2021–2024

2024 694

December 2024

1. 31 DecGetting it in early…
2. 29 DecCost of false positives | Kellan Elliott-McCrea: Blog
3. 28 DecAn Earth-Rocking Cosmic Explosion Turns 20 | Scientific American
4. 26 DecPotatoes: Chinese state propaganda in mainstream TV
5. 24 DecMedia is flooded with complaints about AIs being trained on images or text & roughly reproducing them; meanwhile in the (human) music industry for the past 100 years…
6. 19 DecOfcom apologises for ‘ill-judged’ porn joke job ad | BBC News
7. 19 DecZuck: “It’s sad that I basically have to tell our teams to launch our new AI advances everywhere except the EU at this point”
8. 18 DecThat feeling when you finally give up on trying to find the book that you probably lent out to somebody, and go buy a second-hand replacement on eBay; this is mildly sweetened by the observation that…
9. 18 DecUS Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency strongly endorses use of robust, unsurveilled End-to-End Encrypted Messenger software; it would be bizarre for #Ofcom to oppose this
10. 18 DecPresumably Lorna Woods & @WillPerrin are delighted at saving British children from the “harms” of lycra-clad cyclists
11. 16 DecOfcom spreads misinformation, misrepresents internet and software apps as being unregulated / beyond the rule of law
12. 16 DecOfcom publishes “illegal harms” codes and guidance; follow @cyberleagle for analysis of how Ofcom imagines that privacy & technology work, how people can have “too much” privacy
13. 15 DecTony Blair calls for roll out of digital ID | “…put all your eggs in one basket, it makes it easier to lose them all and for the government to surveil you…”
14. 13 DecGoogle says its breakthrough Willow quantum chip can’t break modern cryptography | The Verge
15. 10 DecIf you’re interested in tech policy or security & looking for Christmas read, I recommend “A History of the World in 6 Glasses” by @tomstandage
16. 9 DecDual_EC_DRBG with Justin Schuh & @matthew_d_green | …listening to Matt not trying to be rude, but achieving it, makes a worthwhile morning podcast
17. 9 DecLinux Kernel: TOCTOU in Exec System | …I am sure that there was a vulnerability of this exact kind in Unix circa 1988 +/- 4yrs
18. 5 DecAustrian federal court decides that use of reCAPTCHA is not “essential” and therefore the cookies it sets are in violation of GDPR/EPD, thus reCAPTCHA is illegal
19. 5 DecI remain perpetually amazed how often the same people are one moment calling for “open APIs” and “access to data for research” and the next are “what do you mean you let just anybody scrape the locations of all rental bikes in New York City?”
20. 5 Dec“So when is the earliest that UK users could now benefit from options to verify their identity?” | …clearly that’s what’s lacking in the UK: social media sites must vet us
21. 4 DecSometimes I imagine that there is an alien race watching and discussing us, and they’re saying “…these humans aren’t *really* intelligent, it’s all just pattern matching and stochastic parroting”
22. 4 DecProof of the universality of the “safety activist crusades to undo demonstrable technical benefit to all because of fringe issue…” trope
23. 3 DecHere is a picture of me using giant, mega marshmallows for their zero-rated VAT approved purpose as an ingredient, in this case for rice crispy cakes
24. 3 DecEU GPSR: General Product Safety Regulations

November 2024

1. 30 Nov“So, in response, many NSA employees were like, ‘No, fuck off, I’ll play Pokémon Go all over base'” | …and yet Australia expects to successfully ban teenagers from social media?
2. 29 NovHonestly thinking that Australia has just done a “Leeroy Jenkins” to Government efforts to “save children from themselves” by banning them from Social Media
3. 28 NovElectric Dreams | Tate Modern | …I’m here and waiting for the inevitable backlash about “algorithms cannot create art”
4. 27 NovHistory of “ping -a” (audible ping) on FreeBSD and MacOS, by @brucewmurphy on Threads
5. 27 NovRuna Sandvik: “Introduction to Investigative Journalism: Digital Security” | Global Investigative Journalism Network
6. 27 NovRemember, Kids: just because Bluesky is suddenly and massively popular whilst X is dying on the vine does *not* mean that all those people screaming that “network effects prevent people moving between social networks, we must regulate!” — were wrong…
7. 27 NovThis sounds so much like the online safety mafia
8. 26 NovTFW someone’s randomness pretty strongly suggests that they’re a bot, but their grammar is so poor that it’s not worth attempting a prompt-injection experiment because they surely can’t be an LLM…
9. 26 NovSo if you’re a historian researching the 17th century Italian use of weasel testicles as contraceptives (yes, really) you may be flagged by your Google searches
10. 25 NovRegulators. They are attracted by success and limelight. They feed on headlines. They will hunt for you.
11. 25 NovParents: how many of you have gotten to the point of memorising Bluey series and episode numbers?
12. 22 NovIf you can remember back when AI deep fakes were supposed to be a terrible thing, this may change your mind…
13. 21 NovIn Case You Missed It: CNN on the Internet Archive being used to protect government climate sites | … “scraping” is dual-use, can also be good
14. 20 NovUK Digital Minister @peterkyle threatens companies which do not submit to government surveillance and censorship demands
15. 20 NovFreeCAD Version 1.0 Released | FreeCAD News
16. 19 Nov“Here, the firewall is not merely a tool—it is an actor within a neoliberal technocratic order, enforcing compliance with a constructed vision of ‘secure communication’ while erasing alternate possibilities for networked interaction” — Michel Foucault, Network Architect
17. 19 NovIf I was the NSA in 2013, still smarting from a Snowden-induced loss of capability, I’d go long on hiring smart nerds to do research whilst building a credible yet overblown threat narrative for extant cryptosystems…
18. 19 NovIf only Sun Microsystems had purchased Apple when it had the chance, we could have had this magnificent device
19. 19 NovSpeaking as a former Sun Microsystems employee, I look forward to Chrome being purchased by (e.g.) Oracle & taken closed-source, thereby killing an entire browser ecosystem
20. 18 NovPakistani religious body declares using VPN is against Islamic law
21. 18 NovNMS Ceefax | …this is gloriously retro and tremendously well done
22. 17 Nov“The teenagers who read Foucault are in pitched battle with the teenagers who read Rand, whilst the teenagers who read Tolkien, Vonnegut or Adams watch, agog at the technical misapprehension…”
23. 17 NovUK cheeses miss out on international prize after getting stuck in customs | The Guardian
24. 16 NovI really like this apparently proposed design for the Serbian 100 dinar
25. 15 NovI clicked on this tweet to see how far I could scroll before reading a comment that says “…it’s not the regulation, it’s how it’s being implemented”
26. 15 Nov3rd edition of Ross Anderson’s Security Engineering now freely available for download | Light Blue Touchpaper
27. 14 NovI feel that the defining attribute of Bluesky is the number of users who follow ~10 people, are followed by ~10 people, and yet who block 1000+ people; it’s not *bad* per-se…
28. 13 Nov“The authors of this book met by chance on Twitter, and together launched Noticing Nature: the British microseason project (@Naturalcalendar) on which this book is based”
29. 13 NovParenting…
30. 13 NovDo you remember the days when newspapers wanted a cut of the revenue of people who linked to them? Good times… good times…
31. 13 NovMeanwhile, back in the UK, I look forward to Jeremy Clarkson being named home secretary… oh wait, the Tories lost?
32. 13 NovNow the dust has settled I would like to strongly condemn @jason_koebler & @josephfcox (& by extension @404mediaco) for misrepresenting the new iPhone “reboot” feature as an Anti-Law-Enforcement measure
33. 13 NovLovely thread on X from some Indian hackers using a microwave as a Faraday cage & spoofing Californian Wi-Fi networks in order to unlock AirPod hearing-aid functionality for Grandma…
34. 12 NovICYMI: (3 months ago) UK ‘desperately exposed’ to cyber-threats and pandemics, says minister [@peterkyle of @SciTechGovUK]
35. 12 NovICYMI: Encrypted messaging app developer moves out of Australia after police visit employee’s home
36. 12 NovTwo online safety questions I beg @DCMS @IWFhotline @LordsCommsCom @Ofcom @SciTechGovUK @onlinesafetycom @peterkyle @CPhilipOfficial respond to…
37. 10 NovThe lesson of phenylephrine is that it takes a minimum of 20 years to rescind ineffective regulator-imposed technologies that are introduced in response to moral panic; now consider Age Verification…
38. 10 Nov“As strongly requested by the reviewers, here we cite some references […] although they are completely irrelevant to the present work”
39. 8 Novwhat’s an authoritarian?
40. 8 Nov“As an academic I can prove that people are mindless sheep & even a single Instagram post is enough to throw society into chaos; thus it is incumbent upon us to rescind anonymity & impose age verification + a duty of care to protect people from ever reading things which might upset them…”
41. 8 NovIt doesn’t always work out but when I can pour a double ristretto straight into an espresso cup from a naked portafilter, I know my puck prep is solid
42. 8 NovHey, do you remember when the Trust & Safety community used to believe that ‘election interference’ was how people like Trump got elected?
43. 7 NovAustralian Government demands that SOCIAL NETWORKS MUST COLLECT EVEN MORE INFORMATION ABOUT EVERYBODY, ESPECIALLY CHILDREN (HT: @eSafetyOffice)
44. 7 NovI lament the gradual loss of the diversity of online forums (…/email lists/USENET/BBS…) to Facebook groups, not least for the 40+ year bulwark of transferable skills they taught for dealing summarily & elegantly with trolls, edgelords & blithe critics (HT @dieworkwear)
45. 6 Nov“Pax Americana”
46. 5 NovSwiss Cheese Mono Font | …finally, a replacement for comic sans?
47. 4 NovIf you like spicy ginger beer, try Belvoir Ginger Cordial diluted with carbonated water (HT: @belvoirfarm_uk)
48. 4 NovOnce Linux’s Biggest Enemy: Darl McBride Dies and Nobody Notices | FOSS Force
49. 3 NovFinally we are combating bad actors spreading misinformation with good actors spreading information
50. 1 NovSir Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch to become Penguin Classic
51. 1 NovAll these people asking “can my husband find out who i voted for?” — yet we’re still supposedly having a debate about messenger software giving people “too much privacy”
52. 1 NovExclusive: Chinese researchers develop AI model for military use on back of Meta’s Llama | …wait until Reuters discover that China use Linux, AES & TCP/IP too
53. 1 NovI’m dialling in the new coffee grinder for espresso…
54. 1 NovGoogle dodging huge financial penalties imposed by regulator for excessive blocking of legitimate content
55. 1 Nov“There’s No Dublin Halloween Parade As Fake Website Causes Confusion” | …IS IT A CYBER ATTACK? IS IT AI?

October 2024

1. 30 OctTension between US copyright office vs: video game historians regarding circumvention of copy protection
2. 30 OctAnnoyed Redditors tanking Google Search results illustrates perils of AI scrapers | Ars Technica
3. 30 OctAfter Pause, NASA’s Voyager 1 Communicating With Mission Team | NASA
4. 30 Oct“A surprising device is capturing the vibe of a single street corner in San Francisco” | …it’s not surveillance if it’s art
5. 29 OctAs many people have pointed out, there are literally movies about this scenario
6. 29 OctThe ITU is not a fit body to govern the internet, and neither is the UN
7. 29 OctNew coffee grinder on order
8. 27 OctIf Donald Trump’s team OPSEC is so weak that they are open to people claiming to be him on random burner phones, AI voice synthesis presents an existential danger
9. 27 OctChina Adds 160 Gigawatts in First 3 Quarters of 2024 | CleanTechnica
10. 26 OctWaPoMeltDown: if you wield the tagline “democracy dies in darkness” you had better live by it
11. 25 OctFrom 2022: a 25-minute video on the history of GPS, end to end encryption, and our avoidance of hard science cost/benefit analyses of “saving a child’s life”
12. 25 OctGraham Smith @cyberleagle “celebrates” the first birthday of the Online Safety Act with a 6 Year retrospective timeline of blog posts correctly predicting the extant clusterf*ck
13. 25 Oct“…what’s so ‘magical’ about a perfect geometric form, with wings made of mirrors, flying in the dark silence outside of the world, singing a song made of light?”
14. 24 OctRegulators around the world are racing to regulate Big AI; meanwhile @Raspberry_PI have released a £65 Neural Network AI Accelerator
15. 22 OctOfcom to consult on legally obliging client side scanning spyware to be added to end-to-end encrypted secure messengers
16. 22 OctResponse to the @AllTechIsHuman report into End-to-End Encryption: the original questionnaire, with responses & critique by Alec Muffett (1/n ?)
17. 22 OctA is for Boat, P is for Balloon, K is for Football — and so is B…
18. 22 OctLife as a Stay-At-Home-Dad
19. 22 OctTesting a new feature: “Blogposts” :-)
20. 21 OctGay man rejected for asylum [from Bangladesh] told he is ‘not truly gay’ by judge | Metro News
21. 21 OctGENERIC TEMPLATES FOR CIVIL SOCIETY CALLS TO REDUCE RISK AND IMPACT OF END TO END ENCRYPTION IN MESSENGER SERVICES
22. 20 Oct“If you let Google have your data, why not the NHS?” | …or, indeed, the Police? The security services? Glib, dehumanising foolishness from @phillipinman …
23. 18 OctJustice decides to block four pornographic sites accessible to minors | Libération
24. 18 OctCheat bread rolls, and why not?
25. 17 OctVPN traffic from France to spike
26. 17 OctUnpopular Opinion: the change to the Twitter block button is no big deal
27. 17 OctHow does WhatsApp make money? | BBC News
28. 17 OctChocolate-Chip Beetroot Muffins: a baker’s dozen…
29. 14 OctI, for one, look forward to the day when we have our first Grade 1 Listed Data Centre with upgrades & updates subject to local council planning authorities
30. 12 OctThe Social Media Moral Panic Is All About Confusing Risks & Harms | Techdirt
31. 12 OctEndingWithAli on IG nails how to respond to whoever hacked the internet archive
32. 12 OctConsider the Plight of the VC-Backed Privacy Burglars | Daring Fireball
33. 12 OctJonathan Haidt’s Claims On Kids & Tech Crumble Under Scrutiny From Top Expert, Candice Odgers | Techdirt
34. 11 OctEU delays biometric border plan again as demand for fingerprints could be scrapped | The Independent
35. 8 OctThe Disappearance of an Internet Domain
36. 7 OctIt is the 7th of October 2024 and once again the European Union are FRESHLY attempting to spy on all your messages
37. 1 OctDutch avoid endorsing Hungary’s approach to EU child sexual abuse regulation | Euractiv
38. 1 OctDigital Breakup Assistant | Certo Software
39. 1 OctHurrah for Switzerland
40. 1 OctWouldn’t it be easier to make it illegal to trick, mislead, or defraud people?

September 2024

1. 30 Sep“Protocol: All messages are encoded as JSON objects and terminated with a single NUL byte”
2. 27 SepCryptography 101 with Alfred Menezes
3. 27 SepWow, Conservative leadership candidates are advertising on X/Twitter
4. 21 SepWe Are Old
5. 19 SepAlan Turing Institute: “No [evidence of] AI impact on UK, French & EU election results”
6. 18 SepCourt backs Google’s challenge to the EU’s $1.7 billion antitrust fine
7. 17 SepHeritage Foundation Admits KOSA Will Be Useful For Removing Pro-Abortion Content… If Trump Wins | Techdirt
8. 15 SepHow to Monetize a Blog | Yes, really…
9. 15 SepWales 20mph limit: Lee Waters admits more common sense needed | BBC News
10. 10 SepOn the Pros and Cons of the Signal Protocol for End-to-End Encryption of Messenger Software : a brief reminder that Signal should NOT be the only E2EE Protocol
11. 6 SepReminder: ChatControl is back from the dead. Again. The European Union want all the world’s messenger software to have state surveillance built into the code
12. 6 SepTelegram will start moderating private chats after CEO’s arrest | …which they can only do because it’s not encrypted… | TheVerge
13. 6 SepVia @TheEconomist, Rick Jones of the Britain’s National Crime Agency (@NCA_UK) asks “Why does a 13-year-old need [end-to-end] encryption?” | …because everyone needs good security, Rick /HT @ShashJ
14. 5 SepHey, does everybody remember the “monopolistic” & “anti-competitive” WhatsApp blocking of Telegram links in 2015?
15. 4 SepPerhaps Trump is the next Joyce?
16. 3 SepThe last few days I’ve listened to any number of podcasts regarding the Durov affair, but if I’d listened to only one I’d have wanted it to be The 9pm Edict by @Stilgherrian
17. 3 SepUnpopular Opinion: new Bluesky “anti-toxicity” measures may have just carried us all a smidgen past “peak trust & safety”
18. 2 SepA terrifying example of the Chinese deep fake misinformation which is going to disrupt the American election
19. 2 SepThe Bypass Strategy: Platforms, the Online Safety Act, and Future of Online Speech by @ellenejudson, @beakira & @digitalspeechX | SSRN
20. 2 SepSeabird Panopticon Breeding Success
21. 1 SepThe AI-Copyright Trap: Essential Reading by @CraigCarys

