and hpipf64 as evident if you were to look at the link to any HPUX Db2 security patch: fixids=special_38387_DB2-hpipf64-universal_fixpack-9.7.0.11-FP011. Though for some reason, I recalled calling it ia32 and ia64 as...New Year, New Desktop
January 8, 2026
A new year, a new computer, and a new experience, building my first desktop. It’s only been a year since I got a Framework laptop which is already sufficent for my current needs so there wasn’t any good reason to get a new computer. While most think GPUs are only good for gaming and more recently for running your own local LLM, it can be used for more interesting things, compute such as numerical analysis and simulations. Not that I’m sufficiently motivated to do so myself. Perhaps I’ll write my final undergraduate Math paper on numerical analysis and simulations, but...