In July 2019, an individual exploited a server-side request forgery (SSRF) vulnerability in a misconfigured web application firewall to access temporary IAM credentials on Capital One's cloud infrastructure. Those credentials, attached to an overly permissive IAM role, granted access to storage buckets containing personal data on approximately 100 million people in the United States and 6 million in Canada, primarily credit card applicants. The attack didn't require sophisticated tooling. It required finding a path through the labyrinth that the defenders hadn't mapped. A misconfigured firewall connected to an overly permissive role connected to unprotected storage...

In Greek mythology, Daedalus was the architect who built the Labyrinth of Crete. He designed every corridor, every false turn, every dead end. The maze was his masterwork, commissioned by King Minos to contain the Minotaur. It worked perfectly...

On February 28, 2017, an engineer at a major cloud provider executed a routine maintenance command with an incorrect input parameter. According to the provider's postmortem, the command removed more server capacity than intended from a critical storage subsystem in the US-EAST-1 region. The storage service became unavailable, and over the course of approximately four hours, the outage cascaded across dozens of dependent services, affecting websites, APIs, and applications across a significant portion of the internet. The root cause, as media widely reported it, was a typo (the provider's own postmortem described it as an input "entered incorrectly"). Finding that root cause, amid cascading failures across interconnected services, took considerably longer than the error took to make. The storage service's own health dashboard depended on the storage service itself, so the dashboard reported everything was fine while the system was down...

In Greek mythology, the Labyrinth of Crete was built to contain a monster. The maze was so complex that even its architect, Daedalus, could barely navigate it. The Minotaur at its center was dangerous, but the real threat was the structure surrounding it: a maze so intricate that anyone who entered would die lost in the corridors, regardless of whether they ever encountered the creature itself. Modern software dependency graphs bear a structural resemblance to that myth. A typical application pulls in dozens of direct dependencies, each of which pulls in its own dependencies, which pull in theirs...

King Minos had a problem. The Minotaur, a creature born of divine punishment and human transgression, was too dangerous to let roam free and too shameful to leave visible. So Minos commissioned Daedalus, regarded in Greek tradition as the most skilled craftsman of his age, to build a structure that could contain it. Daedalus built the Labyrinth: a maze so intricate, so densely folded with false turns and dead ends, that anything entering it would never find its way out. The containment worked...

Philippa Foot introduced the trolley problem in 1967 to probe a specific question about the doctrine of double effect. Nearly sixty years later, the thought experiment has become something larger: a lens for examining how we reason about moral trade-offs in systems that affect millions of people. Philosophical tools that long predate it, from Aquinas's doctrine of double effect to Rawls's veil of ignorance to Williams's moral residue, were not designed for algorithmic systems. But they turn out to be remarkably well-suited to the moral challenges those systems create. This post draws together six concepts that, taken together, suggest something about what it means to build technology responsibly in a world where moral questions resist clean answers. What the Six Concepts Reveal Together Each concept addresses a different dimension of the same underlying problem: how do we make moral choices when the stakes are high, the information is incomplete, and reasonable people disagree? The doctrine of double effect asks whether the harm a system causes is a side effect of pursuing a legitimate goal or the mechanism through which the goal is achieved. The veil of ignorance asks whether the system's designers would accept its decisions if they didn't know which position they'd occupy...

In 300 BCE, Epicurus added a random swerve to the deterministic atoms of Democritus because a clockwork universe left no room for novelty or freedom. In 1814, Laplace imagined a demon who could predict everything if it knew the position and momentum of every particle. In the 1920s, quantum mechanics suggested that some events are irreducibly random, that no amount of information could predict them. For most of history, this was a debate among philosophers and physicists. Technology has turned it into an engineering question...

A neural network begins its life in chaos. Before any training occurs, the weights that connect its neurons are set to random values, typically drawn from a carefully calibrated distribution. The network, at this point, knows nothing. It produces random outputs for any input...

The trolley problem was introduced in 1967. Nearly sixty years later, philosophers have not solved it. Utilitarians say pull the lever: five lives outweigh one. Deontologists say it depends on whether you're using the one person as a means or merely foreseeing their death as a side effect...

In the early 1970s, Bob Metcalfe and David Boggs were working on what would become Ethernet at Xerox PARC. They faced a problem that would become fundamental to networked computing: what happens when two devices try to send data at the same time on a shared wire? The signals collide, and both transmissions are corrupted. The obvious solution is to have each device wait and try again. But if both devices wait the same amount of time, they'll collide again. And again...