Best of Cryptography — January 2026

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   Article

   Anton Zhiyanov·16w

   Go 1.26 interactive tour

   Go 1.26 introduces significant language and runtime improvements. Key features include `new(expr)` for creating pointers from expressions, type-safe error checking with `errors.AsType`, the Green Tea garbage collector for better memory efficiency on multi-core systems, faster cgo/syscalls and memory allocation, experimental SIMD operations, secret mode for cryptographic data protection, goroutine leak profiling, and numerous standard library enhancements including reflective iterators, buffer peeking, process handles, and improved metrics.

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   Article

   Developer's Journey·14w

   Small Observation That Changed How I See Everyday Tech

   TOTP (Time-based One-Time Password) enables two-factor authentication without internet connectivity by using a shared secret key and time-based windows. Both the server and client independently generate identical OTPs by combining the secret key with the current 30-second time window step. The article includes a simplified JavaScript implementation demonstrating the core concept: dividing Unix time into intervals, multiplying by the secret, and applying modulus to generate a 6-digit code that refreshes every 30 seconds.

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   Article

   daniel.haxx.se·14w

   More HTTP/3 focus, one backend less

   The curl project is removing support for the OpenSSL-QUIC backend in version 8.19.0, consolidating HTTP/3 support to just two backends: nghttp2+nghttp3 and quiche (experimental). OpenSSL-QUIC never graduated from experimental status due to three critical issues: an inadequate API lacking necessary controls, extremely poor performance (up to 3x slower than ngtcp2), and excessive memory usage (up to 20x more than alternatives). This decision follows a history where OpenSSL rejected implementing the BoringSSL QUIC API in 2021, instead creating their own QUIC stack that shipped broken in 2023 and only became decent by 2025.

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