August 2024

1. 31 AugThe secret inside One Million Checkboxes | eieio.games
2. 30 AugBrazil judge orders suspension of Elon Musk’s X | AP News
3. 30 AugOne for @bphillipsonMP / @educationgovuk: perhaps our *kids* need to be educated-away from the desire to create non-consensual intimate imagery and deepfakes?
4. 30 AugWhat if L’affaire {Durov, Telegram} is actually hiding a nation state turf war over mass surveillance?
5. 29 AugOn the marzipan dreadnought | Heather Burns
6. 29 AugRand Paul Is Right: Censoring The Internet Doesn’t Protect Kids | Techdirt
7. 29 AugThe untimely demise of an image upscaler | @lcamtuf’s thing
8. 28 AugSignal Is More Than Encrypted Messaging. Under Meredith Whittaker, It’s Out to Prove Surveillance Capitalism Wrong | WIRED
9. 28 AugLord, please save us from activists like @CCDHate who wish to equip state regulators with powers of arbitrary censorship
10. 27 AugMy understanding of the charges against Pavel Durov & Telegram
11. 26 AugLiterally 20 years ago we said that French regulations to restrict cryptography without state approval would eventually bite; and we were right…
12. 26 AugInteresting to see the child safety activist community vaguely split between “Yay France Go Ban All The Encryptions” vs: “Durov Must Prefer French Prison to Lefortovo”
13. 26 AugTelegram CEO Pavel Durov Held Over Alleged Child Protection Failures on App | Bloomberg
14. 26 AugSo, Alec, what do *you* believe is happening with Pavel Durov and Telegram Messenger and the French Government?
15. 24 AugLIDL becoming a cloud infrastructure and cybersecurity provider
16. 22 AugRegulating platform risk and design: ChatGPT says the quiet part out loud | MUST READ from @daphnehk
17. 22 AugThe AI photo editing era is here | The Verge
18. 21 AugRe: “Findings Report: Governance on Fediverse Microblogging Servers”
19. 21 Aug1972: Introduction to VM/370
20. 21 AugThe Oldest World Map in the World
21. 21 Aug“Spoiler: it is likely @X will be blocked soon in Brazil” | Thread by @1lucabelli
22. 20 AugPostbox closed because ‘snails eating mail’ | BBC News
23. 20 AugItalian Ministry of Justice defines Rickrolling as a cybercrime, provides definition
24. 19 Aug“How Find My Device protects your data” | Google turns Android devices into Airtag equivalents, I’m waiting for screams from privacy & safety activists
25. 19 AugWith @realDonaldTrump reposting fake images of @taylorSwift13 endorsement we should see restructuring of the AI debate: “who cares if it’s AI, look at the impact”
26. 18 Aug“my son’s iPhone died after trying to play fortnite, PLEASE HELP!” | Oops…
27. 18 AugHas anyone yet seen explicit carve outs for surveillance of end-to-end encrypted messenger systems such as ChatControl?
28. 18 AugThe evolution of expert communities | @lcamtuf
29. 17 AugNo, the government isn’t planning to introduce ID cards | @Psythor on the companies which are trying to become essential middlemen for the internet
30. 17 AugRepublicans Pump Brakes on KOSA After Realizing It Could Censor Them Too | Techdirt
31. 17 AugA key part of California’s online safety law for kids is still on hold after appeals court ruling | The Verge
32. 17 AugBarnstorming thread by Ari Cohn on the fear-mongering that surrounds modern technology
33. 17 AugUS: states that mandate age verification lead to performative self-censorship of Porn sites; UK: Porn-site holding companies & advocacy groups work with regulator towards “workable” age verification…
34. 17 AugI suspect that this tweet was written by somebody who doesn’t use daily contactless payments
35. 17 AugThis amazing double thread by @daphnehk on California’s cloning of @5RightsFound’s Age Appropriate Design Code…
36. 16 AugJD Vance offers a prime example of why teenagers need end-to-end encryption and closed messenger groups for personal data safety
37. 13 AugBrussels [European Commission] slaps down Thierry Breton over ‘harmful content’ letter to Elon Musk | …and rightfully throws @ThierryBreton under a metaphorical bus
38. 13 AugIn the Times @hugorifkind asks the ultimate pearl-clutcher’s question: “…how does a free society cope when the unspeakable are free to speak?”
39. 12 AugThe former (“focus on the failure”) space is also where those people intent upon “regulating AI for the public good” largely live; their goal is to prevent advancement rather than improve it…
40. 12 AugThe Many Reasons Why NCMEC’s Board Is Failing Its Mission, From A NCMEC Insider | Techdirt
41. 10 Aug“What’s the most powerful uncensored LLM?” | …one person’s safety regulation is another person’s bowdlerisation
42. 10 AugWe received internal Trump documents from ‘Robert.’ The campaign just confirmed it was hacked | POLITICO
43. 9 AugFrom 1999 | “how can I become a cryptographer?” | Schneier on Security
44. 9 Aug‘A Platform That’s Teetering on the Edge of Becoming a User-Experience Joke Akin to Windows Vista’ | Daring Fireball
45. 9 AugUK ‘desperately exposed’ to cyber-threats and pandemics, says Minister @PeterKyle | The Guardian
46. 9 Aug“Keeping your accounts safe from AI content moderation” | …pacifying or circumventing “trust & safety” will be the SEO of the next decade
47. 9 AugUtah outlaws books by Judy Blume and Sarah J Maas in first statewide ban | The Guardian
48. 9 AugFSC Executive Director Delivers Keynote at UK Age Assurance Regulator Event | Free Speech Coalition | …but where are the Privacy campaigners?
49. 9 Aug[From 2008] HyperCard: What Could Have Been | Isegoria
50. 8 AugApple’s permissions features are out of balance | Six Colors
51. 8 AugOverriding Gatekeeper Protections in MacOS 15 Sequoia Will Require Clicking Through Panels in System Settings | Daring Fireball
52. 7 AugBanning X/Twitter Would Do More Harm Than Good
53. 6 AugURGENT: Call for views on the Code of Practice for Software Vendors | *BEFORE THIS FRIDAY* | GOV.UK
54. 6 AugThis Twitter post is a deep metaphor for online anonymity…
55. 5 AugAnonymity is not the problem, either…
56. 5 AugA primer on how End-to-End Encryption IS NOT PREVENTING policing, arrest, or conviction of the rioters in the UK race riots (HT @shashj @DmitryOpines @AntiRacismDay @arusbridger)
57. 5 AugSen. Ron Wyden: Why I voted against the Kids Online Safety Act
58. 5 AugIt was recently in vogue for academic digital-rights campaigners to demand that platforms (e.g. Facebook) NEVER update user experience without user consent; this HN article…
59. 2 Aug“Pump and Trump” | The Bitcoin community goes MAGA | The Verge
60. 2 AugThe irony is that if this actually worked as described, @Nextdoor would be the richest platform on the planet
61. 1 AugMeet the teens lobbying against the Kids Online Safety Act | The Verge
62. 1 AugDing Dong KOSA’s Dead (For Now) | Techdirt
63. 1 AugModest Proposal: if “infinite scroll” is to be banned in the USA, they should also ban 24-hour news channels

July 2024

1. 31 JulJD Vance’s Drunken College Photo Met With Shrugs | …as someone put it: “we finally have a test case”
2. 30 JulNice little thread which (to paraphrase) thoroughly punctures the style & trend aspects of applying modern cryptography to software architecture
3. 30 JulThe IWF, Thorn, & WeProtect are polling people’s opinions of a list of “horizon technologies” that may harm or help children; I offer sample responses that you may consider…
4. 29 JulFerrari CEO Deepfake Shows Growing Threat of AI Scams Impersonating Executives | Bloomberg
5. 28 JulNice little primer on the tradeoffs when designing webapps to keep secrets securely in client storage | @0xTib3rius
6. 28 JulRemember the “Messages in @SignalApp’s Desktop App need to be inaccessibly encrypted on the local hard disk” brouhaha? It’s now claiming victims…
7. 26 JulSpot the aircraft exclusion zone around Paris for the Olympics opening
8. 26 JulNeedle in a Neural Network: In Order to Forget You, First You Must Be Found | Carey Lening
9. 25 JulHow the American war on porn could change the way you use the internet | BBC Future
10. 25 JulHow to Read a Legal Opinion: A Guide for New Law Students by Orin S. Kerr [PDF]
11. 25 JulCFAIL: The Conference for Failed Approaches and Insightful Losses in Cryptology | “Failing better since 2019…”
12. 24 JulVia @lorenzofb | NEW: CrowdStrike sent partners a $10 UberEats gift card to apologize for the outage
13. 24 JulWhatsApp and Signal messages at risk of surveillance following EncroChat ruling, court hears | Computer Weekly | …maybe, but maybe not; avoid hysteria
14. 24 JulWhatever happened to Professor Neil Barrett?
15. 24 Jul2017: “EU: New antitrust complaint looms over Microsoft” | …the smoking gun to which Microsoft alludes re: CrowdStrike’s kernel modules
16. 24 JulI was asked for my perspective on how we got to a world where the CrowdStrike affair could have occurred…
17. 24 JulHelping our customers through the CrowdStrike outage | Microsoft
18. 24 JulConfidential counselling calls were eavesdropped on by strangers | BBC News
19. 24 JulWhat railway pedestrian fatalities in Mumbai can teach us about online safety
20. 23 JulMeta announces Llama 3.1, launch video by Zuck expounds the benefit of open source models being shared, expects open source to become the default “like Linux”
21. 22 JulHolotypic Occlupanid Research Group | this is an absolutely fantabulous website for people who…
22. 21 JulThe challenge of “dual use technology” elegantly contextualized in a single tweet
23. 20 JulGooception: Google have begun preemptively shutting down the services to which they are transitioning people whose service is being shut down
24. 19 JulThe Paradox Of Cyber
25. 19 JulHow long before NASDAQ opens?
26. 19 JulI ordered a green waste disposal / recycling bin from @HartCouncil at 0730am; it quietly arrived by 0930am
27. 19 JulI can’t defend continued use of an operating system where so much of the fundamental core integrity needs to be outsourced to random third parties
28. 19 JulGoogle URL Shortener links will no longer be available | Google Developers Blog
29. 18 JulThe EU’s pursuit of regulatory control over tech will lead to doctrinal self-extinction of Europe from the tech sphere and the primacy of Anglophone & Sinophone tech (HT: @KayJebelli)
30. 18 JulThis guy on TikTok ran a simulation of what it would look like from Voyager 1 to look back at the solar system *now*
31. 17 JulWhat do you do with old @OReillyMedia & other tech books of that kind? I have about 1.5m shelving ancient software guides & manuals…
32. 15 JulStarmer plans to introduce AI bill in King’s Speech | “…tell us what you are testing for…”
33. 14 JulFitting an Elephant with Four non-Zero Parameters
34. 10 JulGoogleOne Darkweb reports coming to all Google accounts soon
35. 9 JulEtsy’s … head of its trust and safety team Alice Wu Paulus said the policy change was the company’s attempt “to continue to keep our users safe”
36. 8 JulI am not certain what this portends but it suggests that the separation of DCMS & DSIT a few months ago may have been considered problematic by Labour
37. 7 JulI would like to invite everyone to consider what would have happened in the Brexit referendum if there had been a second round runoff…?
38. 7 JulEuropol says Home Routing mobile encryption feature aids criminals
39. 7 JulMy venerable Miele W3444 starts flashing a flood warning and for a service technician — but it’s way out of warranty; the internet & 3D-printing provide a fix…
40. 7 JulLabour rejects Tony Blair’s plan to curb migration | …perhaps @jreynoldsMP could also do us the favour of also ruling out Digital ID and/or an “app”?
41. 5 JulEntrepreneurial Spanish children open a “porn futures” market and hedge-fund based around new age verification porn credits
42. 5 JulIt doesn’t matter which party is in power, the UK for the time being will remain hostile to the Internet; but at least there will be change elsewhere
43. 4 JulNick Cave, advice columnist and agony uncle
44. 4 JulYes populism is on the rise around the globe, but freshly enabling it with the tools of totalitarian surveillance will be totally worth it if we save just one child – John Carr, child safety activist
45. 3 JulJapan declares victory in effort to end government use of floppy disks | Reuters
46. 3 JulThe more I read from them the more I believe that the worst thing ever to happen to the Internet was its discovery by Law Professors
47. 2 JulVoices, some calling Macron a Cameron-style fool for “handing France to the fascists,” others think him astute for forcing the issue, the centrists, & the left to pull their shit together at speed. Which is it?
48. 1 JulLabour plans to make tech giants liable for reimbursing victims of online fraud, report | …what could possibly go wrong?
49. 1 JulIs there anything about life in Europe which requires one to go around proving one’s identity at regular intervals?

June 2024

1. 27 JunConservative party mailshot adopts look and feel, passing itself off as HMRC circular
2. 27 JunLinkedIn invents the Wiki
3. 26 JunPolymorphic LLMs? | llama.ttf is both a font AND an LLM, usable in WASM browsers
4. 25 JunUK politicians still do not understand the Streisand Effect
5. 25 JunFrom @camwilson on Mastodon | … more evidence that Australia is a land of online safety contrasts
6. 25 Jun“Google: Stop Burning Counterterrorism Operations” | @mncoppola | … Remember, Kids: bad guys exploiting bugs is BAD, but when we do it, it’s GOOD
7. 23 Jun“all of the thriving EU-based smartphone & OS makers can jump in & compete on merit now, without Apple the gatekeeping bully in their way”
8. 21 JunBooking chief slams EU over ‘dumb’ [DMA] regulations
9. 21 JunFirst insight: 42 key points of the secret #EUGoingDark surveillance plan for the new EU Commission | Patrick Breyer
10. 21 JunEU Justice Commissioner attempting to walk back her admission that chat control breaks encryption; is schooled by Signal’s president
11. 20 JunEtappensieg: Belgien scheitert mit Abstimmung zur Chatkontrolle | Chat Control is NOT dead, but will be back next month
12. 19 JunOpenAI’s former chief scientist is starting a new AI company | The Verge
13. 19 JunUnpopular Hypothesis / Opinion of the Day
14. 19 JunAm listening to the audiobook of “Politics on the Edge” by @RoryStewartUK; 4 chapters in and I’m uncannily reminded of James Herriot’s “All Creatures Great & Small” meets “The Thick Of It”
15. 18 JunArundhati Roy: Will Booker Prize-winner face jail for 14-year-old remark? | BBC News | …this is also the trajectory for the European Union
16. 18 Jun‘Encryption is deeply threatening to power’: Meredith Whittaker of messaging app Signal | Chat and messaging apps | The Guardian
17. 18 JunFun Twitter search of the day: parsejson credits
18. 18 Junsystemd-tmpfiles, deleting /home
19. 18 JunDoes anyone else feel suddenly disenfranchised from podcasts?
20. 17 JunI’m beginning to wonder whether all of these people who complain about “dunking” or QT-without-tagging on Twitter simply don’t Kiboze themselves?
21. 17 JunRetired engineer discovers 55-year-old bug in Lunar Lander computer game code | Ars Technica
22. 17 JunFifty Years Of Diff | blarg
23. 15 JunWhen ‘Nerd Harder’ meets International Standards: @profmusgrave tells us how ISO “screwed the pooch” with ISO8601
24. 14 JunHusband pursues Apple after wife finds ‘deleted’ messages to prostitute
25. 14 JunIf you’re living in the EU you should read this & urgently contact your representative TODAY to combat this invasion of your privacy
26. 14 JunThe Stanford Internet Observatory is being dismantled
27. 14 JunWallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
28. 13 JunOn the new Dutch Intelligence and Security Law | Bert Hubert’s writings
29. 10 JunAge Verification to purchase Red Bull?
30. 10 JunOkay, so who wants to do a sweepstake on how long it is before “RCS is a designed-by-committee pile of poop” -stories hit the press?
31. 10 JunA nanoGPT pipeline packed in a spreadsheet
32. 8 JunCyber, MacGyver, and the Limits of Covert Power | Lawfare
33. 7 JunMachine learning with matchboxes: A journey from a childhood game to… | Pavel Anni
34. 6 JunWhen Dynamite Turned Terrorism Into an Everyday Threat
35. 6 JunFirst insight: 42 key points of the secret #EUGoingDark surveillance plan for the new EU Commission | Patrick Breyer
36. 6 JunThis thread by @GossiTheDog makes me wonder if Apple will avoid repeating Recall mistakes…
37. 5 JunAustralian Safety Exceptionalism: if content might be harmful to Australians it needs to be removed *globally* to protect them
38. 5 JunHappy Birthday Whitfield Diffie, 80 years today!
39. 4 JunBlah NHS Blah Cyberattack!
40. 3 JunGoogle Leak Reveals Thousands of Privacy Incidents | …any politician who tries to capitalise on this article MUST come out in favour of end-to-end encryption
41. 2 JunBart Preneel: “The full Belgian presidency chatcontrol proposal has been leaked…”

May 2024

1. 31 MayAI plays NetHack, runs into long-forgotten lunar code
2. 31 MayGoogle & Apple keeping Reddit & X in app stores despite pornography due to revenue, [Australian] eSafety boss says
3. 30 MayA few weeks ago I broke my hip…
4. 30 MayConsent to be scanned – or get banned! | …the EU’s pursuit of ChatControl decides to copy Meta’s “forced user consent is adequate to permit surveillance” approach
5. 29 MayCould a Senate bill cause age verification laws to apply to Netflix? Experts say yes | The Globe & Mail
6. 29 MayOpinion: Ottawa wants the power to create secret backdoors in our networks to allow for surveillance – The Globe and Mail
7. 29 MayMozilla urges WhatsApp to combat misinformation ahead of global elections
8. 29 MayBest Fit Proportional Constituency Allocation | by @djstimms
9. 28 MayIt’s nice to see Ciaran Martin RTing Yann LeCun on AI Doomerism, and worth quoting in full
10. 27 MayXi Jinping’s recipe for total control: An army of eyes and ears | The Japan Times
11. 27 MayInside the scramble to ‘prebunk’ election misinformation before it takes hold | The Washington Post | FULL ARTICLE
12. 26 MayICQ, One of the Oldest Instant Messengers, Is Shutting Down
13. 25 MayTories plan to introduce obligatory “national (cyber)service” for 18+, consequences are easy to imagine
14. 25 MayIf 16-year-olds are given the vote we can rapidly expect to see a “Online Misinformation Bill” …
15. 25 May“Fascinating how when it’s voting age they are ‘under-18s’, or ‘16 & 17 year olds’, but when it’s online safety, smartphones & social media they are ‘children’” | @cyberleagle
16. 24 May“Signal would rather leave the EU market than subject our users to mass gov surveillance. FULL STOP.”
17. 23 May“Because of the general election the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill passed by the Commons has fallen in the Lords”
18. 23 MayThe PGPi scanning project
19. 23 MayOpenDyslexic
20. 22 MayJust shipped: Bluesky Direct Messages! | …regrettably not end to end encrypted
21. 22 MayHow the new Microsoft Recall feature fundamentally undermines Windows security | Kevin Beaumont
22. 22 MayChina’s latest answer to OpenAI is ‘Chat Xi PT’
23. 22 MayHave we yet seen calls from NCMEC @MissingKids & the child safety lobby, for Copilot+ AI to assess your laptop screen for porn & report in real time any presence of apparent CSAM?
24. 22 MayPublic library to become adults-only due to new Idaho law
25. 22 MayGraham Smith @cyberleagle on the “Duty of Care”
26. 21 MayThis thread is a masterpiece in practical explanation of outrage / ragebait / clickbait, including the emotional levers which get pulled to induce reaction
27. 20 MayHow I Made Google’s “Web” View My Default Search
28. 20 Maynaklecha / llama3-from-scratch: llama3 implementation one matrix multiplication at a time
29. 20 MayOpenAI Reportedly Dissolves Its Existential AI Risk Team
30. 20 MayIn terms of the Data Protection Act I am pretty sure that Richard Gadd is off the hook… but quite a lot of social media users may be in trouble
31. 19 MayQuiz: Who said this about what?
32. 18 May17 States Are Considering Laws That Would Imprison Librarians | Vanity Fair
33. 17 MayIndia’s butter chicken battle heats up with new court evidence | Reuters
34. 16 MayImportant Note: just because your App is trying to keep you safe does not *necessarily* mean that it’s doing “Client-Side Scanning”, even if AI, or Meta, or Google are involved…
35. 15 MayMatt’s cartoon in the Telegraph: Perfect summary of where the UK Government is re: child safety & protection
36. 15 MayThe temporary shutdown comes amid continuing attempts to find technical solutions to address the problems, which have included flashing body parts and showing potentially offensive images.
37. 14 MayToday’s internet is the worst of all possible networks, excepting all those which were designed to predate, supplant or fix it
38. 14 MayThe End of TikTok Is a Win for Beijing | The New York Times
39. 14 MayFredrik Backman on Creative Anxiety and Procrastination
40. 14 MayWe’ve heard that AI will bring about the apocalypse for 6+ months now; could it please get a move on?
41. 14 MayJeremy Hunt bets on creating a $1tn ‘British Microsoft’ | …oh, bless…
42. 13 MayElon Musk Weighs in on the Encryption Wars Between Telegram and Signal | Headline misses: “Telegram is not even encrypted by default”
43. 13 MayHow to defang sextortion: the direct approach
44. 13 May“Telegram has launched a pretty intense campaign to malign Signal as insecure, with assistance from Elon Musk” | @matthew_d_green
45. 13 MayGosh, it’s almost like what we should have been doing all along is teaching people to have critical faculties and opinions
46. 12 MayDell API abused to steal 49 million customer records in data breach | …an example of poor security through lack of both rate limiting & behavioural modelling
47. 12 MayUndersea cables and the vulnerability of American power | Engelsberg Ideas
48. 11 MayBBC Radio 4 “Last Word” | Obituary for Ross Anderson
49. 10 MayCongressional Committee Threatens To Investigate Any Company Helping TikTok Defend Its Rights | Techdirt
50. 10 MayTheyWorkForYou is 20 years old and is starting a new project!
51. 10 MayUK: “Benefit fraud squad snoops on pupil data under secret deal” | …school records being cross-checked against benefits to detect fraud
52. 10 MayUS Government forces NetChoice tech lobby group to eject TikTok
53. 9 MayZuckerman vs: Zuckerberg: why and how this is a battle of the public understanding of APIs, and why Zuckerman needs to lose and Meta needs to win
54. 9 MayMeredith Whittaker debunking Elon Musk and the conspiracies of FUD surrounding Signal
55. 8 MayGitHub Copilot is not infringing your copyright | Felix Reda | …essential debunking of “AI-generated content is derivative work” and other myths
56. 7 MayTikTok countersue US government on grounds of 1st amendment and bill of attainder
57. 7 MayThread by @matthew_d_green | …the dangerous trajectory towards requiring government ID for the entire internet
58. 7 MayRaging Ignorantly At The Internet Fixes Nothing | Techdirt
59. 7 MayHave we seen a “trans drugs on the dark web” story yet?
60. 7 MayChina hacked Ministry of Defence, Sky News learns | Politics News
61. 7 MayNigeria imposes 0.5% “Cybersecurity Levy” on electronic transfers, because of course that’s how you do information security
62. 6 MayCharting a Vision of Progress for European Tech Policy | by Kay Jebelli | Chamber of Progress | Apr, 2024 | Medium
63. 5 MayPolish Embassy Interviews 1st Person to Crack Enigma: Marian Rejewski | flyingpenguin
64. 5 MayComplexity, the Law and noyb suing OpenAI
65. 5 MayI’m a security person. If you’re faced with the tradeoff between security and another priority, your answer is clear: check your priorities and your risk appetite per your ISMS
66. 5 May“Fake news” legislation risks doing more harm than good amid a record number of elections in 2024 | Nieman Journalism Lab
67. 4 MayWhat Happens When a Romance Writer Gets Locked Out of Google Docs | WIRED
68. 3 MayHours After Aussie Gov’t Greenlights Online Age Verification Pilot, Breach Of Mandated Verification Database For Bars Is Revealed | Techdirt
69. 3 MayRoman snail dye found in UK for the first time | BBC News
70. 2 MayWhatsApp could leave India over encryption battle | Rest of World
71. 2 MayEUROPE IS NOW THE WORLD’S GREATEST THREAT TO SECURE AND PRIVATE COMMUNICATION | Thread by @bpreneel1 on Thread Reader App
72. 1 MayZuckerman v. Meta Platforms | Knight First Amendment Institute | …a misconceived, anti-1A conceit posing in the name of the 1st Amendment
73. 1 MayTens of millions secretly use WhatsApp despite bans | BBC News
74. 1 MayThese are the life skills which we need to teach people

