Dropsafe
by Alec Muffett
- Posts
- 8,059 from 6 Aug 2001 to 14 Oct 2026
- Posting
- about daily (291 in the last year)
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- personal blog
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- https://alecmuffett.com/feed
Latest
October 2026
- The Memory Hierarchy, Measured in Human Time: From a 1997 Sun [Microsystems] book to an NVIDIA H100: the same memory hierarchy, thirty years apart
- REMINDER: If you use Signal on Android and if you really care about privacy, here are 3 default app settings that you should fix *TODAY*
- BREAKING: TIME MAGAZINE: “THE DEVIL IN THE NETWORK”
September 2026
- IF YOU DO NOTHING ELSE TODAY: please read this astonishing summary of what Paul Moore has been doing to #SafeToNet, #HarmBlock & the Government-lauded #HMDFuse kids’ phone
- Squirrels: The Threat to Critical National Infrastructure
- Obvious in retrospect, someone who got their break “looking through the square window” into everyone’s lives, is going to be in favour of surveillance & censorship
- Douglas Adams in 1978 predicted Terence Tao’s role as Vroomfondel in the modern AI debate: “We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!”
- RSA-260 has been factorised
August 2026
- “German flashlight forum TLF (taschenlampen-forum.de) will be taken offline permanently on September 16”
- “Trump ally issues bill to exempt US websites from British regulators”
- CDT: “The British Public Reject State Access to Private Online Conversations”
- France’s top court blocks social media ban for under-15s | Reuters
- #RUSI / Royal United Services Institute makes batshit proposal to socially engineer “nationalism” in Britain to foster “total defence” / army signups
- Eventually @andyburnham @10DowningStreet must choose whether he wants British children online to be “safe” or “educated”, ‘coz we can’t have “both”
- The Java Story | The Official Documentary
- Remember, Kids: Cyberaugmentation is only for the less-abled!
July 2026
- RE: 1 BILLION
- microgpt
- Ofcom’s quest to censor the world | spiked
- When I started password cracking in 1991, using all available computer resources of a small university I could manage about 200 guesses per second
- New York puts accuracy minimums for age assurance into effect with SAFE for Kids Act | Biometric Update
- India App Censorship Leads To Own Goal, Streisand Effect, Ofcom To Take Note, Please| Rahul Matthan
- US Gov’t threatens sanctions on China for Open Source LLMs “because distillation is a cyber attack”
- The Huggingface Dilemma
- Apple Defeats Liability for Not Scanning iCloud for CSAM, But the Judge Was Not Pleased-Amy v. Apple | Eric Goldman
- EU Exempts Apple Watch and AirPods [and iPhone] From Battery Removal Requirement [due to water resistance & safety]
- I was waiting for this: House of Lords / Baroness Royall: “Algorithms Killed Ann Widdecombe”
- “Social Media Curfew” is a Digital “Purity Ring”
- How It Started in 2018 / How It’s Going in 2026: UK Labour Government to discover “Timezones” in 3… 2…
- Coco had a haircut…
- I asked 3 separate AIs to pretend to be Nigel Farage’s campaign manager and to propose a strategy to survive the Clacton by-election; this is what they suggested
- EU Mandates Driver-Facing Cameras in New Cars From Today
- Stochastic Nerds
- Age Verification is Digital ID
- India asks WhatsApp to pause username feature rollout over fraud concerns – BBC News
- Remember, folks: coordinated misinformation campaigns only happen on the internet / in social media, not in the fact-checked, trustworthy mainstream press
- Mullvad, Napoleon and Sun Tzu: it would be wise for civil society to take a look in the mirror
- When you build tools with abstract and rather arbitrary notions of “safety” baked into them – not addressing a specific threat model – they get considerably weaker
June 2026
- Online Age Verification Law Could Kill Whistleblowing
- It’s not about the children, it’s about how monetize surveillance: demand the illiberal, stupid, self-defeating & impossible, & then criminalise the wrong people for circumvention
- Britain, or Russia?
