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The Symbols of Operation

Code, data and the dangers of confusing the two.

By chrisanley

14 October 2025

In 1843, Countess Ada Lovelace wrote about the potential for confusion between the "symbols of operation" (which today we would call "code"), and data. This paper discusses the consequences of this confusion for security, from the Countess's comments nearly two centuries ago, through self-modifying code, buffer overflows, ROP chains and all the way to present day Agentic AI vulnerabilities.