April 2024

1. 30 AprAmazon AWS to walk back recently launched “Bankruptcy as a Service” (BaaS) feature
2. 30 AprThe Corn Laws go digital | Cyberleagle
3. 30 Apr“How to monetize a Cryptographic method?” / “How to advance in your Infosec career?”
4. 29 AprNo One Should Have That Much Power | Mark Nottingham
5. 28 AprBill Gates, Man United and 20 other sites that ban linking to them | Malcolm Coles
6. 27 AprInterview with Senior Rust Developer in 2023
7. 26 AprThe Tao of Programming
8. 26 AprAaron Sorkin to write film about how people are scum who should not be permitted to communicate with each other without oversight | The Guardian
9. 26 Apr“WhatsApp Must Act to Protect Elections” | Mozilla want to make WhatsApp painful to use during elections, because people are scum
10. 26 AprAustralian safety-types trying to work out how to force platforms to implement their will when lacking (not collecting) nationality or other information about their users
11. 26 AprA European Internet for European People!
12. 26 AprHere’s a fun idea: TikTok implements ActivityPub for US-based client IP addresses
13. 26 AprOpen Sourcing DOS 4 | Scott Hanselman’s Blog
14. 26 AprFailure to use Encryption to protect data privacy is NOT an “encryption loophole” …
15. 26 AprSomewhere in the world someone is using an LLM to read, arrange, and produce rough-cut songs direct from out-of-copyright sheet music
16. 25 AprByteDance Shrugged
17. 25 AprPerhaps the upside of age verification will be the exclusion of the 70+ demographic from politics?
18. 25 AprInteresting perspective from TikTok: students in the USA are resisting police disruption of Palestine protests using skills obtained via active shooter drills
19. 24 AprSome really good insight about the TikTok ban and how (e.g.) extant anti-monopolistic AppStore draft regulation actively undermines enforcement
20. 23 Apr“Bluey accounted for 29% of all TV views on Disney+ in the fourth quarter of 2023”
21. 23 AprNASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth
22. 23 AprShipping end-to-end encryption to billions | RWC 2024 | YouTube
23. 22 AprRutland’s Memorial Statue of Queen Elizabeth II | The Lord-Lieutenant of Rutland
24. 22 AprI Made a Graph of Wikipedia… This Is What I Found
25. 21 AprEuropean Police Chiefs call for industry and governments to take action against end-to-end encryption roll-out | Europol
26. 20 AprHospital Visit
27. 19 AprChild Safety campaigners celebrating how their demands for blocks are *literally* being used by those sites to drive children to use/buy VPNs
28. 19 AprBREAKING: <PLATFORM> ordered to remove <APPS> from App Store in <COUNTRY> for National Security Reasons
29. 18 AprStruggling with a Moral Panic Once Again | zephoria
30. 18 AprDaring Fireball: European Data Protection Board Goes There, Rules Against Meta’s ‘Pay or OK’ Model
31. 18 AprPaying ransom for data? Bad. Paying ransom for Tory MP? Standard practice, apparently.
32. 17 Apr“changeme”
33. 17 AprSecret Talks for the UK “Helicopter Parents Charter”
34. 16 AprCreating sexually explicit deepfakes to become a criminal offence | BBC News
35. 16 AprThere are fewer than 2^273 atoms (i.e. a 273 bit number) in the universe; but if your ECDSA crypto algorithm demands 521 bits of random data yet you supply a mere 512 bits…
36. 16 Aprthe cryptopals crypto challenges
37. 15 AprI’ve been to Marugame Udon in Reading twice in the past month, both times with the toddler, and it’s been fantastic; then I wondered…
38. 15 AprWhy the Short-Lived Calvin and Hobbes Is Still One of the Most Beloved & Influential Comic Strips | Open Culture
39. 14 AprThis weekend has largely been carpet installation…
40. 13 AprDigital Waco, Digital Jonestown?
41. 12 AprThreads and the Fediverse – A Smarter Battle Plan to Protect the Open Social Web | Tim Chambers @timothyjchambers
42. 11 Apr2020: NSA’s Cybersecurity Perspective on Post-Quantum [Lattice] Cryptography Algorithms
43. 11 AprInstagram DMs launch privacy-friendly nude detection, education, and metadata-based reporting
44. 11 AprWhy Jesus Never Ate a Banana | Gastro Obscura
45. 10 AprIf you work around Content Moderation or AI Safety and for once you want (for once) to hear something funny, try this episode of this podcast
46. 10 AprToday: Blog posts on cryptographic policy and AI, fixing skirting boards, and repair of DD’s beloved broken toy scissors
47. 10 Apr“it’s just 262GB” : r/LocalLLaMA
48. 10 Apr“Seeds of the Internet” and “Knowledge as Infrastructure” – Magnet URLs, AI, & the increasing, terrifying irrelevance of political borders
49. 10 AprMicrosoft going big in Japan on AI Infrastructure
50. 9 Apr#Fedipact – The [mastodon] instances blocking Zuckerberg’s Threads.net
51. 8 AprPorn panic imperils privacy online, with Alec Muffett (re-air): Lock and Code S05E08 | @Malwarebytes
52. 7 AprThis is what happens when you are a small factory which produces industrial food-grade glycine… and then you go viral on TikTok
53. 7 AprEvery so often a Meta/Facebook “Classifier” burps and blocks some website and people scream CENSORSHIP — but it’s much more complex than that
54. 7 AprThe Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics | abortretry.fail
55. 6 AprBelgium’s latest move doesn’t solve critical issues with CSAR | EDRi
56. 6 AprOriginal Irish vs: Original Nigerian Guinness
57. 6 Apr“The ad model is coming to AI” | …it’s much worse than this, …
58. 6 AprMansplaining, Gatekeeping, Neophobia… there ought to be a better word for nerds reflexively shit-testing other people on the basis of professional prejudice
59. 5 AprDo you remember before so many people understood Trust & Safety, back when you could get a major newspaper “FACEBOOK IS BLOCKING ME!” outrage-karma boost from a single tweet?
60. 5 AprHow To Use NotebookLM As A Research Tool | by Steven Johnson | Feb, 2024 | stevenberlinjohnson
61. 4 Apr“There Is No General First Amendment Right to Distribute Machine-Learning Model Weights” | Lawfare | Poppycock…
62. 4 AprThe software liability debate, writ small:
63. 3 AprNeovim
64. 2 AprUS FTC (temporarily) declines to approve “Age Estimation” as a proxy for parental consent; @GetYoti “disappointed”
65. 1 AprVisit Sunny San Serriffe!
66. 1 AprWell…
67. 1 AprThis is basically how software engineering works…
68. 1 AprHitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Easter Egg in Numberblocks

March 2024

1. 31 Mar… agh burzum-ishi
2. 31 MarKinahan Cartel: Wanted Narco Boss Exposes Whereabouts by Posting Google Reviews | bellingcat
3. 31 MarEssential Sunday Reading: danah boyd (@zephoria) and @candice_odgers rebut @JonHaidt’s “Anxious Generation”
4. 30 MarThe Coddling of the Boomer Parental Guilt-Complex
5. 30 MarHow to spot academic papers which have been massaged or substantially rewritten by ChatGPT
6. 29 MarProf Ross Anderson, RIP
7. 28 Mar“To Govern AI, We Must Govern Compute” | Lawfare | “…and to protect humanity we must ban big, fast computers”
8. 28 MarCalifornia State Senator Pushes Bill To Remove Anonymity From Anyone Who Is Influential Online | Techdirt
9. 28 MarNeal Weigel, RIP
10. 28 MarThe Kids Online Safety Act and the State of Tech Policy | Lawfare
11. 27 MarClause 14 – Powers to obtain communications data: 25 Mar 2024: House of Commons debates | TheyWorkForYou
12. 27 Mar7 years ago, Alec Muffett on Twitter: “…the Home Secretary is literally calling for certain hashtags or words to elicit censorship/blocking on social media”
13. 27 MarTruthSocial’s $11bn valuation rests on old Mastodon code which may be poorly maintained
14. 27 MarUK counter-eavesdropping agency gets slap on the wrist for eavesdropping
15. 27 MarShoshana Weissmann on Twitter: “…a new [US] age verification [proposal] would force platforms to maintain databases of parents’ / children’s government IDs, face scans etc… until the child turns 18. ENORMOUS cyber risk. Age verification forces cyber risk already and this makes it worse”
16. 27 MarPeter Craddock on the EU’s attempting to force use of contextual, not profiled or targeted, advertising on social platforms | LinkedIn
17. 27 MarHeather Burns on Twitter: “This piece … on the Russian digital surveillance system over 540 million teenagers’ accounts, which is presented as “suicide prevention” but is really political surveillance for the Kremlin, reads like a safety tech vendor’s best sales pitch.”
18. 27 MarNorth Korean state TV censors gardener[Alan Titchmarsh]’s trousers
19. 27 MarKay Jebelli on Twitter: “It seems that mandatory forced scrolling is indeed a requirement of DMA compliance.”
20. 26 MarShould Western Democracies ban the general public from learning about, using, or building their own AI technologies? | POLITICO
21. 26 MarGood Luck Fighting Disinformation | The Atlantic
22. 26 MarHow the DMCA Anticipated the DSA’s Due Process Obligations by Eric Goldman, Sebastian Felix Schwemer :: SSRN
23. 26 MarGoogle Ordered To Identify Who Watched Certain YouTube Videos
24. 26 MarI built ByteDance’s censorship machine | Protocol
25. 26 MarMoney Talks | “Why Amazon should be afraid of Temu” | …and not just Amazon
26. 26 MarDaring Fireball: European Commission Opens DMA Non-Compliance Investigations Against Google, Apple, and Meta
27. 25 MarApple II – Apple Vision (1978) by Bob Bishop
28. 25 MarAPL: A Programming Language
29. 24 MarDo a Google search for “chixculub impact”
30. 24 MarSo many folk (e.g. Ryan, attached) amazed that Apple would licence Google Gemini, seem to be ignoring a fairly obvious possible explanation…
31. 24 MarThe Risks of Internet Regulation | How Well-Intentioned Efforts Could Jeopardize Free Speech | @davidakaye in Foreign Affairs
32. 24 MarCA police dept anonymises suspect images using LEGO heads | LEGO requests cease & desist on IP grounds
33. 23 MarThe fish doorbell
34. 22 MarGPS jamming & interference map | Flightradar24
35. 22 MarBetter Preparation of Bacon
36. 22 MarMeta Encryption Privacy Fight Begins in Nevada State Court | …waiting for the other shoe to drop from today’s proceedings
37. 21 MarPerry E. Metzger on Twitter: “Vernor Vinge has died. In pace requiescat. …”
38. 21 Mar“The Inspector-General has found significant failings in the GCSB’s hosting of a foreign partner’s system”
39. 20 MarRuna Sandvik (@runasand) on security improvements that you can make to your own benefit (but probably haven’t)
40. 20 MarThis whole thread, but this Tweet in particular, by @KayJebelli
41. 20 MarMigrating from Google Podcasts to AntennaPod on Android
42. 20 MarSIGINT Tours & the Cold War Network
43. 19 MarSatellite mapping reveals extensive industrial activity at sea | Nature
44. 18 MarHas anyone considered running “The Gruffalo” as a D&D campaign?
45. 18 MarHow Windows uses the TPM | Windows Security | Microsoft Learn
46. 17 MarInside the Premier League unit hunting online trolls who threaten players | BBC News
47. 17 Mar“After over a decade of struggling with CSS, I have something good to say about it. And to my astonishment, I’ve actually used it to solve some important problems I had! And it’s thanks to Tailwind. I heard many people gush about Tailwind CSS before, but…”
48. 16 Mar“Over the past day, searches for ‘Texas VPN’ increased by 1,750% … Searches for ‘Is porn banned in Texas’ showed a 3,100% increase [&] a 1,600% increase in search trends for ‘How to access Pornhub'”
49. 16 MarScrap coercive ‘privacy fee,’ MEPs urge Meta’s Nick Clegg in open letter | TechCrunch
50. 16 MarSigh
51. 16 MarReminder — from March — that a bunch of vandals in the USA want to split-brain the American people who use TikTok, to remove them from the Global community
52. 15 MarARTICLE 29 DATA PROTECTION WORKING PARTY | Opinion 5/2009 on online social networking
53. 15 MarHow (not) to deal with missing data: An economist’s take on a controversial study | Retraction Watch
54. 15 Mar“It’s disgusting and cheap to compare social media to drugs. Social media is speech. When you compare it to drugs, you’re making an argument that speech is scary and dangerous…”
55. 15 MarVoyager 1 starts making sense again after months of babble|The Register
56. 14 Mar“Wow. Pornhub shut down in Texas. Redtube also. I’m thinking Texas lawmakers will reverse course real quick lol” | Reddit
57. 14 MarJulia Angwin: “Americans don’t agree on much, but they do support privacy laws & not banning TikTok. So what is Congress doing? The opposite … we need a privacy law & how banning TikTok doesn’t make us safer”
58. 14 MarIn Britain we have a term for when pundits perform a rapid U-turn in their political stance regards (e.g.) regulation of social media
59. 14 MarThought for the Day
60. 14 MarI finally updated my Prusa MINI+ to use the latest firmware and “input shaping”
61. 14 MarHow We Bypassed Safari 17’s Advanced Audio Fingerprinting Protection
62. 14 MarThe GPT-4 barrier has finally been broken
63. 13 MarThey say that the essence of comedy is recognition; the thing about @damienslash’s “Select All” ep2 is that I’m sure that I’ve met some of these people
64. 13 MarI love independent media but when @BylineTimesPod starts with someone saying how Marx (150+/-10 years ago) explained how capitalism is “not sustainable in the long term…”
65. 12 MarGoogle Is Getting Thousands of Deepfake Porn Complaints | WIRED
66. 11 MarGetty Museum announces Creative Commons Zero searchable art collection
67. 10 MarCACM Is Now Open Access | Communications of the ACM
68. 9 MarJohn O’Connell on Twitter: “So this happened. Finally the UN has amitted #Aberystwyth as a Sovereign Nation State”
69. 8 MarCute comedy thread on Twitter on the Flipper Zero brouhaha
70. 8 MarWould Terry Pratchett be in favour of, or against, artificial intelligence and its impact on writing?
71. 8 MarCyberpunk Librarian: “Okay, I found this on Reddit and I had to share it”
72. 7 MarTikTok users bombard House offices over bill that could ban the app – Live Updates | POLITICO
73. 7 MarFlipperZero vs: NSO’s Pegasus vs: Gamma FinFisher vs: Export Controls & the Wassenaar Arrangement: the difference is intent
74. 7 MarCaleb Smith on X: “Tik Tok is writing a real-time case study on what NOT to do for crisis communications.”
75. 6 MarJaguar Land Rover locks-out 3rd-party charging applications from controlling what times a car is to be charged; Octopus (other?) customers are fuming
76. 6 Mar“…who could well be infringing the rights of others” – it’s telling that some of the minds behind the OSA consider people first & foremost to be potential criminals
77. 6 Mar“How can i access Lancs Pdsoft?” | …history: the Lancaster University Public-Domain Software Archive
78. 5 Mar“The plans, put forward by the government’s adviser on political violence, John Woodcock…”
79. 4 MarWorking for MI6 ‘more exciting than James Bond film’, says spy | BBC News
80. 3 MarNew rules for online services: what you need to know | WORLD’S MOST OBVIOUS QUESTIONNAIRE, EVAR
81. 3 MarI can’t decide if Google Gemini is merely “woke” or whether it is simultaneously also an abstemious puritan killjoy; compare & contrast with ChatGPT
82. 2 Mar“Russia apparently intercepted and released a 30-minute Webex conference call between German military officials who discussed the supply of Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine”
83. 1 MarEpomaker Reveals The New DynaTab 75X Keyboard With Dot-Matrix Display | …BUT WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU TYPE IN A PASSWORD??!?
84. 1 MarIs anyone else I know using post.news?
85. 1 MarA social media ban for children would actually solve nothing. Here’s why – BBC Science Focus Magazine
86. 1 MarThe Canary Resuscitator | Science and Industry Museum