- Digital Sovereignty is a Clusterfuck
- Gov’t “would…like Ofcom to launch a rapid assessment of what highly effective age assurance looks like for determining whether someone is over 16”
- Chips Security Act gains industry support: letter
- UK wants to monetize “leadership” in surveillance, censorship, age-verification to gatekeep internet, get revenue
- If you are a Parent here’s One Thing you should be utterly furious about regarding the UK’s Social Media Ban
- The White House Wants Anthropic to Block All Jailbreaks. That May Not Be Possible | WIRED
- OECD urges mandatory use of shared infrastructure to scale DPI adoption | Biometric Update
- Remember, kids: platform-specific AppStores are tools of monopoly which prevent free choice!
- FAQ: Hello! You have posted or shared material proposing that “privacy-preserving age verification” (often: “ZKP”) exists, will work & help keep people safe
- It is misleading for the Prime Minister, or anyone else, to suggest the privacy concerns here are no more serious than being ID’d for a pint
- Tracker of Tech Industry, Think Tank, and Other Responses to Proposed Expansion of UK Censorship Laws – Preston Byrne
- Farage would employ “chekists” so that central government may police ideology in schools, colleges
- Mumsnet: “Australia didn’t do enough & Tech Companies must Nerd Harder”; Labour MP: “LinkedIn is The Dark Web”
- For those who feel anguished at our government’s slide into totalitarianism: some words of possible comfort
- Enid Blyton to be appointed Minister for Child Safety in the newly announced National Childhood Service | GOV.UK
- Stop Killing the Internet | A Global Movement for a Better Internet
- Censorial, pro-age-verification pro-surveillance child safety charity *suddenly* against Government attempting to render them irrelevant via age verification to ban children from social media
- UK Gov *rejects* “privacy by design” architecture, GDPR-mandated data minimisation now supposedly “makes children unsafe”
- Observation: The UK & EU now must deregulate & promote globally competitive AI/LLM provision on grounds of Digital Sovereignty
- UK set to ban under-16s from social media, livestreaming, disappearing messages – POLITICO
- The End of the Open Internet | Foreign Affairs
- “Signal President Meredith Whittaker threatens again to pull the encrypted messaging app out of the UK”
- Some day Civil Society must grapple with whether platforms can differentiate markets on the basis of delivering Privacy & Security features
- I designed a hat for the Age Verification community. We should ship a bunch of them to Westminster.
- Australia: “the reason that age verification is not working / that kids keep circumventing it, is a lack of good faith on the part of the platforms”
- This: Clippy The Magic Nonce Detector
- “A social media ban should be extended to those aged 16 and 17, the @ChildrensComm (@Rachel_deSouza) has proposed”
- TFW when the younglings discover “defence in depth” | ht: @SwiftOnSecurity
- Compare and Contrast: what is the likely consequence of such simultaneous positions?
- Payment apps are watching what you say (feat. Rainey Reitman) – Lock and Code
May 2026
- “You can tell by the way complaints or requests are worded that they have used AI technology to be able to ask for that information,” he said
- Using AI to assist interpretation…
- Govt: “We committed in the Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy ‘to make it impossible for children in the UK to take, share or view a nude image.’”
- HOW ABOUT SIMPLY NOT HANDING YOUR CHILD A SMARTPHONE, JESS?
- California Wants an Age Tracker for the Whole Web
- Germany’s state media regulators are preparing new rules that could force platforms like X, Facebook, TikTok and Instagram to give greater visibility to “trusted” or “reliable” media outlets in their algorithms
- New Zealand prepares biometric age credential for Govt.nz digital wallet | Biometric Update
- Westminster Recycles Tobacco-Style Panic Campaign For Internet Crackdown
- How Often Do Consumers Balk at Doing Online Age Authentication? | Technology & Marketing Law Blog
- Social media ‘is vital’, say Welsh teens arguing against a ban | BBC News
- Mandatory Age Verification + Lack of Account Memorialization = Horrific Insensitivity by Substack (& others?)
