n0p Blog

A Puppy Is Smarter Than ASI. It Will Still Destroy Us.

Ali Mosajjal — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I hold two beliefs at the same time. AI can wipe us out. And I can argue that AGI, ASI, whatever we end up calling it, is not as smart as a puppy.

Both are true. Here is why.

fortitool: cracking FortiOS firmware end to end, and a key nobody had

Ali Mosajjal — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I own an FWF-60E and I’ve spent a good chunk of time pulling its firmware apart to see what’s actually in there. FortiOS doesn’t do casual encryption. The whole .out file sits under an outer XOR layer, and the filesystem image buried inside that has its own second scheme, which has changed shape several times across versions. None of this is exactly secret. Researchers have been chipping away at it for years. But every writeup solves one slice and then leaves you to stitch the rest together on your own.

Tax the chips, before the models

Ali Mosajjal — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In 1930, with the world sliding into the Depression, John Maynard Keynes sat down and wrote something wildly optimistic. The essay was called Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, and the bet at the center of it was simple: machines were getting good enough, fast enough, that within a hundred years the economic problem would basically be solved. His grandchildren, he figured, would work about fifteen hours a week. The rest of the time they’d spend on life. Art, friends, leisure, the stuff you actually remember.

Iran's Clergy Problem Is 500 Years Old

Ali Mosajjal — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a popular version of Iranian history that goes like this: the Shah was in charge, then in 1979 the mullahs took over, and now we’re stuck with them. It’s clean, it’s simple, and it’s mostly wrong.

America's $38.8 Trillion Gamble

Ali Mosajjal — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The US national debt is $38.8 trillion. Up until now, GDP growth has been just enough to service the interest and keep the lights on. It’s been teetering on the edge of the Japan scenario: either shrink the economy to pay it down, or print money and hope everyone else keeps buying your currency. The petrodollar arrangement, where Gulf states price oil in USD, has been doing the heavy lifting. Arab nations park their money in American assets, America gets to run deficits that would bankrupt any other country.

The First AI-enabled War

Ali Mosajjal — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The White House posted a video mixing real strike footage with Call of Duty gameplay. Kill streak animations and all. Then they posted another one, real bombs hitting real buildings in Tehran, cut to SpongeBob asking “wanna see me do it again?” before looping back to more strikes. The official caption on another clip read “kaboom, kablow.”

An Analysis of S3-Compatible Object Storage Providers

Ali Mosajjal — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) API has become the de facto industry standard for object storage, creating a robust ecosystem of tools, SDKs, and services built around its interface.1 This has spurred the emergence of numerous “S3-compatible” storage providers, each offering a unique value proposition. However, the term “S3-compatible” represents a wide spectrum of functionality, ranging from near-perfect replication of core data operations to significant deficiencies in advanced management and security features. This report provides a detailed comparative analysis of leading S3-compatible providers—Cloudflare R2, Hetzner Object Storage, Vultr Object Storage, and DigitalOcean Spaces—benchmarked against the comprehensive capabilities of AWS S3.

The Real AI Threat: Why Businesses Are Getting Dumber (and Richer)

Ali Mosajjal — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Everyone is looking at the sky. We’re all craning our necks, waiting for the arrival of the big one: Artificial Superintelligence. We read the breathless articles, we watch the TED talks, and we debate when the machine will finally wake up and become smarter than all of us combined. It’s the blockbuster movie version of the future, complete with a dramatic, world-altering climax.

To Catch a Rising (AI) Star

Ali Mosajjal — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

If your day-to-day life is primarily behind your monitor and keyboard, this article is for you. AI is coming fast for our jobs, and most of us are not as alarmed as we should be, nor know what to do about it. I’ve spent the last 12 months digging deeper and deeper into Generative AI, spent 100s of hours building tools with all the “standard” architectures, and I’ve come to some conclusions that I’d like to share with the rest of us. I’m hoping this gives you the point of view that I think we should all have. How Good is Generative AI, really?

The books I read in 2022

Ali Mosajjal — Mon, 26 Dec 2022 22:00:00 +0000

2022 was an interesting year for me. Compared to 2021 and 2020, it was one of the quieter years of my infosec career, even though the noise and hype around every single vulnerability, “breach”, and leak were immense. I decided to focus less on the news, and spend a bit of my 2022 grasping the fundamentals. I also chose a book as the preferred medium since I find it easier to sit down and read than to open a browser tab and get lost in my lack of concentration. I went through at least 20 publications over the past 12 months; some were long blog posts, some were documentation and RFCs and some were published books. In this blog post, I’ll try to rate/rank the top ones I read and give a paragraph on the pros/cons.