February 2024

1. 29 FebAnti-Non-Consensual-Intimate-Imagery campaign being leveraged (presumably by trolls & abusers?) to mislead victims into sharing abusive imagery
2. 29 Feb“Dunking” & “Revenge Porn” vs: the Open Web
3. 29 FebDeath, Lonely Death | Crooked Timber | Voyager Spacecraft
4. 28 FebThere are many reasons I use ChatGPT but the primary remains: to answer a question without wading through pages of noise & similar YouTube videos
5. 28 FebAs Predicted: Scammers Are Now Scanning Faces To Defeat Biometric Security Measures | Techdirt
6. 28 FebPasswordsCon Las Vegas 2014
7. 27 FebThis, Too, Shall Pass: Reflections on Secure Computing
8. 26 FebNevada sues to deny kids access to Messenger encryption | The Register
9. 26 FebEFF Statement on Nevada’s Attack on End-to-End Encryption | Electronic Frontier Foundation weighs in…
10. 26 FebNevada Is In Court This Morning Looking To Get A Temporary Restraining Order Blocking Meta From Using End-To-End Encryption | Techdirt | …update including Meta’s response
11. 26 FebMotherboard on Twitter: “goodnight and good luck”
12. 26 FebCaffeine Bombe Coffee: The National Museum of Computing | The National Museum of Computing
13. 26 FebVending machine error reveals secret face image database of college students | …I wonder if @getyoti are watching the public reaction to this?
14. 26 FebOttawa to create regulator to hold online platforms accountable for harmful content: sources | CBC News
15. 25 Feb** PLEASE NAME IT “BOTTOM” ** — New Uranian moon discovered by @carnegiescience @CarnegiePlanets awaits name of a character from a Shakespearian play
16. 25 FebI truly, truly abhor that there is big-name software out there, the behaviour of which is bolstering the positions of the right-wing, the anti-woke, and other reactionary brigades
17. 25 FebFact-Checker @PolitiFact derides KOSA age-verification concerns as “False” because “there are other ways [beyond demanding ID] to assess users’ ages, such as self-reporting & face scanning tools, some of which are already in use”
18. 24 Feb“The Gruffalo” as Western anti-collectivist libertarian propaganda
19. 24 FebSo it appears that commentary on cybersecurity on Facebook can fall foul of cybersecurity restrictions on Facebook content…
20. 24 FebHorrific gossip here re: manipulating toxic Engineering culture at Dropbox to force people to quit; also this reeks of Git-culture because under Mercurial with Stacked Diffs the “too large to land” thing is not an issue
21. 24 FebSecure online communication, once suppressed by the US Government to combat World Communism, Terrorism, & Drugs, now contested by No-Win-No-Fee Lawyers in Nevada
22. 24 FebNevada AG Asks Court to Ban Meta from Providing End-to-End Encryption to Minors
23. 23 FebBREAKING: US State of Nevada attempting to BAN End-to-End Encryption for Teenagers, Kids (and: implicitly MANDATE age-verification) due to ostensible dangers to children that somehow vanish on 18th birthday
24. 23 FebCyberSecurity Asset Management (CSAM)| Qualys
25. 23 Feb“Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Thursday that adults shouldn’t have to share their personal information to access pornography online” | wow…
26. 22 FebThe Fundamental Problems with Social Media Age-Verification Legislation – R Street Institute
27. 21 FebNice thing that a friend told me last night…
28. 21 FebImpressive scenes outside the Assange trial yesterday
29. 21 Feb“…we need evidence from you that the harm [Apple killing WebApps is] choosing to inflict on EU businesses & consumers is real & significant”
30. 20 FebA turf war between people who want to ban social media for teenagers vs: those who want it regulated to the point of Orwellian surveillance — there can be only one!
31. 19 FebHow to solve all AI-oversight issues at a stroke: Nationalised Foundation Models and free GPU access in Public Libraries; cc: @vestager
32. 19 Feb*This* is how you should teach children how to be — and to make *others* — safer, online
33. 19 FebContent Moderation and Data Protection | ICO releases a short PDF, which is a bit of a Curate’s Egg on moderation issues
34. 18 FebThere’s the thing about AI and “computers can’t be held accountable so must never make decisions”, but then we demand cars be fitted with cameras to not drift over white lines and this happens
35. 18 FebCivil Society: “Woe! Save us, regulators, for evil Capitalism has anticompetitively killed all innovation!” Free Software Community: “Hi! Here’s a new Browser engine, built from scratch!”
36. 18 FebThe Berkeley Software Distribution | … rich and detailed history of the back story of BSD Unix
37. 17 FebNo data? No problem! Undisclosed tinkering in Excel behind economics paper | Retraction Watch
38. 17 FebThe WhatsApp group Smartphone Free Childhood was created […] in response to their fears around children’s smartphone use | … I think I can see several issues here
39. 17 FebThis evening’s 3D-Print: Wine Rack Stackers
40. 17 FebUS Presidential Election, LotR Edition
41. 17 FebPakistani content moderators are exhausted and stuck – Rest of World
42. 17 FebHaving it both ways: Larry Wall, Perl and the technology and culture of the early web | a critical analysis of the impact of Perl
43. 17 FebJohannes Kepler University Linz reports significant DDoS attack targeted at @torproject HSDirs hosted on-site; seek reports from other Tor operators of similar, for analysis
44. 16 FebThe 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion
45. 16 FebScience fiction authors were excluded from awards for fear of offending China
46. 16 FebYou! Yes you! Are you an “evil privacy nerd?”
47. 16 FebHas Wired Given Up On Fact Checking? Publishes Facts-Optional Screed Against Section 230 That Gets Almost Everything Wrong
48. 16 FebAirbus F-GXLJ Beluga cargo plane flew over the house earlier today at 33,000ft; this is what it looked like from a camera phone
49. 15 FebWith experimental cross-silo Federation and so many Fediverse operators running on shoestring budgets, maybe we need Government regulators to demand that all content creators *must* accept this classic UX dialogue before posting
50. 15 FebToday I have learnt something about the central heating system in my home
51. 15 FebShoshana Weissmann: Carding People for Joining Social Media Solves Nothing
52. 15 FebHobbyists running AI foundation models at home will be the next frontier of attempted Government regulation; Civil Society will have to decide which side it is on
53. 15 FebTwo Years After Privacy Risks of Client-Side Scanning Paper Was Published, It’s Time for Governments to Move On
54. 14 FebMarco @polotek@social.polotek.net shares a glorious epiphany regarding trust, safety, platforms in general, & Mastodon in specific
55. 14 FebNice little explainer thread from David Thiel on the Bluesky Mastodon Bridge Brouhaha
56. 14 FebReading this and remembering the (subset of) people who told me that it was irresponsible to release a password cracker to USENET in 1991 because it might be used by bad people to do bad things
57. 14 Feb“Opt-out is a terrible default and should be reconsidered” | Mastodon users throwing a huge fit that their content may be copied to Bluesky by bridging software
58. 13 FebWorcestershire: New Road ‘situation worsening’ as water levels rise, says Ashley Giles | Wicket Keeper bitten by Giant Eel
59. 13 FebI signed up for Nextdoor for fun, it’s full of “this country is going to the dogs” DailyMail/Sun-readers… and then I realised…
60. 12 FebA chatbot that imitates the dead. Is it a good idea? | FT
61. 12 FebPlaying snake on @Ubiquiti Etherlighting switch | …awesome geek overkill
62. 11 Feb“Once the commander in chief says “I will not come to an ally’s aid if attacked,” why would anyone fear NATO, regardless of what obligations still exist on paper? “
63. 9 FebCanada Moves to Ban the Flipper Zero Over Car Hacking Fears
64. 9 FebTwo thoughts on the Future of AI Regulation, Part 2: The Regulation of Public Power
65. 9 FebTwo thoughts on the Future of AI Regulation, Part 1: The Secondhand Market and the H100
66. 8 FebYou are a red magnetic Tyrannosaurus. A runaway train is speeding towards Ankylosaurus, but if you throw a switch it will hit Triceratops and Diplodocus instead. Which species should go extinct?
67. 7 FebI can call today a major success because…
68. 7 FebEU DMA Interoperability: Pundit Predictions | …courtesy of an epic article from WiReD
69. 7 FebGoogle ‘cannot proceed with third-party cookie deprecation’ | …the UK’s Competition & Markets Authority is suppressing THE MARCH OF PRIVACY
70. 6 FebBRILLIANT IDEA: let’s bring about the end of the internet by embedding locally-running LLMs into Web browsers!
71. 6 FebBritain and France assemble diplomats for international agreement on spyware | I’ve got a bad feeling about this…
72. 4 Feboss-security – Out-of-bounds read & write in the glibc’s qsort()
73. 4 FebBrianna Ghey’s mother Esther calls for ban on social media apps for under-16s | ITV News
74. 3 FebThe @torproject have launched an unofficial fork of the Enterprise Onion Toolkit… and I’m broadly okay with that, mostly…
75. 3 FebWho is Dusty Deevers? Lawmaker Wants to Make Viewing Porn a Crime | Rolling Stone
76. 3 FebFrom Vexing Uncertainty to Intellectual Humility | …an amazing snapshot of schizophrenia
77. 3 FebDo we think the online safety community will ever recover momentum for the “Taylor Swift abuse is endgame for AI deepfake regulation” narrative?
78. 3 FebAll of the exhaustion is worth it when your restless toddler…
79. 1 FebWe’re in the middle of a perfect storm for rollback of the “open web” and burgeoning online surveillance
80. 1 FebBeing taught how to make curry by Indian in-laws, there is a whole new system of weights and measures to learn…

January 2024

1. 31 JanIf you have ever delved in the world of high-end Hi-Fi, this is one of the funniest websites you will ever read
2. 31 JanKOSA isn’t designed to help kids. | by danah boyd
3. 31 Jantrurl: command line tool for URL parsing and manipulation
4. 31 JanThe Misinformation-Outrage Cycle, Part 1: “There are no Yankees here!” | …another Teri Kanefield post that I wish I had read sooner…
5. 31 JanApple says UK could ‘secretly veto’ global privacy tools | …The Home Office said … that it also had to keep the country safe [from people being TOO secure]
6. 31 JanThe Investigatory Powers (Amendment) Bill: further changes are still needed to ensure user trust and safety, and to mitigate potential conflicts of law
7. 31 JanWire a computer to a radio & a satellite dish, download free weather maps & imagery from space…
8. 31 JanInternet Standards Almanac | …pretty and interesting/ish, but I find it clumsy to explore & lacking in opinionation
9. 31 JanBugs in our pockets: the risks of client-side scanning
10. 31 Jan(2018) “Government regulation is not something to fear. Regulation doesn’t stifle innovation.” | …just a little reminder that sometimes even the great and the good will get it wrong
11. 31 JanMeta tool to block nude images in teens’ private messages | …note, since this does not report outwards this is not client-side scanning, no more than a spellchecker would be
12. 30 JanYou learn some weird stuff on Instagram… and this is exceptional
13. 30 JanBritish man acquitted over London-Spain flight bomb hoax | …SnapChat leaking messages to security services & supporting KOSA? Not a good combo for user privacy | HT @rebeccamkern
14. 29 JanUK tabloid media seems hellbent upon resurrecting the myth of “red rooms” (i.e. “dark web snuff movies”) even though there is no such phenomenon
15. 29 JanThe Rust community are lovely but they definitely are worthy of the snark…
16. 29 Jan“Overly powerful, rent-seeking gatekeepers seem like a problem” HT @sdw@mastodon.social / @sdw
17. 29 JanThinks: “It must be weird for journalists who came of age on Twitter to suddenly have Zuck engaging with their shitposting about him”
18. 29 JanHow Apple becomes Facebook by forcing developers to track whether purchases were instigated over an iPhone hyperlink
19. 29 JanExtraordinary archive and miscellany of classic Sci-Fi, Comedy and Kids’ TV and books, including especially half-forgotten 1970s and 80s British media
20. 27 JanWhhhhhyyyyy is there a Harrier jump jet in this real estate listing?
21. 27 JanHonest pornography deep fake question for legal types
22. 27 JanA School without Books | Perspectives on History
23. 27 JanDoes anybody want to buy a used A380? It’s a snip at $25M…
24. 26 JanThe Quiet Death of Ello’s Big Dreams | Waxy.org
25. 26 JanFederal judge rules against Meta in data scraping case | …this is going to be a headache for Civil Society, if they think hard enough
26. 26 JanCold War Comics about Communism, HT @lcamtuf
27. 25 JanMatt Green breaks down (ahem) popular misrepresentation of “homomorphic encryption” (i.e. cleartext) CSAM detection that Thorn espouse; HT Douwe Korff for tl;dr
28. 25 JanMeghan Cross on Twitter “Can a ghost and a zombie come from the same person? …”
29. 25 JanMost Top News Sites Block AI Bots. Right-Wing Media Welcomes Them | WIRED
30. 25 Jan“…policy implications of the development of virtual worlds – civil, company, commercial and intellectual property law issues” | …some common sense, some utterly bonkers stuff in this European Parliament report
31. 25 Jan(2022) Lasers reveal ancient pyramids and canals hidden in the Amazon | …basically a nice little primer on LIDAR and its use in archaeology, pretty pictures
32. 25 JanGrapefruit Is One of the Weirdest Fruits on the Planet | grapefruit history and drug interactions | Gastro Obscura
33. 25 Jan(2019) From Culinary Dud To Stud: How Dutch Plant Breeders Built Our Brussels Sprouts Boom | The Salt | NPR
34. 25 JanBoth of these agencies want a piece of Microsoft’s Open AI partnership | POLITICO
35. 25 JanLooks like Ireland is spinning up its own online safety bill
36. 25 JanPoliticians should be using dedicated political messenger apps with record retention
37. 25 JanDakotaTheKat on Twitter: “I have acquired the fabled NSA “FURBIE (sic) ALERT” memo” | …this is delightful
38. 25 Jan“Is it time to give up on old news?” | …thought-provoking essay from Jeff Jarvis
39. 25 JanFormer Linux kernel engineer Alan Cox weighs in on computer-data-as-evidence given the sketchy reliability of data-at-scale
40. 24 JanOur toddler has a priority interrupt and it’s hilarious
41. 24 Jan“‘Outrageous’ tea recipe involving pinch of salt draws US embassy comment”
42. 23 JanRishi Sunak told to go by top Tory or party faces ‘election massacre’ | Evening Standard | …the word is “and”
43. 23 JanBritish man appears in Spanish court over [PRIVATE JOKE] plane-bomb hoax | BBC News | … if you are using SnapChat then your text-chat messages are NOT encrypted and are actively surveilled
44. 23 JanJoint Briefing on the Investigatory Powers (Amendment) Bill | A BORING TITLE FOR A TERRIFYING BLOG POST …
45. 23 JanMaintenance Outage
46. 23 JanInteresting little thread on the Microsoft Windows user experience
47. 23 JanHippy, capitalist, guru, grocer: the forgotten genius who changed British food | …I was vaguely aware of Nicholas Saunders but had no idea of the extent of his impact on British food – and where we are now
48. 21 JanBREAKING: food bloggers are adding nightshade and other poisons to online recipe pages to defeat “cooked.wiki” and other advert/revenue-stripping robots
49. 21 JanTake a book and prefix the opening chapter with “Hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel…” | this is perfect
50. 20 JanRetired teacher’s pension stopped as provider refuses to believe she is not dead | The Guardian
51. 18 JanThought-provoking to see so many Americans suddenly interested in Cricket because of the “new” Bluey episode drop on Disney+
52. 18 Jan80 years later, GCHQ releases new images of Nazi code-breaking computer | …the British approach to encryption, in a nutshell
53. 18 Jantwitter.com is blocked | twitter.com refused to connect | ERR_BLOCKED_BY_RESPONSE | …what the hell is this?
54. 18 Jan“Daddy Makes Pizza Night” is getting better
55. 18 JanA new variation on the Scunthorpe problem: a cable company which will not accept the surname “Cable”
56. 16 JanThe UK’s political class needs to learn to love the economy it actually has | …excellent article
57. 15 JanFrom Amazon to Facebook and Google, here’s how platforms can ‘decay’ | NPR | …another Cory “enshittification” piece, but having seen USENET & various BBSes decay, I feel he overcooks the “capitalism” aspects
58. 15 JanGradually, Civil Society is starting to wake up to the idea that “Government algorithms” are less an issue than underlying Government policy of treating people as objects or stereotypes
59. 15 JanNineteen Eighty Pooh
60. 15 JanVery interesting short thread by @mwdavis84@threads.net re: iMessage and its dominance in the USA from the perspective of a competitor at Microsoft
61. 15 JanShort (but deep-clickable) thread by @matthew_d_green which foreshadows debate about power the UK Government seeks: to prevent fixes of security bugs they are exploiting
62. 15 JanThis new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI | …I’m always torn whether to call these things “pettyware” or “get off my lawn-ware”
63. 15 JanIs anybody working on algorithmic, engagement-led feed generation for Mastodon?
64. 15 JanIntroducing DJI FlyCart 30 | DJI Delivery | Thinks: with 30kg lift capacity & 45MPH top speed, I could deliver the toddler to nursery over morning coffee
65. 12 JanWhen you have plumbers working on your house, you also get plumber-grade radio … and it’s wall-to-wall 1980s hits
66. 12 JanNew Boiler Day
67. 11 JanThings that I am eating because my toddler did not eat them 2: Lentil & Chorizo stew with Penne, extra Broccoli and Fish Finger bits
68. 10 JanI’ve just thought of a whole new way to feel terribly old…
69. 9 JanWhy Disney Bailed on Turning Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Into an Animated Film | …spoiler: they wanted to drop the character of Death + would have had to buy the rights for all Discworld characters a-la Winnie the Pooh
70. 9 JanDo a Twitter search for “goes against openai” and then dig into the Bot accounts which get trawled up, to see what else they are posting…
71. 9 JanSusan Kare, Iconic Designer | Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation | … I saw and used these in the late 80s and it was wonderful
72. 9 JanThe old testament for Unix nerds…
73. 8 JanThings that I am eating because my toddler did not eat them 1: fish fingers, peas, corn, and spicy okra
74. 7 JanThe Third University of Cambridge: BBN and the Development of the ARPAnet
75. 6 JanI wish that we could go back to calling it “shunning” – it’s a good word, focusing on the active individual rather than the passive medium
76. 6 JanSo after reading this marvellous posting by @Teri_Kanefield@mastodon.social, this is how I think Trump is going to win the next US election
77. 6 JanRemember that thing in the Online Safety Bill re: how it was needed to stop anonymous abuse of footballers & other sportspeople? It seems they’re perfectly good at abusing each other…
78. 6 JanIs someone at mastodon.social actually doing “Trust & Safety” work, or are the crims merely self-censoring and avoiding danger
79. 5 JanPeak Parenting with a DYMO Labeller
80. 4 JanMuffett’s Law of Regulator Usability Perception
81. 4 JanCould NC be sued for its new age verification porn bill? | Charlotte Observer
82. 4 JanCalifornia court has decided that privacy is dangerous and that disappearing messages facilitate drug sales
83. 4 JanTwo ways of dealing with “algorithmic rage-bait…”
84. 4 JanPeople on Threads griping about “rage bait” & algorithmic curation of feeds makes me think we need a new version of “Hanlon’s Razor”
85. 4 JanRoy Longbottom Pits 1976’s Cray-1 Supercomputer Against the Raspberry Pi Single-Board Computer Range
86. 3 JanNiklaus Wirth has died
87. 3 JanThe I in LLM stands for intelligence | …excellent post by the Curl guy re: LLMs and Credibility
88. 3 Jan“The greatest lie told to the public is that people make apps to sell data. Data has no value—you can buy a complete data set on the entire US population for under $10,000. In reality, we actually do it to sell engagement. Attention is more valuable than a spreadsheet…” | Nikita Bier
89. 2 JanVia @tychotithonus@infosec.exchange a novel idea: maybe it’s about time we started talking honestly about what had to be done to combat Y2K to diffuse the disinformation about it
90. 2 JanWhen Namespaces Collide: why it’s a bad idea to bind Phone Numbers to Messenger Software which offers Interoperability / “Free Upgrades” to Other Messengers
91. 2 JanVia @ollie_whitehouse@infosec.exchange I came across @punkxorg who built a boardgame to teach his kid ARM assembly, and wondered: Does anyone play Corewars any more?
92. 1 JanWhat’s the False Positive and False Negative rate, Phil?
93. 1 JanHappy New Year, Everyone