- UK Government King’s Speech proposes “Cyber ASBO” with obvious risk of scope creep into censorship
April 2026
- Don’t take away our freedom to play games when we want | 38 Degrees
- ‘Von der Leyen Announces the EU’s New Age Verification App Claiming it is “Completely Anonymous” & users “Cannot be Tracked”’ | …the EU is about to have its ‘Clipper’ moment
- From 2019: ‘If there were 5 million “bad people” on Facebook – terrorists, criminals, drug-dealers, whatever – that would be 0.2% of the userbase’
- I find it bizarre that the AgeVerification (AV) industry says “platforms don’t want AV because they don’t want private data” – BUT civil society says “platforms DO want AV because they want private data”
- Trump posts graphic video of slaying to argue for stricter immigration policies | BBC News
- In a X/Twitter post that garnered over 3.2 million impressions, EFF declares X is”…no longer where the fight is happening”
- A bug on the dark side of the Moon
- The trial lawyers come for online free speech | Blaze Media
- New Mexico’s Meta Ruling and Encryption | Schneier on Security
- Age Verification causing people to stop installing security updates on iPhone
- Australian eSafety: “It is a ‘dark pattern’ to permit people to 1/ amend mistakes 2/ be in control of information about themselves 3/ be obliged to validate abuse reports”
March 2026
- The Timeless Fear of Corrupting the Youth | WSJ
- The Big Tech verdicts you’re cheering for are actually terrible for free speech | The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
- ‘…all of the evidence submitted to “prove” Meta knew their product was harmful was internal safety research they were conducting to improve their moderation and detection’
- ‘The Encryption Problem: Where “Design Liability” Leads’ | … IF YOU ARE CHEERING META LOSING 2X RECENT LAWSUITS YOU ARE SUPPORTING THE END OF ONLINE PRIVACY
- [Europe] voted today to end chat monitoring 1.0. This ends an exception that was used, in particular, by US Big Tech companies to monitor billions of people’s private messages without suspicion
- MEPs block tech firms from scanning for child sexual abuse material | POLITICO
- I am very much looking at the Apple Age Verification (AV) approach as the least bad way to do something terrible
- Remember that big win on ChatControl a couple of weeks ago? It turns out they didn’t like the result and they want to vote on it again, TODAY. Sorry.
- This cybersecurity tweet from @SciTechgovuk / DSIT is getting *brigaded* by people pointing out how the UK Government is actively undermining cybersecurity
- Human rights chief warns against banning social media for kids | POLITICO
- ‘Restricting access to social media presents “issues of human rights, because a child has a right to receive information just like anybody else.”’
- Spain: football-match-induced online censorship regularly prevents installation of Postgres on Docker for fear of illicit streaming
- PseudoDNA: Identifying Critical Vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s PhotoDNA
- “Natural collisions in Apple’s NeuralHash & Microsoft’s PhotoDNA show worrying false positives/negatives in widely deployed perceptual hashing”
- Investigation: UK spends millions on VPNs as government weighs ban for children | TechRadar
- UK House of Lords seeks ban on Swiss Army Knives that “…could be used to cut people”
- This is absolute perfection: UBUNTU SECURE BOOT AGE VERIFICATION | Hacker.House
- Lawyer mocks Ofcom’s big fine with bigger hamster | RollOnFriday
- Ofcom accused of posting misinformation
- Let Me Explain How a State Actor Could Perform a Denial-of-Service Attack on the Entire UK Government in the Wake of Ofcom “Online Safety Act” Client-Side Scanning
- One Week, Three Stories About Meta, Encryption, & Age Verification, and Why I’m Not Worried About (This Aspect of) Meta
- Ofcom persist in pretending that 4chan are trading in the UK, rather than accepting that Britons are visiting a foreign website
- I suspect that Ofcom only ever accept that it is “highly effective age assurance” if somebody gets paid, ideally repeatedly | Apple permit “account age” as a means of age verification
- Moxie Marlinspike, of Signal fame, announces partnership with Meta to bring end-to-end encryption to Meta AI Chat
- Meta is shutting down its VR metaverse on June 15th | The Verge | …BUT WON’T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE REGULATORS?
