A magazine about programmers, code, and society. Written by and for humans since 2018.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski, December 1st, 2025
In a key scene of the 2012 blockbuster James Bond film "Skyfall", MI6 quartermaster Q, played by Ben Whishaw, realizes too late that plugging a cable into the laptop of a notoriously skilled terrorist like Raoul Silva (one of Javier Bardem's most remarkable roles) was a terrible idea. After a few seconds of connection, the laptop infects the systems of MI6, releasing all physical doors and disabling all security guards, prompting Silva to escape and wreak havoc through the London Underground. A message appears on the laptop screen, taunting Q, reading "Not such a clever boy".
by Adrian Kosmaczewski, May 5th, 2025
Hard to believe as it is, it has been already almost 20 years since the days when Apple plastered the halls of its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) with huge posters proclaiming "Redmond, start your photocopiers" or "Mac OS X Leopard: Hasta la vista, Vista". The decade of the 2000s, coinciding with Steve Ballmer’s tenure as CEO, is widely perceived as a lost one for Microsoft, and one of the most visible signs of that decline was, without a doubt, the "Longhorn" saga.
April 7th, 2025
Welcome to the 79th issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, about Trust. In this edition, we explore trust and its importance in human society and culture; in the Library section, we review "Geekonomics" by David Rice; and in our Vidéothèque section, we watch a video on the Veritasium channel where Derek Muller hacks Linus Sebastian's phone.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski, March 3rd, 2025
Paraphrasing a well-known software mogul who shall remain nameless in the pages of this magazine, insecure software is eating the world. The reasons of such sad state of things are varied and range from social to economic; the technological aspect is usually the one that concerns me the least. In this sea of unusable things and insecure networks, there is a “subculture” (a horrible word, but bear with me) of highly skilled individuals who teach each other how broken those things are. And yes, they have their own magazines to spread the word.
by Graham Lee, October 4th, 2021
Yes, you read that correctly. Microsoft. Writing on information security. They may be the software company who have done the most writing on information security, including many security software companies.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski, May 3rd, 2021
The book "Writing Secure Code, 2nd Edition" written by David LeBlanc and Michael Howard, published by Microsoft Press in 2002, was once required reading at Microsoft, following Bill Gates' "Trustworthy Computing" memo. The fifth chapter of said book is titled "Public Enemy #1: The Buffer Overrun" and it starts with a very interesting historical perspective on the problem, referring to the Morris Worm in 1986 as precedent, and even finding occurrences as far back as the 1960s.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski, December 7th, 2020
I remember vividly the first time I saw somebody "online." It was early in a morning of December 1994, in the hallways of the "Sciences 2" building of the University of Geneva. One of my classmates, who worked part-time as a professional software developer, was connected to a terminal with glowing yellow text over a dark brown background. To my question about what he was doing, he answered with a simple "I am downloading stuff from Apple's server in California."
by Adrian Kosmaczewski, July 6th, 2020
On November 12, 1990, a 35 year-old Bill Gates introduced his "Information at your Fingertips" concept during his keynote at COMDEX. The PC, he said, would become "more personal," integrating "fax, voice and electronic mail," and providing "easy access to a broad range of information." More or less at the same time, Tim Berners-Lee was giving the final touches to the first web browser and web server software ever put in production. Bill Gates was right; as any Internet user can easily confirm 30 years later, PCs become much more interesting when you connect them to other computers. Or, as they call it, "The Cloud."
December 3rd, 2018
Welcome to the third issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, dedicated to the subject of Security. In this edition our guest writer Anastasiia Vixentael exposes the dramatic state of security practices among software developers, Adrian talks about the weakest link in software security, asking some questions about society and ethics, and in this issue's subscriber-only article, Graham provides a thorough review of current trends in software security.