2023 315

December 2023

1. 31 DecThe year is finishing on a crappy note with the theft of a load of groceries; hopefully they actually need them, but I doubt it
2. 31 DecWhat the history of OpenBoot, Phrack, Mudge & Solaris, can teach us about the wisdom (or not) of Apple’s building their iPhone security debugging-backdoor-NSA-hack thing
3. 30 Dec37C3 – Breaking “DRM” in Polish trains | no notes; absolutely worth watching
4. 30 DecQing dynasty China, where failing to properly subtweet the Emperor would get you — and possibly all your rellies — beheaded, or worse…
5. 30 DecThere’s a better English alphabet
6. 30 DecUmikot Planetary Gear Spirograph Espresso WDT Tool by redfoxdude | Printables.com
7. 30 DecHow AI fake news is creating a ‘misinformation superspreader’ | The Washington Post
8. 29 DecMangajin Archives Now Available – Comics Worth Reading
9. 29 DecDare Obasanjo on Apple’s App Tracking Transparency
10. 29 DecAmazing: today we have at least two stories — one old, one new — about Governments wanting to suppress public discussion of attempted surveillance
11. 29 DecThe reason why armchair (and professional) lawyers who want to argue the Open AI vs: New York Times copyright lawsuit, should look towards the Dead Sea Scrolls…
12. 29 DecThe Mouse that Roared: PDP 1 Celebration Event | History, with some notable names
13. 29 DecThe UK’s Online Safety Bill – allegedly the ‘safest place in the world to be online’ – ConnectFutures
14. 29 DecKevin A. Bryan on X: “NYT/OpenAI lawsuit completely misunderstands how LLMs work, and judges getting this wrong will do huge damage to AI. Basic point: LLMs DON’T “STORE” UNDERLYING TRAINING TEXT. It is impossible, the parameter size of GPT-3.5 or 4 is not enough to losslessly encode the training se
15. 29 DecPODCAST | Encrypting Facebook Messenger with Jon Millican and Timothy Buck
16. 28 DecStatement about the EU Cyber Resilience Act – Bits from Debian | …oh, this is glorious
17. 28 DecSomething interesting to read: the history of iodised salt in Switzerland
18. 28 DecOkta says the quiet part out loud: the goal of (all) digital identity systems is to lock people in so that they are under control; “Lock in their loyalty,” indeed
19. 28 DecAm I alone in feeling that MITRE ATT&CK is essentially D&D roleplay for pentesters who can’t get the Devops team to implement ISO27001 and have just got bored?
20. 28 DecAm still bemused that when Apple undocumented hardware gets misused by the NSA people are all like “…it must be for testing” yet when I *personally* wrote one cookie-handling goof/bug on Facebook it spawned (1) conspiracy theories (2) academic white papers (3) newspaper headlines and (4) EU-wide law
21. 27 Dec…OR YOU COULD REPLACE YOUR CHILDREN WITH BLUE CARDBOARD STANDEE CUTOUTS
22. 27 DecMeet Joe Biden’s Favorite Hacker – The Messenger | …nice little biography of Dark Tangent
23. 27 DecOperation Triangulation: The last (hardware) mystery | …if this turns out to be an NSA-enabling backdoor, Apple’s security reputation will be toast
24. 27 DeciPhone Triangulation attack abused undocumented hardware feature | iPhones are “secure” except for the magic keys which are left underneath an undocumented doormat
25. 27 DecIt’s the winter perineum so I get time to read books because of extra toddler help; this year I’m reading several books on “the future of the internet” dating from 1998-2008, and doing so reminds me of USENET…
26. 27 DecThousands of private camera footages from bedrooms hacked, sold online
27. 26 DecHacking my “smart” toothbrush | …absolutely fascinating breakdown of DRM coming to electric toothbrushes
28. 26 DecHow to amuse your small geeks over Christmas | Matt Blaze: The Cryptography of Orphan Annie and Captain Midnight
29. 26 DecThe discreet charm of the perfect martini | BFI | …on martinis
30. 25 DecThe Fight Over Apple’s iMessage and Those Green Bubbles | between eIDAS & blue/green bubbles, regulators apparently want to declare war on “Tech” expressing self-opinion about privacy & security
31. 25 DecWhy I’m not even slightly scared about the future | …good read + a thought-provoking observation from Femi Oluwole; I wonder why power may be afraid of TikTok & Social Networks?
32. 25 DecMerry Christmas: “Stalkers ‘exploit face recognition site designed to stop revenge porn’”
33. 24 DecMigrate your podcast shows from Google Podcasts to YouTube Music (US Only) | …sigh, another trainwreck
34. 24 DecI got to say the new Bluesky logo is giving me familiar vibes…
35. 24 DecBlame Parents for Carless, Sexless Teenagers | …whilst it is refreshing to read something not blaming social networking for changes in teenage behaviour, I feel this is a stretch generalisation
36. 24 DecWhat’s the deal with KFC and Christmas in Japan? | Time Out Tokyo | …and I thought Jewish Chinese-Food Christmas was amazing
37. 23 DecChina to increase curbs on video gaming industry | BBC | …let’s be honest: this is all about political control
38. 22 DecWhy the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters | some classic geekery, straight from the horse’s mouth
39. 22 DecMy village is sufficiently weird that for a few minutes I did wonder if someone decided to start worshipping Baal at Christmas time
40. 22 Dec“Technology Panic Attacks, From Radio to Social Media, With Amy Orben” | from 2020, Dr. Amy Orben, expert in the history of technology panics | this will be weekend listening
41. 22 DecThe Future of Model Deletion | …of *course* “ill-gotten data” should be deleted, because it’s ill-gotten and *everyone* can see that; but I’m wondering how long before this idea runs into people who consider data more like librarians than philosophers
42. 22 DecAge Verification: “New Jersey […] requiring social media companies to contract with third-party data vendors to perform invasive age and identity verification”
43. 22 DecJudge a person by their enemies…
44. 22 DecFun Stuff To Read: “How to Be a Better Reactionary: Time and Knowledge in Technology Regulation”
45. 22 DecAs we approach Christmas one thing which gives me the greatest hope for mankind is that the war & empire-building that killed millions and marred European history of the past 500 years, is now reduced to witty sparring on social networks
46. 22 DecBy far, my most popular Reddit post ever…
47. 22 DecCriminals will start wearing extra prosthetic fingers to make surveillance footage look like it’s AI generated and thus inadmissible as evidence
48. 22 Decpun of the day
49. 22 DecJordan Taylor on X: “How do you create the sharpest thing in the world? And why would you do it? In this thread we take a voyage into true sharpness… https://t.co/Io2qsQt17t” / X
50. 22 Dec“But we do forget that most people are good. By letting the narrative only ever reflect the presence of abusive actors, we enable people who want to pervert social media to their own political control.”
51. 22 DecI know this article a bit old, but I remain amazed that one of the big talking-points in favour of the EU’s DMA was that it would solve the “ivory tower” aspects of platforms such as iMessage being (e.g.) inaccessible to everyone on Android
52. 22 DecGoogle Just Killed Warrants That Give Police Access To Location Data | …one more proof that encryption can and should be used to minimise or disable un-necessary platform access to data
53. 22 DecAfter a while you have to wonder whether it’s worth complaining about MPs who attack online privacy and encryption from behind newspaper paywalls, or if it’s not just giving them more oxygen
54. 22 Dec“Could there be an internet where Tesco, Amazon, Netflix, BBC, airlines, banking etc work well but there are major changes elsewhere?” | child-safety activists ask for a read-only internet
55. 22 Dec“Write the Laws for the World in Which We Live—Not the One We Imagine”
56. 22 DecIs Compelled Decryption Heading to the Supreme Court?
57. 22 DecMoving-ish to @alecmuffett@mastodon.social, although this blog remains federated at the existing URL
58. 21 DecLapsus$: GTA 6 hacker handed indefinite hospital order | …somehow we have teleported back to the early 1980s and “WarGames”-stylee fear of hackers
59. 21 DecThursday night, and I’m making pizza in between odd bits of code and writing
60. 21 Dec“Suffice it to say that everyone in possession of a copy of the LAION-5B images has hundreds if not thousands of instances of CSAM” | …so that’s 0.0001% of the content, then
61. 20 DecThe rise and fall of Usenet: How the original social media platform came to be | ZDNET
62. 20 DecThe Chevrolet of Watsonville story is basically how hackers* of the mid 1980s *felt* when they got into a Unix machine as “guest” and found /usr/games to be intact
63. 19 DecInternet Architecture Board hits out at client-side scanning | The Register
64. 15 DecSunak Considers Crackdown on Young Teens’ Social Media Use / Government plans consultation as soon as January | the #OnlineSafetyAct and its drivers have always been about the Government being scared of youth and technology
65. 15 DecThe UX of delivering parcels | wonderful posting on where user interface meets service reputation, with a twist of Weetabix
66. 14 DecBest Train Safety Check, Evar
67. 14 DecI wish that I could be as optimistic as @ciaranmartinoxf regarding the eventual wisdom of the British state regarding end-to-end encryption, but I cannot…
68. 14 DecHalley’s Comet reaches Perihelion, is on its way back | props to @JohnSimpsonNews
69. 14 DecOPEN LETTER: Make DMs Safe | this is the kind of initiative that the UK Home Office are attempting to lobby against
70. 13 DecIN CASE YOU MISSED IT | Report: 2.6B records compromised by data breaches, underscoring need for E2EE | Apple (yes, *that* one) posts report/PDF underscoring existential need for end-to-end encryption in future of Cloud data
71. 13 DecFor those of us who are old enough to remember ASCII-Art
72. 11 Decjon prosser on Twitter: “If you want iMessage, buy an iPhone” | this is a hell of a thread with replies; and amazingly it is mostly an American thing, but they don’t seem to realise it.
73. 10 DecWhy Is Paul Ehrlich So Hard to Ignore? – Human Progress | there are lessons here for the #infosec & #ai communities; beware doom-mongers
74. 9 DecThe standard domestic laundry model
75. 8 DecExcellent thread by Jess Miers ? on Twitter on American legal drama re: how attempting to overthrow or restrict #Section230 will chill diversity voices and focus right wing voices instead
76. 8 DecAre you an “encryption extremist?” If you’re not, perhaps you should be?
77. 8 DecIf you’ve been sent this blogpost it’s to ask you: do you NOT want 1.3 billion human beings to have better data security and better privacy?
78. 7 DecEnd-to-End Encrypted Instagram and Messenger Chats: Why It Took Meta 7 Years | WIRED | nice piece
79. 7 DecWhen the EFF are saying something nice about Meta & Facebook you know that something important has happened
80. 7 DecBREAKING: Meta Facebook Messenger is now rolling out End-To-End Encryption by Default #E2EE
81. 6 DecIf you need some excellent chillout music in the early to mid-evening, try CBeebies radio on BBCSounds (aka iPlayer for radio)
82. 6 DecGovernments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications – US senator | Reuters | Really, who expected this? Anyone?
83. 5 DecNEWS CYCLE: 1. Plucky School Genius (PSG) breaks Apple secret software! 2. Apple bans PSG software! 3. Public outcry at Apple PSG ban! 4. EU to sue Apple over PSG! 5. Why all this iMessage spam, suddenly?
84. 5 Dec2023: The difference between developers & journalists is that developers try to make software say “hello world”, and journalists try to make it say something racist.
85. 5 DecUK porn watchers could have faces scanned – BBC News | how to teach a generation of young Britons to use dodgy VPNs
86. 4 Dec“It would be most advisable in the context of this discussion. if the so-called security expert academic community would revert back to their irrelevance and stop with fear mongering.” #eIDAS #QWACs
87. 4 DecCAMPAIGN: Let’s get the Australian eSafety Office to fix the stale misinformation about #Encryption on its website
88. 3 DecSunday Morning is: toddler investigating cause-and-effect with the light switch
89. 2 DecMy thermostat requires genuine alkaline AA batteries…
90. 1 DecHonestly, I thought that webpages that kept to business hours was a joke that died in 2010 #NHS

November 2023

1. 30 Nov#Sikh activist accuses #India of ‘transnational terrorism’ after US foils plot to kill him | you must wonder: if the Indian government obtains the backdoor it demands in WhatsApp, how many more people it would kill?
2. 30 NovBREAKING: leaked document from MEPs lays out a delusional, paranoid joint (mis)understanding of how Web standards work, makes demands for Government, not experts, to dictate how Web works / for HTTPS backdoor #QWACs
3. 29 NovNew Zealand smoking ban: Health experts criticise new government’s shock reversal | I was not aware that NZ had dropped the rolling smoking ban. The UK currently persists.
4. 28 NovInhaled isopropyl alcohol for nausea & vomiting in the emergency department
5. 28 NovLaw of Toddler Crayons
6. 27 NovAntibiotics again…
7. 26 NovThe Swedes have a concept-word “lagom”, and the game theorist in me has questions
8. 25 NovNobody tells you that the MTRR to recover from a toddler-induced outage exceeds the mean time between outages
9. 25 NovShould privacy be a superpower for the techno-elite?
10. 25 NovQ: “Where are the universities in the Fediverse?” A: “I suspect that they are wisely avoiding getting into content-moderation arguments…” (HT: @radlschorsch@muenchen.social)
11. 24 NovBloody Yodel
12. 24 NovDoes mass media pave the way to fascism? | Wellcome Collection | Betteridge’s Law, Applies
13. 24 NovOne of the things I really enjoy about being a FTSAHD
14. 24 NovSTUFF TO READ: How to sum up 1700 pages in four words | @webdevlaw on the purposefully intimidating Ofcom “Online Safety” consultation, and where we’ve seen similar before
15. 23 NovFrom 2022: shoshana wodinsky (she/her): “honestly if i had to name the One Big Takeaway from all this shit, it’s that fb employees generally think abt algorithms *way* differently than regulators or reporters do, and tbh i think their way is… the right one ? sorry”
16. 23 NovThis is an utterly delightful little TikTok video presenting an apparently clever solution to the security of farm gates, but which is *actually* just a massive expansion of the attack surface and a lockpicker’s dream come true *SO MANY METAPHORS*
17. 23 NovThis new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI | “Q: why has everything on the web turned to shit?” “A: proactive vengeance by vitriolic artists…”
18. 23 NovSTUFF TO READ: What the Doomsayers Get Wrong About Deepfakes | The New Yorker
19. 23 NovPlatforms like Threads are experimenting with Hashtags that are essentially detached metadata, not represented in the {tweet, source of truth}; slight trust & safety problem… #VerbTheOppressedOutgroup
20. 23 NovSo it turns out that signing up for an app which explicitly breaks the promise of end-to-end security for an end-to-end-secure messenger, in order to “have your messages all in one place”, is insecure. Who’da thunk?
21. 23 Nov“Fox News did to our parents what our parents were afraid video games would do to us” | it doesn’t always generationally work, but it’s too good a quote to ignore
22. 23 Nov“Never forget the political value of pornography, which helped bring about the French revolution.”
23. 23 NovTHREAD: “Governments – in democracies and dictatorships – systematically lie to publics and themselves about how much influence they have over migration” | …and (aside) the same goes for {public speech, the internet}
24. 23 NovSTUFF TO READ: Twitter’s Former Head of Trust and Safety Finally Breaks Her Silence | WIRED
25. 23 NovSkating to Where the Puck Is Going – Center for Security & Emerging Technology | overall I’m grateful to the AI community for absorbing so many of the professional fearmongers hitherto locked-into VR & Infosec
26. 23 NovBright satellites are disrupting astronomy research worldwide | my, how things have changed
27. 22 NovHow long before they have to reboot the ball? How long before somebody DDoSes it? | UEFA 2024 to feature “connected ball”
28. 22 NovStart them early…
29. 21 NovThat feeling that 05:15h when the toddler requests a bottle of water, drinks the whole thing, and then vomits all over you
30. 20 NovI love SQLite but OMG the bugs from namespace pollution in Python
31. 20 NovArgentina has just elected a radical libertarian lunatic as president; I’ve no idea how much real power this person has, but judging by this video Rishi Sunak should now be gearing up & hoping for Falklands2.0 whilst Argentina gets run into the ground
32. 19 NovAssuming that #SamA goes back into #OpenAI, there is only one thing I am worried about
33. 19 NovFamily Television
34. 18 NovIt’s not yet an addiction but eBay second-hand books are really really attractive
35. 18 NovWe’re back where we were during Brexit, with hot-head know-nothing MPs and ministers insisting that they can write legislation to change global reality, without any recognition of the limitations of their power. They have confused legislation for daydreams and clauses for omnipotence.
36. 18 NovSo now we get to see what happens when a world-leading startup decides to step back from the cutting edge
37. 17 NovA question for friends who are home #solar-power experts, and/or who have experience in dealing with charging 12V “deep-cycle” batteries for electrical projects: Are “smart” chargers really “smart”?
38. 16 NovApple will apparently adopt #RCS end-to-end #encryption in 2024 to solve various monopoly and user issues with respect to Android; we can’t tell if RCS is truly worthy of the description #EndToEndEncrypted
39. 16 NovThis is so true:
40. 16 NovI looked at this pack of Pampers and saw SBF, and now I can’t unsee…
41. 16 NovI wanted to have kimchi on a hot dog for dinner but ran out so had to fake it with sriracha and sauerkraut…
42. 16 NovI use colour codes for Google Calendars to track different classes of event. Birthdays are yellow. Can you find the yellow on this Android Google Calendar?
43. 15 NovThe *best* comment on the NothingOS / Sunbird / iMessage-back-door-for-Android drama comes from @documentingmeta on Threads
44. 15 NovDiary for Today
45. 15 Nov“Pottery Is Womens’ Work” – the triumph of Nigerian ceramicist Ladi Kwali
46. 15 NovMorning So Far…
47. 14 NovICMYI: @Ofcom has launched a call for views on best practice principles for #medialiteracy by design | … so how does Ofcom propose to redesign humans to have media literacy? Perhaps: Education?
48. 14 NovFake audio of Sadiq Khan is not a crime, says Met | … I’m sure the cast of Dead Ringers on Radio 4 are relieved
49. 14 NovIKEA pictograms | a fun little perspective from people who worked on them
50. 14 NovMichael Nielsen: “In the Mission in SF there was a flyer posted on a street pole, with a QR code that would let you download the Llama weights”
51. 14 NovINHOPE — the umbrella group for the likes of NCMEC and IWF — continue to paint surveillance and monitoring as “content scanning”
52. 14 NovIdentifying adult black-backed gulls | BTO – British Trust for Ornithology
53. 14 NovExperts in Standardising Backdoors continue unabated
54. 14 NovMy sense is that Lina Khan was a “late-techlash” hire who appealed both to Regulators and Techlash Activists in her desire to GetBigTech™ rather than to determine what might need doing, and do it
55. 14 NovI am exceptionally glad that we don’t have to find out what Braverman’s “Plan B” was
56. 14 NovWhere Americans live in England | …and Wales, and I am wondering why there are increased Americans in Ceredigion? Is there a surveillance base there?
57. 13 NovDiary for the last 3 days
58. 13 NovWhen RFC 7686 and transparent proxies collide | time for old magic and for /etc/nsswitch.conf to save the day?
59. 13 NovBluetooth could help police spot e-bikes hacked for higher speeds | Senior German cycle-industry wonk calls for Bluetooth-based tracking of E-bikes
60. 13 Nov#DavidCameron, a man who can be honestly said to have misunderestimated his own party’s hatred of the world, is now foreign secretary
61. 12 NovEconomics has the “Lump of Labour Fallacy”; tech needs the “Lump of Social Community” fallacy
62. 11 NovMeta and YouTube face criminal surveillance complaints | MAN WALKING AROUND IN PUBLIC SHOUTING INCREASINGLY LOUDLY THAT HE ‘JUST WANTS TO BE LEFT ALONE, DAMNIT!’
63. 11 NovMiele Dishwasher Hack
64. 10 Nov“Through NATO, we can build a secure cyberspace for all” | no, no, sorry Jens, no we can’t.
65. 9 Nov“I’ll keep the free-usage tier with targeted advertising, please.”
66. 9 NovDiary for Today
67. 9 NovThis tweet is just so much truth; as a person of VeryComputer™ there are so many novel ways my computer can not work compared to most peoples’
68. 9 NovPuffin Rock and the New Friends review – climate peril in beloved cartoon’s movie spinoff | Film | The Guardian | from July
69. 9 NovWaiting for the dystopian remake where the Internet of Things wages war on Felinekind
70. 8 NovView older posts from other servers · Issue #17213 · mastodon/mastodon · GitHub | wow yes it really is fragile
71. 8 NovDiary for Today
72. 8 NovTesting Mastodon Pickup Under Supercache
73. 8 NovHeather Burns / @webdevlaw on the new #InvestigatoryPowersAct attempt to force backdoors and bugs into everything
74. 7 NovDiary for Today
75. 7 NovOn Biscuits: a toddler translation table
76. 7 NovReminder from 2021: “the World Bank has taken down its blog talking up the development and gender equality benefits of Afghanistan’s digital ID system”
77. 7 NovPrediction: One day soon there will be a clickbait piece in the media about “Regulators Angry at Nazis in Free iPhone Games and SomethingMustBeDone™” #touchHLE #Censorship #ArtificialIntelligence
78. 6 NovDiary for Today
79. 6 NovMastodon seems to be a lot more fragile than USENET; the whole PubSub thing seems to assume better connectivity than old-style distribution permits
80. 6 NovNice long-form Tweet from @rmhrisk re: the perennial FUD that {Libraries, The Internet, Search Engines, Social Networking, AI} will enable youth to access $BAD_IDEAS and cause them to {cause chaos, kill others, kill themselves, vote for change} …
81. 6 NovClearly the local hedgehogs are up to something eldritch…
82. 6 NovBeing a parent sometimes means…
83. 5 NovThe Eighteenth Century : Free Texts : Free Download, Borrow and Streaming : Internet Archive
84. 5 NovDiary for Today
85. 5 NovNadine Dorries appears to be admitting to being an accessory to crime, in (I think?) a national newspaper
86. 5 NovElsewhere in Climate Change
87. 4 NovRishi Sunak x Elon Musk: “One of the maddest events I’ve ever covered” – Sam Coates
88. 3 NovThe best hostname-creation scheme, evar?
89. 2 NovFor people who don’t believe that #eIDAS #QWACs are primarily about creating EU-based tax revenue…
90. 2 NovToday so far…
91. 2 NovHot on the heels of #ChatControl and in the name of “identity” and “consumer choice” the EU seeks the ability to undetectably spy on HTTPS communication; 300+ experts say “no” to #Article45 of #eIDAS #QWAC
92. 1 NovBBC to provide emergency radio service for Gaza
93. 1 Nov“game-changing cyber protections that will make our computers and our critical infrastructure more secure than it is today” | HEADSUP: the US Government will be rolling out the NSA A1 Labeled Security Operating System to everyone
94. 1 NovAdvertising™ is the worst thing which can happen to any User™ – worse than oppression, surveillance, prison, capitalism, or democracy. And the worst form of Advertising™ is “Relevant” advertising, or as SPAs call it: Targeted™
95. 1 NovI Accidentally Saved Half A Million Dollars | from October; this sounds so familiar for no terribly explicable reason
96. 1 NovWhen you are using federated social networking you start to need new tools, like “something to track whether a friend’s server has disconnected from the federation without telling you.”

