Editorial standards

Reporting, opinion, inference, speculation

Essays mix four kinds of claims, and try to keep them visibly distinct:

• Reporting — events on the public record, attributed to sources in the essay and its Trust Ledger.
• Opinion — the author's judgment, written in the first person ("I think", "the better read may be").
• Inference — conclusions drawn from evidence but not directly documented; flagged in context.
• Speculation — open questions and thought experiments (a "hypothetical wallet", "where does consent occur?"), framed as such.

Sources & citation policy

• Substantive factual claims are traced in each essay's Trust Ledger: what was checked, against what source, and what remains uncertain.
• Primary sources (police releases, legislative records, company disclosures, academic studies) are preferred over aggregator coverage.
• Sources with commercial interests — including the author's employer and its competitors — are labeled as such.
• Where a source link is not yet archived, the Ledger says so ("archive link being added") rather than linking something unverified. Fragile sources get archived copies as the library grows.

Corrections policy

• Factual errors are corrected in the essay, noted in its Trust Ledger, and logged on the public corrections page with the date and the substance of the change.
• Material changes to a developing technical claim are versioned the same way; silent rewrites are not practiced.
• Each essay shows its original publication date and a "last reviewed" date. Provisional dates (reconstructed from the publication's weekly cadence) are marked provisional until confirmed against the original posts.
• To report an error, use the contact page. Corrections that survive scrutiny are credited if the reporter wishes.

Sponsorship & funding

• The Device Layer carries no advertising, no sponsored posts, no affiliate links, and no paywall.
• It is funded by nobody: it is a side project. If that ever changes, this page will say so before it does.
• The author's employment at KeepKey is disclosed on the about page and inline in every essay it is relevant to.

Tools

Essays are written by the author. Site production and research assistance may use software tools, including AI tools; claims that reach publication are checked against sources per the policy above regardless of how a draft was produced.