Technical history
This is a provenance trail, not a second CV. It records a few public artefacts that show the continuity of the Hacknix technical identity. Hobby, open-source and professional work are identified separately because they provide different kinds of evidence.
1993 — packet-radio networking
Hobby. A contemporary issue of Practical Wireless records me, then using the amateur-radio callsign 2E1AGM, running a worldwide packet-radio club using a Commodore 64, a TNC and the packet network, with a monthly bulletin distributed electronically. Contemporary magazine record (PDF).
2002–2004 — Webfish Linux and Fishwall
Open source. Webfish Linux was an independently developed GNU/Linux distribution I created around a small package footprint, source-based construction, custom build and installation tooling, and server and workstation use. Fishwall was its firewall-oriented branch. The surviving site records GCC/glibc integration, automated builds, bootable installation media and Perl installer/configuration work.
Webfish is obsolete, unmaintained historical software and should not be deployed today. Its old security claims are not current assurance. The original webfish.net domain is no longer under my control; the surviving SourceForge-hosted Webfish site and SourceForge release archive are the appropriate records.
An LWN software announcement from September 2002 independently preserves a Freshmeat-sourced listing for Webfish Linux 0.92a.
2003 — IDS architecture and peer review
Professional. Two surviving Focus-IDS mailing-list messages record a discussion about passive Ethernet taps and separating an IDS monitoring interface from the production network. When another practitioner challenged the claim that passive connectivity made the IDS immune to attack through monitored traffic, I accepted and refined the threat model, describing a dedicated Linux IDS and a separate analysis workstation. Initial message · follow-up.
These are historical evidence of operational IDS and network-security work, not current deployment guidance.
2004–2012 — client security, infrastructure and architecture
Professional. The public technical record becomes thinner while my work increasingly moved into financial services, government, defence, national healthcare and large enterprise systems, where much of the output was client-owned rather than publicly developed or discussed. That is context, not an inference that the absence of public material proves particular work was sensitive.
2012 — Hacknix writing and Parliamentary evidence
Personal technical writing and professional evidence. The surviving Hacknix archive covers IPv6 adoption, SMTP and Qmail engineering, privacy and profiling, identity and authentication, federation, DNS, surveillance policy and computer forensics.
A written submission to Parliament concerning the Communications Data Bill independently records my IT architecture and security work, relevant organisations and computer-forensic experience at the time.
2013–2019 — infrastructure, communications and healthcare security
Mixed personal and professional technical work. The selected archive continues through authentication, TLS private-key custody, radio systems, the 2017 healthcare ransomware outbreak and practical DNS operations. Some articles now carry explicit corrections; the archive is evidence of reasoning at the time, not a claim that every contemporary conclusion survived unchanged.
2020 onward — FreeDMR
Open source and amateur radio. FreeDMR is an amateur-radio experimentation platform and network derived from HBLink. Its federation and independent operator control are deliberate, as are its low barriers to understanding and modification. The security model is lightweight and proportionate to a trust-based, non-essential and non-safety-critical amateur-radio environment; it is not presented as an enterprise or high-assurance system.
The architectural signal is that the solution fits the actual problem and operating community. FreeDMR source · independent deployment project.
Current
Professional and independent technical work. Current work includes architecture, security and governance through iCoriolis, high-assurance product and security assessment, and continuing investigation of identity, trust, provenance, resilient distributed systems, assured data exchange, Linux and open-source protocols.