October 2023

1. 31 OctImportant History Lesson: the 2019 Kazakhstan Government’s attempt to man-in-the-middle all their citizens’ HTTPS requests
2. 31 OctConstructive start to the day…
3. 31 OctThat feeling when the darling toddler eats two entire Weetabix – except for the last spoonful…
4. 31 Oct#DinnerForBreakfast: overnight slow cooked lamb shoulder with root vegetables and homemade wholemeal bread.
5. 31 OctSEC Charges SolarWinds and Chief Information Security Officer with Fraud, Internal Control Failures | Soon we get to see all the “liability will fix software and architecture insecurity” folk explaining how they “meant it to work differently”
6. 31 OctThe UK Prime Minister appears to be bragging about having cornered a conversation with… Elon Musk? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?
7. 30 OctPOLITICO Europe: Top Boris Johnson aide turned on disappearing WhatsApps weeks before COVID inquiry unveiled | Politicians & Civil Servants surrender many rights to commence work; perhaps privacy should be one of them
8. 30 OctPerhaps the #VAWG / Violence Against Women & Girls charities which supported the #OnlineSafetyBill’s attack on end-to-end encryption, might consider reappraising their strategic positions re: the importance of private messaging
9. 30 OctThe State of this Blog
10. 30 OctThe Internet (almost) never forgets
11. 30 OctThere’s a US Presidential Executive Order re: Artificial Intelligence out today, and it’s doomed to fail because (as ever) it makes the rookie mistake of trying to dictate the #ShapeOfCode
12. 30 OctSection 230 Protects Gmail’s Spam Filter-RNC v. Google | Technology & Marketing Law Blog | it’s impossible to overstate the importance of Section 230 in development of the open internet & open web
13. 30 OctFor the first time in history, the “extra hour in bed” thing worked
14. 29 OctMusk announces that community notes will lead to demonetization. What could possibly go wrong?
15. 29 OctTHE SPEECH POLICE DISMISSETH US | the minds behind the free-speech-preserving online safety bill seek to police (reprehensible or not) what academics say in public on social media
16. 29 Oct“responsible capability sharing” | UK civil society creates buzzwords for the new oppression
17. 29 OctJeni Tennison speaks wise regulatory heresy… but still somehow comes out trying to control the uncontrollable
18. 29 Octresearch!rsc: Running the “Reflections on Trusting Trust” Compiler | someone finally published Ken Thompson’s actual compiler back door source code
19. 29 OctDon’t let your car read road signs
20. 29 OctWe Get The Internet We Ask For: YouTube censoring academic side-channel attack videos, which of course are obviously different from “hacking” videos that are against the TOU
21. 29 OctYoel Roth is teaching a university course on online trust and safety
22. 28 OctGoogle Play Points: if only Google would give you free points for keeping your phone up to date
23. 28 OctI’m sure somebody’s going to be annoyed by this but I think it’s a great way to focus conference attendees: to register for the Selenium unconference you must make a pull request or log an issue
24. 27 OctFig & Stilton Pizza
25. 27 OctSo the OnlineSafetyBill is now law; but what will the activists and politicians behind it attempt next to do?
26. 26 OctStuff To Read: Google Decides To Pull Up The Ladder On The Open Internet, Pushes For Unconstitutional Regulatory Proposals | interesting take from @mmasnick suggesting that Google has caved (?) to age-estimation / child-protection interests in order to shore-up monopoly interest, rather than from fe
27. 26 OctSimon Willison on X: “@AlecMuffett @AnthropicAI Well that worked!” | it turns out that the simplest way to bypass security of a AI sometimes is just to lie to them
28. 26 OctThink Kiwi Farms Is Legally Unassailable? Copyright Law Might Disagree | Greer v. Moon, Technology & Marketing Law Blog | Eric Goldman
29. 26 OctAutomattic (“the WordPress people”) believe that the problem with Instant Messaging is that there’s not a single app to bring them all together. Clearly he’s never read XKCD 927
30. 26 OctStuff To Read: Curbing Government Internet Surveillance by Riana Pfefferkorn & Callum Voge – Project Syndicate
31. 26 OctThought for the Day
32. 26 OctIn Case You Missed It: more good news from Europe: the #fairshare proposal (viz: ending #NetNeutrality in EU and permitting ISPs to extort money for preferential treatment of traffic) is apparently dead, for the moment at least
33. 26 OctGoogle plans to test proxy scheme to hide IP addresses • The Register | Those who do not adopt Tor are doomed to reinvent it
34. 26 OctSo I go away for a family get-together for a couple of days and I come back to find that #ChatControl is possibly dead? HT: @ellajakubowska1 @echo_pbreyer
35. 26 OctStuff To Read: OSI: The Internet That Wasn’t – IEEE Spectrum
36. 26 OctWhy artist David Shrigley has pulped 6,000 copies of The Da Vinci Code – BBC News
37. 26 OctBarnstorming thread by Jess Miers on the US-ian Attorneys General (sp?) wanting to sue Meta for being interesting (i.e. “addictive”)
38. 23 OctHashiCorp CEO predicts OSS-free Silicon Valley… | /me *laughs in Sun Microsystems*
39. 23 OctGitHub – ruffle-rs/ruffle: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust
40. 23 OctUK government keeping files on teaching assistants’ and librarians’ internet activity | …this is the sort of feature-creep (ha!) that I expect the #OnlineSafetyBill’s snooping of End-to-End Encrypted Messengers will enable
41. 23 OctSick of Cancel Culture? One Man Has a Surprising Solution – POLITICO | I feel Lukianoff’s “coddling” writing should be informing how we approach Trust & Safety
42. 22 OctThe World’s Most Popular Painter Sent His Followers After Me Because He Didn’t Like a Review of His Work. Here’s What I Learned
43. 21 Oct“Raw AI Training Data leaks into City water supply, tens of thousands poisoned; Refugee Cyber hackers in Small Boats blamed.”
44. 20 OctI’ve seen at least three hagiographies for Mastodon in the past 48 hours. I fear this won’t end well. #Mastodon #Threads #EternalSeptember2
45. 20 OctPlease enjoy the names of this seventeenth century Sussex jury | a thread on Twitter still worth a click-through
46. 20 OctThis is what you get for enabling people like Nadine Dorries
47. 20 OctThe Problem With Jon Stewart ending over AI and China coverage – The Verge | in partial praise of Trump
48. 19 OctProtonmail (groundlessly?) accusing Google of spying on people’s device content for CSAM
49. 19 OctHeather is a keen observer
50. 19 OctNetwork Usage Fees: The European Commission Plays Politics with the Global Internet – Internet Society
51. 19 OctStable Signature: A new method for watermarking images created by open source generative AI | maybe not so much?
52. 19 OctIf anything has been “family purchase of the year” so far, it is the Makita DTM52 oscillating multitool
53. 19 OctOur neighbours recently had scaffolding put up: workers evicted pigeons from nesting overnight under the solar panels, and wire mesh was installed to prevent them getting underneath again
54. 19 OctI am very much feeling this National Trust sign #toddlerlife
55. 19 OctA thought provocation for people who want to regulate artificial intelligence software & training data
56. 19 OctFive Eyes Warn Deep Tech Start-Ups Against Nation-State Threats – Infosecurity Magazine
57. 19 OctBoy with water pistol confronted by armed police – BBC News
58. 19 OctSignal app President Meredith Whittaker on messaging privacy
59. 19 OctRaspberry Pi Detects License Plates with AI
60. 18 OctThis is a quick test of a new card feature for this blog…
61. 17 OctWhat could possibly go wrong: New York May Require a Background Check to Buy a 3D Printer
62. 17 OctEasy Answer: American direct messages are measured in imperial units.
63. 17 OctAll these infosec professionals suddenly “Signal bug? What Signal bug?”
64. 17 OctAs a software developer, this resonates…
65. 17 OctDiscovering that your Bluetooth car battery monitor is siphoning up your location data | lovely bit of reverse engineering
66. 17 OctStuff to Read: Students’ New Surveillance State | University of Virginia School of Law
67. 17 OctWikimedia DNS | in case you missed it, the Wikimedia foundation are now offering secure DNS
68. 17 OctStuff to Read: Mistranslation of Newton’s First Law Discovered after Nearly 300 Years – Scientific American
69. 17 OctStuff to Read: LLM now provides tools for working with embeddings
70. 17 OctStuff to Read: Distance Metrics in Vector Search | Weaviate – vector database
71. 16 OctTwitter Community Notes: How the Algorithms work | and therefore how to game them
72. 16 OctReminder from August 2023: the UK Ministry of Defence see positive value in VPNs
73. 16 OctCarey Lening: On Data Breaches & Privacy Harms | just because you can “out” someone’s past doesn’t mean that you should
74. 16 OctStuff to Read: FROM HOT NEWS TO LINK TAX: THE DANGERS OF A QUASI-PROPERTY RIGHT IN INFORMATION
75. 16 OctThis is our default recipe at the moment: Wholemeal Rye and White 50-50 Bread Machine Loaf
76. 16 OctIf you, like me, are trying to restrict a Ubuntu Raspberry Pi filesystem expansion upon first boot…
77. 16 OctNot all uses of “stalker” AirTags are a bad thing…
78. 16 OctBasic Modelling in MiniZinc
79. 16 OctSomething to watch later: Prof Victoria Baines on “Meet the Cybercriminals”
80. 15 OctTFW you set up an RSS feed in 2004, and it’s still going 19 years later…
81. 15 OctProject Pink Cadillac
82. 15 OctSchools Are Normalizing Intrusive Surveillance

July 2023

1. 19 JulTHOUGHT EXPERIMENT: how the experiences of #Twitter and #ThreadsApp show us how the #OnlineSafetyBill could be a windfall for fully-end-to-end-encrypted Facebook @Messenger
2. 4 JulEnd-to-End Encryption and Client-Side Scanning: Notes for @CameronWilson of Crikey magazine; relevant also to #OnlineSafetyBill

June 2023

1. 8 JunA short note for Civil Society on the inadvisability of Government regulation & restriction of #LLM and #AI — #OpenSource #FreeSpeech #CodeIsSpeech

May 2023

1. 24 MayEnd to End Encryption: Political Timing is Everything / HT: @radioproducer
2. 22 MayNEW: “LockAndCode” Podcast on #AgeVerification by @Malwarebytes, featuring @AlecMuffett: “Identity crisis: How an anti-porn crusade could jam the Internet”
3. 15 MayA question for everyone who is saying that #AI must be regulated (a) soon, and (b) by the Government rather than self-regulation; #BigAI
4. 10 MayA Short Thread on peoples’ understanding of “End-to-End Encryption”
5. 7 MayHigh Performers of Low Trust #tiktok #funny #wellilaughed
6. 6 MayICYMI: @LordJimKnight (who has abandoned Twitter) proposes in the #OnlineSafetyBill that platforms must know the nationality and/or physical location of their users, lest VPNs (etc) are used to circumvent OSB restrictions

April 2023

1. 30 AprA short thread on implementing properly private end-to-end encrypted messaging on your global megaplatform
2. 30 AprResource for Journalists: How best to frame your article criticising @ElonMusk for adding #Encryption to @Twitter DMs. Questions to ask, resources to consult.
3. 26 AprRe: #OnlineSecurityBill & #ChatControl demands to filter WhatsApp messages for content legality, one must wonder if the UK & EU Governments would be content to extend such features to northern Nigerian or Uganda? #ChatKontrolle #LGBT
4. 26 Apr#Facepalm — what we really don’t need right now is somebody trying to reboot failed 1997 #Encryption Key Escrow, e.g. like in this letter to the @FT #OnlineSafetyBill
5. 24 AprFixing: EXPKEYSIG 74A941BA219EC810 deb.torproject.org
6. 24 AprResponse to “Most People Don’t Need End-to-End Encryption, Most of the Time” #NothingToHide #NothingToFear #DrinkableWater #OnlineSafetyBill
7. 23 AprHow WhatsApp could shut down service to the UK using “Feature Flags”
8. 23 AprIn Case You Missed It: some current commentary and press coverage re: the downsides of the #OnlineSafetyBill
9. 21 AprHow the #OnlineSafetyBill’s OFCOM surveillance measures can (will?) bring about public emasculation of the UK Government and a kind of #CyberBrexit effect (HT: @ciaranmartinoxf @allanofhallam @wongmjane @jamesrbuk)
10. 18 AprThe Impending Crisis of Messenger Communications in the Westminster Bubble
11. 14 AprSome Friday Afternoon Laundry Political Predictions
12. 14 AprA Land Acknowledgement for the Internet
13. 3 AprHow the United States has just made it illegal for #WhatsApp to contain a Remote Code Execution (RCE) bug, via the Executive Order on Spyware
14. 2 AprA Short Twitter-Thread on Scraping, Copyright, and Licensing, touching on Derivative Use, and LLMs / OpenAI / ChatGPT, etc…

March 2023

1. 29 MarPossibly the most biting article on the whole of Wikipedia
2. 25 MarAlex Stamos (@alexstamos) op-ed at @CNN: “When it comes to TikTok, the US is blind” — waging proxy war on China via TikTok will make the USA & “The West” more *like* China
3. 25 MarBREAKING: new paper from Jenny Blessing & Ross Anderson at Cambridge: “One Protocol to Rule Them All? On Securing Interoperable Messaging” re: interoperability under the EU #DigitalMarketsAct #DMA @rossjanderson
4. 24 Mar“#DigitalMarketsAct: Commission creates High-Level Group to provide advice and expertise in implementation” – Gosh, what will happen when the infeasible reality hits?
5. 24 MarThis thread by Phillip Hallam-Baker (@hallam) is a historical- and business-reality-checking response to the UK Minister for Geekery (@michelledonelan) and well worth a read re: who can foster / claim credit for fostering innovation #PHB
6. 21 MarAndy Burrows has insinuating questions about WhatsApp Security; I don’t work for WhatsApp but I think I can answer most of them: The War On Regular Expressions
7. 9 MarChatGPT: create a list of 20 new code names for “advanced persistent threat” hacking teams hosted by hostile nation states.ChatGPT:
8. 9 Mar“Mercury Shrugged” — how can end-to-end #encrypted messenger platforms threatening to “take their ball home” be “…a threat to ‘the nation state?'” #OnlineSafetyBill #MercuryShrugged @SignalApp @WhatsApp

February 2023

1. 16 FebThought for the Day
2. 5 FebSo I forgot that I am literally the person who in 2007 requested that Twitter add a “Reply” button

January 2023

1. 13 JanThe Execution of Mark Zuckerberg …
2. 10 JanGotta love #Clangers subtitles
3. 10 JanThings from an 80s childhood which were actually awful…
4. 9 JanAnyone who wants to understand how crowdsourcing works, simply needs to do a Google search for “{doing,pulling} a Trump”, which became suddenly popular yesterday.
5. 9 JanNew: @marietjeschaake’s FT adulation of EU #precrime proposals to decide #ArtificialIntelligence legality on the basis of its education
6. 9 JanNew: Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3 – astrophotographers start your engines, there is a lensless version, too.
7. 9 Janbreakingthe3ma.app — oh dear #threema
8. 9 JanImpractical demands for WhatsApp to provide message content to the Brazilian government, in 3… 2…
9. 9 JanIn theory I am now also @alecm@alecmuffett.com
10. 8 JanThe disjoint described by @shashj in this Tweet, nicely encapsulates a lesson for Civil Society regarding technology:
11. 8 JanHonestly, I have to wonder what the hell #Friendica on social.gibiris.org thinks that is it doing…
12. 8 JanWhy Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with [@SignalApp] president Meredith Whittaker
13. 1 JanDoes anyone know how to construct (or, where to find documentation) intent URLs to call out to the @WordPress app on a device?
14. 1 JanLovely way to start a year, getting an award for my work in open source. Thank you @openuk_uk and congratulations to everyone else!