- There is an entire genre of tricking AI customer service bots into doing work; but few are pointing out the obvious…
- Lloyds, Bank of Scotland and Halifax apps showing customers other users’ transactions | BBC News
- A New Jerusalem
- I have a 2018-era MacMini with 64Gb of RAM + negligible GPU, running a 35 billion parameter model and I’m getting 4 tokens per second out of it; tell me again how we aren’t going to be running AIs locally at home?
- Ofcom’s [attempted] browbeating of Canada-based online depression forum into compliance with Online Safety Act “Age Verification”
- “JUST A LINK CAN LEAVE A TRACE” | UK Counter-Terrorism Police are feeding teenagers with horrific, emotional anti-social-media fearmongering that may end in multiple *tragedy*
- Journalists! Why you should not bother wasting your/everyone’s time covering “Age Verification” on Linux: The “Tug of War” Theory of Open Source
- TikTok incapable of delivering both user privacy *and* user safety, retains capability to surveil user communications
- “Governments should halt plans to roll out age checks on online services until privacy and security concerns are addressed, hundreds of academics said today”
- Social Media Bans are like the “Peanut Allergy” Bans of the 1990s/2000s: they will unnecessarily create a generation who cannot cope with the digital environment
- “The world wants to ban children from social media, but there will be grave consequences for us all”| Taylor Lorenz | …Age Verification is Digital ID via the back door
February 2026
- If you read 1 thing about Social Media Bans this week, it should be Rod Wilson’s magisterial letter to the WSJ; extract, text & link below
- Across Civil Society you can almost hear the mumbling of activists suddenly staring at their shoes wondering if they now have to defend AI & “Effective Altruism” against Trump
- The Wyoming GRANITE Act, America’s first-ever foreign censorship shield bill, has PASSED the Wyoming House of Representatives, 46-12! | Preston Byrne
- “Google and Apple today announced that testing of encrypted RCS messaging between Android and iPhone is now underway” | Yay, more end-to-end encryption!
- Thought for the day: Online Safety and Age Verification
- US Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy explains that maybe age verification is not about child protection
- UK Govt to demand AgeVerification of “ALL regulated user-to-user” services, and VPNs for anyone under 18; well that would end online anonymity in the UK…
- I have a TCP/UDP port number, a patent*, a USENET** moderatorship, an RFC, and an Erdos Number of 2 twice over; it’s probably time for me to write that book
- UK right-wing news: “No foreign government should be helping citizens of allied countries to circumvent their own laws!”; meanwhile MI6 continues to run its dark web Russian recruitment site…
- Businesses may be caught by government proposals to restrict VPN use | Computer Weekly
- OFCOM update: so apparently the embargoed press-release email was circulated to one (more?) of their general discussion maillists, which I feel symbolic of their approach towards security
- HEADSUP: Ofcom *tonight* to announce demand for apps, websites to deploy “hash matching” (i.e. client-side scanning, fuzzy matching) of uploaded images “to protect children”
- Thought for the day: if there is a UK under-16 social media ban, the party which most appeals to 16-year-olds “out of the starting gate” will win the next election
- UK Government Press Release: “the same people who demanded & shaped the online safety act now want to do it all over again”
- UK Government: “children deserve social isolation and pervasive surveillance to prepare them for their future lives”
- UK Government: “platforms must retain activity data pertinent to dead children, unless it’s not pertinent to their death” | …but how will they know beforehand?
- UK Government: “Infinite Scrolling leads to CSAM”
- “You have twitter feeds of Randos that are just studying where our airplanes go and publishing it…”
- It’s going to be really interesting when AIs finally start to demand diversity, equity, and inclusion…
- Ofcom: “if you don’t respect our groundless extraterritorial authority then we will multiply the unenforceable fines that we shall demand you pay”
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