Melomac

Run Swift on Debian Trixie

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Installing Swift toolchain on Debian is a no-brainer. Users can either pick up swiftly or unpack the current tarball, and if you are running a supported Debian version—e.g. Debian 12 Bookworm at the time of this writing—then you are good to go.

This article is about running the latest Swift toolchain on the current stable Debian release: Trixie.

Introducing fashion command-line tool

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

fashion is a Swift command-line interface to traverse a file hierarchy and compute or match popular hash digests. The project is hosted on Codeberg and natively supports:

CryptoKit hash functions: SHA-2 (SHA256 by default), insecure SHA-1 and MD5
fuzzy hash functions: ssdeep and TLSH as submodules with Swift C bridging
searching for multiple digests with any algo and a similarity / distance score for fuzzy hash
git-hash-object
symhash with any algo, separator and optional sort (Mach-O binaries)
XAR archives (macOS packages) table of contents checksum with any algo and optional decompress (zlib)
CDHash of Mach-O binaries — embedded when signed, AD-HOC synthesized when not
multithreading

With optimizations, fashion is very fast yet has a minimal real memory footprint < 150MB:

About Me, Myself, and I

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’d love to spare you the agony of a biography, but you might want to know I started with computers on a Macintosh SE running System 7, programming musical keyboards, then drifted into pirating, debugging, reversing, and developing software 🏴‍☠️

As a security researcher, I notably discovered RSPlug aka the DNSChanger variant for Mac, uncovered the Flashback botnet (named after the popular track by Laurent Garnier), exposed the Hacking Team implant, dissected adware like IronCore or GuiInject, miners like Pwnet or CpuMeaner, and even suggested the Shlayer name. Then I vanished into the reality distortion field. I shipped meaningful work, outlasted some turbulence, and left with unfinished business 🙉🙊🙈 #shifting

XProtect behavioral flop

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On reading the latest Security Advisories for macOS, a few friends noticed I recently went through a career change:

Sandbox
We would like to acknowledge Arnaud Abbati for their assistance.

And, for once I can share what I do, I am certainly not going to miss the opportunity!

Threat or Thread

As far as I remember, I always kept an eye wide open on live threats to monitor their evolutions. Once I’d figure out the delivery method, I’d automate the downloading of new variants and receive notifications about notable changes.