2026-09-05
Beyond Regex: Why We Shipped a CPU Profile for PII Detection
What spaCy NER adds to PII detection in Elixir: measured recall and precision tradeoffs, a native CPU runtime, and a reproducible Obscura 0.2.0 example.
Read articleEngineering notes
Building practical PII protection in Elixir
Implementation reports, measurements, and integration guides from the work behind Obscura.
2026-09-02
An AI Hybrid Improved PII Detection. We Still Did Not Ship It.
An engineering case study about testing Perplexity's PII model, finding an apparent hybrid win, and using incremental error analysis to reject a new runtime dependency.
Read article2026-08-21
Should PII Detection Live Inside the BEAM?
A practical comparison of native Obscura integration and a separately operated Presidio privacy service for Elixir applications.
Read article2026-08-15
The Agent Needs Identity. The Model Does Not.
An Elixir engineering case study about keeping customer identity inside a Phoenix application while Jido, OpenAI, and trusted tools operate on stable Obscura pseudonyms.
Read article2026-08-12
Privacy-Safe Phoenix Socket and Channel Logging Without Exposing Payloads
An engineering case study about restoring Phoenix socket and channel visibility with omitted payloads, static labels, bounded redaction, and explicit correlation.
Read article2026-08-07
Privacy-Safe Phoenix Request Logging Without Changing Controller Params
An engineering case study about closing the gap between redacted Phoenix assigns and default request logging without changing controller input.
Read article2026-08-05
Making PII Detection Faster Without Keeping the Input Alive
An Elixir engineering case study about optimizing Obscura's fast profile while preserving output compatibility and proving BEAM binary ownership.
Read article2026-07-29
A Model Card Is Not a License: What We Learned Shipping Local NER in Obscura
An engineering case study about base-model licenses, fine-tuning data agreements, checkpoint provenance, and the licensing changes shipped in Obscura 0.1.1.
Read article2026-07-24
Running Obscura on an NVIDIA GPU with Elixir, EXLA, and Lightning AI
A reproducible field report for validating Obscura, Nx, and EXLA on a Linux NVIDIA Tesla T4 without owning the hardware.
Read article2026-07-22
Protecting PII in Elixir Before It Reaches Logs, APIs, and LLMs
A practical guide to detecting, redacting, and pseudonymizing PII at Elixir application boundaries with Obscura.
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