2022 75

December 2022

1. 29 DecThe Guardian has been polling #StayAtHomeDad-s about their career choices; I have no idea if this will ever go anywhere but it gave me a chance to talk about the #OnlineSafetyBill
2. 29 DecI seem to have misplaced my copy of Godel, Escher, Bach; have I loaned it to someone?
3. 6 DecHacky workaround while I decide what to do about #Mastodon: Python script takes various Mastodon URIs, converts them to RSS URLs, and subscribes to them
4. 3 DecAsking #ChatGPT: Please cite a few things which are legal online but illegal offline. #OnlineSafetyBill
5. 3 DecAsking #ChatGPT: Please write a 600 word essay on the decline of politeness in society that will result from younger generations not saying “please” or “thank you” to generative AI bots, causing those phrases to drop out of fashion in daily use.
6. 2 DecAsking #ChatGPT: Could you please write 500 words in the style of a Daily Telegraph op-ed about whether the #OnlineSafetyBill will meet its objectives?

November 2022

1. 26 NovEU Post-Pegasus Report, drawing on EDRi paper (?) calls for regulation of vulnerability disclosure
2. 25 NovNotes for interview with @TonyaJoRiley of @CyberScoopNews regarding #EndToEndEncryption of Direct Messenger on Twitter post-Musk
3. 10 NovSuddenly #Mastodon: history teaches what will happen when Twitter-expatriates discover “federated social networks” are a volatile blend of unsafe spaces & stifled speech with blunt, imprecise instruments to address their woes @jonronson @jamesrbuk @bradtem

October 2022

1. 31 OctSlides, Scripts and PDFs for the Encryption Panel session at #UKIGF #UKIGF22
2. 19 OctMore evidence of how the #DigitalMarketsAct demand for #Interoperability will turn #EndToEndEncryption Messenger Apps into festering pools of Spam
3. 19 Oct“XCheck at Meta: Why it exists and how it works” by Krishna Sundarram
4. 19 Oct“An adversary can imperceptibly perturb an image that would normally be placed in this bank, and all live instances of the benign image will then be either incorrectly removed or flagged”
5. 18 OctOne aspect that I really appreciate about getting older is the increasing number of past events that you thought were “missed opportunities” being later revealed as “dodged bullets”
6. 13 OctIf you are interested in #DarkPatterns but actually want to understand what drives them, watch this TED talk by @danariely, notably the pharma story…
7. 13 Oct“We Need Better Stories” — jack.lawro on TikTok makes an elegant case for pursuing optimism over dystopia in the tales we tell about ourselves… for our own sake
8. 12 OctOkay, yes, some people I know are quite upset that the Apple #AirTag may be used to track people; but the anti-stalking features hamper return of stolen goods, so…
9. 11 OctUm…
10. 11 OctStonehenge in Biscuits
11. 11 OctToday I Learned: The Abilene Paradox
12. 8 OctDefinition: “illiberal” means #LegalButHarmful for those things which Governments do to citizens
13. 8 OctA cursory Google search suggests that I may have invented an original joke. #wine #naturalwine
14. 5 OctYou know that you have given up on the local bakery when you start buying 15kg bags of strong Canadian flour from Costco

September 2022

1. 6 SepHow I divide up the day…

August 2022

1. 16 AugI’m chairing the Encryption session at @UKIGF / UK Internet Governance Forum, on November 1st … #ukigf2022 #privacy #security #infosec #encryption #endtoendencryption
2. 7 AugAbuse Prevention is Tradecraft (Was: “Como is Infosec” by @doctorow) #ContentModeration Is Not #Infosec
3. 6 Aug@naomicfisher on screen time

July 2022

1. 21 JulAll Watched Over By Filters Of Loving Grace: GCHQ’s Holistic, Sociotechnical , “Thoughts on Child Safety on Commodity Platforms” end-to-end #encryption #ghost #NCSC #ghostProtocol
2. 19 JulWatch this space: GCHQ / NCSC soon to publish Version 2 of “Ghost Protocol” appeal for backdoors in end-to-end secure, encrypted messenger software
3. 6 JulDon’t buy Rhino Pro Milk Pitchers from Rhinoware / Rhinowares / Rhino Coffee Gear — this bad experience does not bode well for their products

June 2022

1. 30 JunA Civil Society Glossary and Primer for End-to-End Encryption Policy in 2022 — #privacy #surveillance #messenger #interoperability #encryption #endtoendencryption @WhatsApp @SignalApp
2. 21 JunIt’s weird AF & a complete mashup of homages to British kids’ TV, but only once you’re into it do you realise how “In The Night Garden” is practically engineered to calm toddlers down & help them sleep. And Derek Jacobi clearly had a blast narrating it.
3. 4 JunConverting Millimeters to Feet & Decimal Inches in Google Sheets
4. 2 JunThe dangerous subtext within the concerned-dot-tech “Letter in Support of Responsible Fintech Policy”

May 2022

1. 13 MayThings which are legal offline, should be legal online — e.g. having a conversation without state surveillance; by @alecmuffett licensed CC-BY-SA

April 2022

1. 14 AprMessenger Interoperability: pushing for conformity, destroying functional diversity, enabling abuse and dangerous monocultures
2. 4 AprBreaking Up “Ma Zuck” — how a generational divide amongst #DigitalRights #CivilSociety regarding #Messenger #Interoperability imperils the deployment of end-to-end encryption as a platform solution … for everyone
3. 2 AprTwo threads on Twitter regarding online surveillance: it happens because our governments demand it

March 2022

1. 31 MarThe more I think about it, the more I realise quite what a *genius* ploy #messenger #interoperability is for those who want to surveil the world or resist it gaining “mass end-to-end encryption” #IOP
2. 26 MarMatrixDotOrg actively calling for everyone’s security to be weakened so that perhaps more people will adopt them
3. 25 MarExplaining fundamental problems of the EU #DMA demanding instant #messenger #interoperability, via fun analogies with food & sex — #endtoendencryption #e2ee
4. 12 MarNotes for interview with @DanMilmo in saturday’s @Guardian regarding @Twitter, @TorProject and bypassing censorship
5. 8 MarWhy offer an Onion Address rather than just encourage browsing-over-Tor?
6. 1 MarNotes on mining the #facebookcorewwwi onion address
7. 1 MarLong-deferred reading finally arrived from Amazon

February 2022

1. 25 FebOn Nuclear War and Eating cold Pop-Tarts
2. 23 FebIncreasingly frantic attempts by the #AgeVerification & #OnlineSafetyBill community to dissuade people of the obvious logic that…

January 2022

1. 26 Jan“UK government opens consultation on medic-style register for Brit #infosec pros”
2. 20 JanThe Fallacy of “Privacy vs: [Children’s] Safety”: why Privacy always wins over any singular concern, and why deployment of #EndToEndEncryption is essentially a binary choice, explained for #NoPlaceToHide
3. 20 JanHow #NoPlaceToHide is cover for creation of #DigitalStopAndSearch for the Global Internet
4. 19 JanUK government ignites debate over privacy vs. safety #noplacetohide
5. 19 JanTechnology analyst @BenedictEvans noted that “end-to-end encryption is probably the only issue where the entire tech industry is on Facebook’s side”. “Collective reaction: ‘Jesus, do we have to explain this *again*?’”, he tweeted. #noplacetohide
6. 18 JanHome Office to spearhead anti-encryption public comms campaign
7. 18 JanBBC News: New campaign aims to stop more encrypted apps
8. 18 JanThe @ukhomeoffice-funded #NoPlaceToHide campaign claims that “14 million reports” of child abuse may be “lost” if @Messenger implements #endtoendencryption. Here’s a horrible thought …
9. 18 JanCan a @Messenger Application with #EndToEndEncryption provide a #BackDoor for #LawEnforcement access to message content? #noplacetohide
10. 18 JanFAQ regarding #noplacetohide — Given that @WhatsApp, @SignalApp & others all have #endtoendencryption, then why is @ukhomeoffice so upset about @Messenger adopting #E2EE ?
11. 18 Jan“New [Government] campaign aims to stop more encrypted apps” – so @BBCNews gets the headline mostly right, emphasis mine. #noplacetohide
12. 18 JanHarrison Bergeron, Software Engineer
13. 18 JanA note about using application “risk profiles” to improve online safety for children #NSPCC
14. 17 JanReactions and foreshadowings of #noplacetohide (“live” blog post, will update occasionally)
15. 17 JanWhy we need #EndToEndEncryption and why it’s essential for our safety, our children’s safety, and for everyone’s future #noplacetohide
16. 17 JanThings children *really* need: involved parents, good childcare, healthy food, better education, positive body images & even learning how to be safer online. None of them require holes to be drilled in the privacy of the people of the world #noplacetohide
17. 17 JanShelters from domestic violence & abuse. Dissidents. LGBTQ discrimination. Democracy activists. Oppressed religious minorities. People around the world need strong privacy for many reasons. We can’t & shouldn’t take hope away from them #noplacetohide
18. 17 JanHow much harm would happen for want of #EndToEndEncryption? How many bank & medical details, business deals, or innocent (but embarrassing) photographs will leak from unencrypted chats & hacked accounts? How shall we measure *that* cost? #noplacetohide
19. 17 Jan“I don’t need #encryption, I’ve nothing to hide!” — if you’re paying a mortgage, getting a diagnosis, escaping an abusive partner, you don’t want that data to proliferate. #EndToEndEncryption gives you control over where the data goes #noplacetohide
20. 17 JanPeople’s passwords get guessed & stolen. Their accounts get hacked. It happens every day. But if sensitive information is sent via #EndToEndEncryption there’ll be very little data to steal… #noplacetohide
21. 17 JanEver used an “incognito” window in a browser? If we have to stop kids using #EndToEndEncryption then we’ll also have to stop online anonymity; because to do it they’ll have to know who is, and is not, a kid… #noplacetohide
22. 17 JanRemember #CambridgeAnalytica? Facebook does, & they don’t want to get burned again. But the Government is demanding that they must weaken #EndToEndEncryption to retain access to read your messages. Isn’t that odd? #noplacetohide
23. 17 JanBoris Johnson, Priti Patel, the Cabinet—they use encrypted messenger apps like @WhatsApp & @SignalApp for privacy & security. Strange, then, that they don’t want @Messenger to also be private & secure by using #EndToEndEncryption… #noplacetohide
24. 17 JanIf you are giving your children their privacy — or not already protecting your children by supervising their internet usage — why would you ask a corporation to do it on your behalf? #EndToEndEncryption is not the problem… #noplacetohide
25. 17 JanAbandoning #EndToEndEncryption would sacrifice the privacy of the adults who your children will grow-up to become. Directly & indirectly they’ll need and use #Encryption to protect their data and loved ones #noplacetohide
26. 16 JanBBC Radio 4 #FileOn4 “Hunting the #Darknet Dealers” – “…you can find the BBC, for example, on the #darkweb, for that very reason” — normalising #endtoendencryption is essential for progress of information security
27. 3 JanKenya and “the decline of the world’s greatest coffee” — very interesting blog post on the history, production and sale of Kenyan coffee… and what’s wrong with it
28. 2 JanMuffett versus MI5

2021 353

December 2021

1. 31 DecMembers of the UK Parliament could learn a few lessons from California Congressman Eric @RepSwalwell on how to deal with so-called “anonymous” abuse on social media; more of our politicians should have people skills like this:
2. 28 DecInterview with @RachelAxon at USA Today, re: #Disinformation propagating virally on #Facebook, and #FrancesHaugen
3. 11 DecThis, from Coffee Gems in Farnham, is the first ever Ethiopian coffee that I’ve done as an Espresso at home, and it’s … amazingly good.
4. 10 DecCEOs of Target, Best Buy, CVS and other retail chains…urge Congress to pass a bill that would make it…harder for criminals to hide behind fake identities
5. 10 DecThis comment from Reddit — riffing on something that Pratchett wrote — is perspective-enhancing: “Lady Justice with her scales is on the same podium with Santa”
6. 10 DecAlgorithms
7. 10 DecOfficial judgment portal set to go live | News | Law Gazette
8. 10 DecAir Force Spent Millions on Encrypted App Wickr
9. 10 DecHop-can Stoves: How to make 5 ultralight bikepacking stoves – BIKEPACKING.com
10. 10 DecA Totally Objective Ranking of Every UK Local Authority Logo | by Robin Wilde | Nov, 2021 | Medium
11. 10 DecAbbie Richards ??? (@tofology) Official TikTok | Watch Abbie Richards ???’s Newest TikTok Videos
12. 10 DecTor Project unveils plans to route device traffic through Tor anonymity network with new VPN-like service | The Daily Swig
13. 10 DecTikTok @butterflyastrophysics explains Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning, usefully.
14. 7 DecIn case you missed it and are looking for something else to be angry about, today: #Mitto #Surveillance
15. 4 DecUnrolled thread re: “Meta’s Biggest Encrypted Messaging Mistake Was Its Promise” opinion-piece in @Wired by @elegant_wallaby
16. 2 DecRe: Bug Bounty Programs, Small Startups, and Unicorns
17. 1 DecA couple of weeks ago Meta/Facebook made the mistake of letting the UK Daily @Telegraph publish — and therefore editorialise & distort — their plans for end-to-end encryption. Today they’ve provided a bit more information, more wisely…

November 2021

1. 29 NovAs someone else has wisely observed, Mel Brooks would make an excellent lead software engineer on a high-visibility project [screencaps]
2. 28 NovAlex Henderson has made edible art
3. 28 NovOne More Time: Facebook Isn’t a State Actor-Atkinson v. Facebook – Technology & Marketing Law Blog
4. 24 NovUnrolled: @jsrailton: @Apple just filed a major lawsuit against NSO Group
5. 24 NovThis will all come out in the “Christmas Lecture” but I’m pretty sure that Information Security suffered a massive missed opportunity with Bell & La Padua in 1976, that has kinda tainted everything ever since
6. 23 NovThe fact that it took a month…to put together the effort to release the papers is a damning statement on how many members of the consortium see their role…to be a gatekeeper to information, rather than providing the public access to information /@techdirt
7. 23 NovThread by @ciaranmartinoxf on end-to-end encryption
8. 23 NovIt’s never going to be popular to tell people that saving innocent little children is *not* the most important big-picture thing for humanity — but it’s true (HT: @elegant_wallaby)
9. 23 NovProf @matthew_d_green on the recent thread by @elegant_wallaby
10. 22 NovThe stupid thing about all the “Meta / Facebook Messenger Delaying End-to-End #Encryption” stories, is that… FB are not delaying it. The article misrepresents what was written. It is fake news, it worked, and we all got pwned. #e2ee #endtoendencryption
11. 21 NovIt’s really disappointing when journalists, activists, academics & pundits dismiss the elderly as incapable users
12. 20 NovQUESTION: What crimes are easier to commit when there is no end-to-end encryption of messenger systems; and what opportunities are lost?
13. 19 NovMy father was born in 1919; he told me that when he was a small boy in the late 1920s/early 1930s, his parents rationed access to the family crystal set radio in case it “disrupted sleep” or he encountered “improper influences”, per newspaper fears
14. 19 NovNur Sajat’s offence was to wear a baju kurung, the traditional long-sleeved outfit worn by Malay women, at a private religious ceremony she held in 2018
15. 19 NovPaul Bernal: ‘Hijacking social media’ suggests there’s a pilot and a desired destination.
16. 18 NovJudge Ian Lawrie said it was “extraordinary” the DNA evidence was still available to prove Shakespeare’s guilt after such a long time | “I didn’t realise you kept DNA banks that long,” he told the court
17. 17 Nov“EU’s Latest Internet Regulatory Madness: Destroying Internet Security With Its Digital Identity Framework” # if you’re not following both @MMasnick & @TechDirt, you should be
18. 17 NovThe Broader Implications of Apple’s Content Scanning Push By Nadim Kobeissi (2021)
19. 16 NovIt’s all a bit “Squirrel Nut Zippers” swing/jazz, but I rather like this #duett mashup of #numnumcat on TikTok
20. 16 Nov#MakeBittorrentGreatAgain: #StarTrekDiscovery abandons Netflix in favour of something called … “Paramount+”
21. 16 NovI’ve spent ages trying to get people to stop misquoting the Paradox of Tolerance, but now someone nicer than me has written a Medium post about the Popper “infographic” problem.
22. 16 NovGood Heavens: @damianhinds: “We need to take a balanced approach given that anonymity can be important for a range of cases – such as pro-democracy movements.”
23. 16 Nov“What if you could only speak online if you had a car number plate”: quick comments on yet another weird Internet surveillance proposal – Neil Brown
24. 14 NovBBC Radio4’s @MoneyBox programme is doing harm to #InformationSecurity & #FraudPrevention, and is providing propaganda for the OnlineSafety bill; with @DamianCollins, @paullewismoney & @kuriouskaf
25. 12 NovAdversarial Detection Avoidance Attacks: Evaluating the robustness of perceptual hashing-based client-side scanning | USENIX
26. 12 NovResearchers show that Apple’s CSAM scanning can be fooled easily
27. 12 NovSo: December 16th, I’ve been invited to speak at the venerable HP Colloquium on #InformationSecurity held at @RoyalHolloway. I’ve just submitted the attached abstract. #NoPressure #EndsAllTheWayDown /cc /thanks @martinralbrecht
28. 11 NovJoel Dommett “STOP. It might be a scam! ” | I wish Twitter & Meta would stop the embedding wars & just let us link content once more, this is useful | cc: @joeldommett
29. 11 NovA Guide to Starting a Podcast: The Basics
30. 11 NovAn alternative to Poppies …
31. 11 Nov“Mutually Assured Surveillance” (MAS) — what will be the National Security playbook towards platform adoption of End-to-End Encryption for the next 5 years?
32. 10 NovThis is a *wonderful* set of TikTok videos which help demonstrate the gulf between the “one size fits all” Internet that some people call for, versus actual diversity of User Experience #UX
33. 10 NovTwo posts on reverse-engineering #PokemonGo
34. 10 NovFun thread of stuff to do/build…
35. 10 NovMichigan poised to ban most state workers’ use of encrypted messaging | I’ve absolutely no problem with an employer (e.g. The Government) banning employees from conducting work over E2EE …
36. 10 NovThe Lawfare Podcast: Susan Landau & Ross Anderson on the Going Dark Debate & the Risks of Client-Side Scanning – Lawfare | #SusanLandau & @rossjanderson on the Apple/CSAM, via @webdevlaw; #MUSTLISTEN
37. 9 NovUsing SOUNDEX / Homophones / Misspellyngs & Scope Expansions to bypass Social Media Censorship and Blocks
38. 9 NovTikTok reveals details of how its coveted algorithm works – Axios
39. 9 NovWhy TikTok made its user so obsessive? The AI Algorithm that got you hooked. | by Catherine Wang | Towards Data Science
40. 9 Nov“Comprehensive Guide to build Recommendation Engine from scratch” — I kinda wish that any pundit writing about (e.g. newsfeed) “algorithms” was required to build one like this, first.
41. 9 Nov#RealWorldCryptography 2022: Accepted Talk Proposals
42. 9 NovDiscussion with @runasand: “One Nation’s Cybermercinaries are another’s Ethical Hackers”, per the @UN
43. 8 NovSomething to Watch (or Listen To) @jonronson introduces his new Podcast “Things Fell Apart” on #BBCR4today #r4today (Nov 8th)
44. 8 NovIf you’re looking for a list of things to be angry or worried about, regarding “Internet Security” vs State attempts to inveigle their way into owning it, @JoeBeOne has you covered…
45. 8 NovRSA Conference 2012 — Cyber War: You’re Doing it Wrong! — Marcus Ranum
46. 8 NovHow to perform Multiselect on an Android device using OpenMTP to access the filesystem
47. 8 NovElections Bill Clause 37: Requirement to include information with electronic material # this is faintly worrying, but…
48. 3 NovSo I am using Google podcasts and for the first time encountered a podcast which somehow disabled the “fast forward” and “skip back” buttons
49. 2 Nov“Now is my service production quality?”
50. 2 NovA quick & clear demonstration of why the general public, pundits, and perhaps politicians on any part of the political spectrum, are not well-qualified to discuss inauthentic online behaviour
51. 1 Nov“I think it’s because us tech reporters live in a bubble” — I love this exchange, and I feel that @WilliamTurton is correct; cc: @daveyalba
52. 1 Nov‘She often speaks without thinking’: Nadine Dorries, our new minister for culture wars | Nadine Dorries | The Guardian
53. 1 NovBlood, rage & history: The world’s first terrorists # This is an interesting article, but it also leaves me wondering what the invention of SSRIs & other treatments have done to politics?

