Unintended computations, sideways thinking, rigorous craft.
I'm a software security engineer. I love hunting for beauty and accidental logic where neither belongs. I turn printers into game consoles, specs into bugs, and Swiss mountains into GPX routes. A few featured pieces:
Computation - Turing machines where nobody meant to create one
🦄 Unicode's Transliteration Rules Are Turing-Complete (July 2026)
Just three lines of Unicode transliteration rules (UTS #35) can compute Collatz on stock ICU—which ships natively with every major OS. Featuring Rule 110 and a prime number generator.
⚙️ Jira is Turing-Complete (May 2026)
The proof that the automation rules of this famous enterprise ticketing system can simulate a full Turing machine.
PostScript - A programming language disguised as a document format
🖨️ Programming in PostScript (2025)
This printer language is a full programming environment. Enough to run Tetris and Sokoban.
♟️ PSChess (2024) Play chess directly against your printer.
Security - Specifications, implementations, and wrong assumptions
🔊 An AWKward Modem in Paged Out! #8 (February 2026)
Generate audio files containing data encoded as Bell 103 modem tones with 5 lines of AWK, enabling stealthy air-gapped data exfiltration from restricted Unix systems.
💣 Parsing JSON is a Minefield (2016–2018)
The spec fits on a business card, yet no two parsers agree on what valid JSON is. Widely cited since 2016.
Contact: nicolas at seriot dot ch.