October 2021

1. 31 OctHard Examples: why it’s a really bad idea to strongly enforce against “Single User Multiple Accounts” (#SUMA or #FINSTA) on Instagram, Facebook & other Social Media, via #yungkendee; cc: @FrancesHaugen
2. 30 OctAs Prudes Drive Social Media Takedowns, Museums Embrace… OnlyFans? | Techdirt
3. 30 OctTip: Muscovado Whisky Popcorn is very, very, very good.
4. 30 Oct4x 23g vacuum pack bags of dried Chestnut Mushrooms. Banana for scale.
5. 29 OctThe Best Thing about having both a Vacuum Chamber and a Dehydrator in the Kitchen
6. 29 OctYou know that trope about aliens arriving and being so much quicker and more dangerous than us? What if that’s us? What if we meet intelligent life that experiences time at 1/5th our speed?
7. 29 OctHe has a point, you know…
8. 29 OctThe master’s voice | Radio | The Guardian # how much are we still talking about regulating Radio and TV, as opposed to Social Media?
9. 29 OctPGP FAN [The Call of the Open Sidewalk] # this is fun
10. 29 OctPlease remember that illiberal countries *also* make use of democratically-sanctioned processes: “Interpol Has Been Weaponized By Governments Seeking To Hunt Down Critics And Activists | Techdirt”
11. 29 OctI’m just waiting for the inevitable Senator, MP, Politician, or Apparatchik who assumes that all “meta data” is something to do with the former-Facebook, and wants to drag Zuck into some random data-protection proceedings
12. 29 OctHow To Spot And Critique Censorship Tropes In The Media’s Coverage Of Free Speech Controversies | Popehat
13. 29 OctThree Generations of a Hackneyed Apologia for Censorship Are Enough | Popehat
14. 29 OctIt’s Time to Stop Using the ‘Fire in a Crowded Theater’ Quote – The Atlantic
15. 29 OctWhy Falsely Claiming It’s Illegal To Shout Fire In A Crowded Theater Distorts Any Conversation About Online Speech | Techdirt
16. 28 OctPublic Report – WhatsApp End-to-End Encrypted Backups Security Assessment – NCC Group Research # check out the final results!
17. 28 OctIt’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and @Verge are characterising “Car-Park USB Drops” as means of Whistleblower Entrapment. Because of course that’s a thing. Not.
18. 27 OctQuestion: “What do you mean by ‘standalone end-to-end encryption’ and what does [Frances Haugen] mean?”
19. 27 OctThe Prodigal Techbro – The Conversationalist
20. 27 OctGame over for digital rights? – Hi, I’m Heather Burns
21. 27 OctThe Whistleblower And Encryption: Everyone Has An Angle, And Not Everyone Is A Policy Expert
22. 26 OctOn Public Messages, Private Messages, Multicast, Broadcast, Large Groups, and End-to-End Encryption
23. 26 OctAnyone who feels that memes & social-media are a distraction from the realities of the world, presenting a (relatively) new menace to society, should read this Saki short-story on “Music Hall” in 1914
24. 25 OctReason: Whistleblower Absurdly Attacks Facebook’s Privacy-Protecting Encryption Efforts
25. 25 OctBefore the “Whistleblowers” there were “Goodbye” posts: leaving #Facebook Engineering in 2016 because of #China, User Content, and #EndToEndEncryption
26. 24 OctMy interview with Steven Levy of Wired re: Frances Haugen leaking my Facebook Engineering “Goodbye Post”
27. 14 OctUnrolled: 5Rights Foundation (@5RightsFound) and their report “By what rights should we strip privacy and anonymity from People who are not Children?”
28. 14 OctUnrolled: John Carr cites LinkedIn as a reason that Apple won’t be coerced in China

September 2021

1. 28 SepWhat is the #OnlineSafetyBill actually intended to do?
2. 17 SepHartley Wintney, Hartford Bridge, Rodolphe Trempe & “Caber Feidh”
3. 14 SepRegarding “Child-Safe Places” on the Internet
4. 13 SepExample of why social networks need *more* end-to-end encryption, not less, in order to protect their users:
5. 13 SepSocial networks are famously already geared up to track behaviours & identities across the internet for advertising purposes; the Government should stop trying to force them to snoop on data, and instead let them play to their strengths to detect Abuse.
6. 13 SepEncrypted Communications in the UK are NOT “beyond the rule of law”, they are already dealt with in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000
7. 11 SepUnroll: The Telegraph & Cressida Dick’s article on End-To-End Encryption, is part of a deeper political project
8. 7 SepPropublica Think That Whatsapp Abuse Reports Are A Backdoor
9. 3 SepMatt Green on the NSA Juniper Backdoor revelations & strong-arming

August 2021

1. 27 AugINDEX: Religion, Spirituality, & Religious Kooks on the #Darknet
2. 15 AugAdvice to a Novice Infosec: Work Commitment and Personal Life
3. 7 AugSo @pwnallthethings decided to try calling out @wcathcart and @WhatsApp as “scanning content” like Apple; here’s why that’s incorrect & misleading

July 2021

1. 27 JulA “Duck Test” for End-to-End Secure Messaging
2. 13 JulA long thread discussing End-to-End Encryption with @terrorwatchdog …
3. 11 Jul#Identity, #OnlineSafety & #AgeVerification – notes on “Can facial analysis technology create a child-safe internet?”

June 2021

1. 20 JunThe unexpected difference between “Age Verification” and “AgeVerification”
2. 19 JunTwitterSearch #ageverification
3. 15 JunThis is your occasional reminder that some self-styled “privacy” activists will unwisely demand ALL of 1/ software monoculture 2/ gratuitous interoperability 3/ scraping protection; these are bad ideas singularly, and worse when combined
4. 10 JunThis is an important and awesome thread on #ANOM #TrojanShield by @granick (+ unrolled)
5. 8 Jun#UyghurTribunal Day 4
6. 4 JunBBC Instagram: Pakistani journalists under attack, censorship
7. 4 JunCVE-2021-31166 HTTP Protocol Stack Remote Code Execution Vulnerability I learned RCE at my Grandma’s knee; “Billy,” she said, whisking cake batter as the cat circled awaiting a few fallen drops of sweet goo, “there’s an article in Phrack 49…”

May 2021

1. 30 MayIf you want to see each and every new @torproject Onion site as-and-when it has a HTTPS certificate issued, you want to follow this web page:
2. 30 MayIf you visit the @Wikipedia page on the #DiffieHellman #encryption algorithm, you will see this illustration of how the protocol works; I think we can do better, but I lack the skills and @Wikipedia “clout” to do it.
3. 30 MayMake your cleartext website #UNBLOCKABLE by adding a @torproject Onion address, using #EOTK and a HTTPS certificate from #HARICA
4. 30 MayStop talking about who you think should *not* have #privacy. Instead: talk about who you think really, *really* needs it, and *why* they need it.
5. 19 MayToday in Nerdiness: this doesn’t mean what I reflexively interpreted it to mean.
6. 19 MayOMG this is an emotional rollercoaster: “Our cybersecurity ‘industry best practices’ keep allowing breaches” – but @allengwinn has got at least one thing right about cybersecurity
7. 18 MayA vision of the future: #CyberSumptuary Laws — who will and will not be permitted to use encryption or to have online privacy? #CyberNobility, #CyberPeasantry, #KnightsTale & #HeathLedger (HT @heyfeifer)
8. 13 MayNow: #Canada proposes to regulate popular Twitter accounts
9. 12 MayAlso, an Ocarina
10. 12 MayDesigned a simple espresso dosing cup, printed in a slightly tweaked vase mode. Will update this post tomorrow with review, deets & code.
11. 4 May“Messenger Interoperability” : a largely terrible, illiberal, misconceived idea which — on the other hand — if implemented in the least terrible way, would stop any lingering capability to monitor or filter end-to-end encrypted messengers
12. 4 MayJust trying to take a moment, to snapshot it
13. 4 MayWelcome to the Online Regulation Analogy Collection
14. 1 MayConversations with @bricksilk / David Anderson QC

April 2021

1. 30 AprA Wolf in Child-Protection’s Clothing: “This legislation should not be interpreted as prohibiting or weakening end-to-end encryption” — it’s amazing to see Governments framing future attacks upon end-to-end encryption, by simply denying that they are…
2. 30 AprSo the Prime Minister’s phone number leaked; what could possibly go wrong? (recap thread)
3. 30 AprThis thread on @Fesshole, yet the @NSPCC & @ukhomeoffice are still attempting to frame the lack of end-to-end encryption as a “good” thing:
4. 30 AprHow Phone Scams Work, & How To Avoid Them
5. 30 AprIs it just me, or once you buy a #3DPrinter, you start to carry a vernier caliper with you everywhere you go? #Prusa
6. 29 AprNeed coffee to wake up
7. 29 AprWatch “I Made A Water Computer And It Actually Works” on YouTube – props to @MouldS @standupmaths
8. 29 AprThere’s no way to put this sympathetically, but the most positive thing to reshape our increasingly cynical & toxic attitudes towards online communication in the past 25 years, has been the pandemic lockdown. Example:
9. 28 AprOne for the #socialEngineering #infosec community:
10. 28 AprRepublican Politics and the @OpenTechFund: how populist Trumpian ideology nearly killed internet freedoms in supposed pursuit of “advancing” them
11. 28 AprWhy it will take at least another “generation” – 20..30 years – for online communication to fix itself, if we stop chasing legislative mirages and get started now.
12. 27 AprAs a friend described it: A Wikipedia entry from the year circa 2080; #scifi short, well worth reading in full…
13. 27 AprWe mustn’t let it go unremarked that #SaveAnonymity appears to have successfully hushed the #TrackATroll & #HarveysLaw efforts from @KatiePrice – for the moment. Here’s what we also learned re: #AgeVerification #AgeAssurance & #VoCO
14. 27 AprI have a lot of sympathy for @ByDonkeys, but in the light of their current campaign I have to ask: what WOULD have happened in Northern Ireland if we had closed the borders due to Covid?
15. 26 AprWhen the Soviet Union collapsed, the “.su” domain died not long after; if Ireland reunifies then perhaps “.uk” will go the same way, leading to the restoration of “.gb”?
16. 26 AprZ85m: a proposal for padding odd-sized inputs for the Z85 (Ascii85 / Base85) encoding system, with good space-efficiency
17. 26 AprToday I am 3D printing my first #OpenSCAD design for a Coffee Redistributor
18. 25 AprI sincerely hope that I never lose my sense of humour thusly; it is possible to kick arse AND have fun
19. 21 AprLinux bans University of Minnesota for sending buggy patches in the name of research [Update] – Neowin
20. 21 Apr#Privacy Activists: please never forget that UK Gov’t, Parliamentarians, Quangos & Officials will turn and mock you for your cause if it means that they can continue to surveil the populace via social media. “The Altar of Privacy”, indeed.
21. 19 AprTwitterSearch #endToEndEncryption
22. 16 AprI 3D-printed a small stand for my #Aeropress #coffee filter, so I can more easily rinse filter papers with boiling water
23. 14 AprThis is a constructive and positive BBC video re: addressing body dysmorphia & anorexia in the age of social media, looking at root causes and how “tech” is also part of the solution
24. 1 Apr[stumbles across hagiography of Derrida] [skims] “…oh, okay, so, ‘Derrida’ gets uncritical hero-worship from Postmodernists the same as ‘Rand’ gets from Libertarians.”

March 2021

1. 26 MarFRIDAY FUN: French Data Protection Regulator @CNIL (@CNIL_en) will pursue *customers* of cloud provider @OVHcloud … because the latter had a datacenter fire
2. 26 MarDiscovery: Campaigners for a Child-Safe Internet haven’t really thought much about what happens when a child grows up.
3. 26 MarTHREAD: some people worry about #ArtificialIntelligence in autonomous vehicles, but I worry moreso about this…
4. 25 Mar#WireGuard / #Netgate / #pfSense #Drama / #Wow
5. 23 MarNational Archives release a #Suffragette-themed #ChooseYourOwnAdventure tweet-stream /cc @UkNatArchives
6. 22 MarCensus submitted. Covid vaccination part 1, done. Prepping to talk on #DoHoT again. Met new neighbours.
7. 22 MarThe Privacy Front in the Messaging Wars – The Diff # Excellent little analysis by @ByrneHobart
8. 22 MarVia @baekdal, sounds like Excel and PHP are brothers…
9. 22 MarThis thread on Nixon
10. 21 MarIn Home Of Original Sriracha Sauce, Thais Say Rooster Brand Is Nothing To Crow About : The Salt : NPR
11. 20 MarI love this piece of music, it feel like the inside of my head sometimes # “Fitkin: Log” on YouTube, good headphones/DAC recommended
12. 20 MarSo the Danish health authorities didn’t send out vaccines invites to about 9,000 people because their social security number started with zero … and so when the data was imported eg. 0204563552 instead looked like this: 204563552 (which is an invalid number).
13. 19 MarIf you need something interesting to read on a Friday morning, this thread by @seldo on Leonardo da Vinci should be it
14. 18 MarTIL The British Museum has published a bunch of 3D models of artworks: https://sketchfab.com/britishmuseum
15. 18 MarIn which we present a counter-argument to Baroness Benjamin: Unrolled
16. 18 MarOMG this @IcelandFoods “The Dark Ages” page is amazing. Click every link in the sidebar. They don’t merely throw their past chief executive under a bus, they build a bus depot on top of him.
17. 17 MarThat brief, mildly horrifying moment when you click the LinkedIn tab and think/fear that somehow your Facebook account has reverted to the “Classic” theme
18. 17 MarThoughtful advice on Twitter “sex worker account purges” being actually proportionate and in line with terms of service https://twitter.com/AmberlyPSO/status/1353971284799934466
19. 17 MarCambodia to force all internet traffic through national ‘Internet Gateway’ # I’ll leave this here, mostly because I am expecting the UK Government to suggest similar within about 5 years.
20. 17 MarI wish that more people would break the fourth wall on Trolley Problems this way: https://twitter.com/myrrlyn/status/1364790126933516291
21. 17 MarTHE BEST EVER THREAD ON DEFINITIONS OF ANONYMITY? https://twitter.com/robinberjon/status/1365382981452521476
22. 17 MarSo the Chinese Government finally moved to block @SignalApp; frankly I am surprised that it survived this long.
23. 17 Mar“Why Brits Love the Empire So Much, Despite Not Knowing Much About It” # fascinating, balanced (?) read from Vice on the British Empire: “The only intellectually rigorous thing to say is that it was really intense and complicated”
24. 17 Mar77-Year-Old Man “Paints” Japanese Landscapes on Excel Spreadsheets # Beautiful Spreadsheet Abuse
25. 17 MarWatch “PID demo” on YouTube # As a coffee field I tend to throw the term around with no actual concept of what “PID” means. This is a cool visual explanation.
26. 17 MarBBC News: The coffee start-ups brewing up a storm in lockdown # interesting read on the Coffee Van startups
27. 16 MarBBC: “The inside story of the government’s battle against the virus” # this is worth the time to read, portrait of a PM dynamically striving for inaction
28. 10 MarI bought a new @Prusa3d MINI+ printer in January, after #Brexit; it arrived yesterday. This is what I’ve experienced so far… #prusa #prusa3d
29. 9 MarUnpicking the “making children as safe as they are offline” fallacy – Internet, telecoms, and tech law decoded # this is an exceptional blogpost by @neil_neilzone, highly recommended
30. 9 MarRare meteorite chunk traced by scientists to Gloucestershire driveway | Science | The Guardian # why do they never fall on my driveway?
31. 4 Mar“As a consequence of this directive’s quite broad definition of DNS, every organisation or individual running their own DNS will have to comply by registering their DNS service with ENISA, the EU agency for Cyber Security”
32. 2 MarI don’t know if you like either books or audiobooks, but I am listening to “The Gospel Of The Eels” on Audible, and am enjoying it thoroughly #eels
33. 1 MarWhat do we mean by a “backdoor” in End-To-End Encrypted Messengers or Secure Messengers? #endToEndEncryption #e2ee
34. 1 MarWatch “Why The Government Shouldn’t Break WhatsApp” on YouTube # this #endToEndEncryption explainer by @tomscott is 3 years old, but is just as relevant today

February 2021

1. 25 FebHeather Burns (@WebDevLaw) talks Covid-19 “vaccine passports” on BBC Radio Scotland
2. 22 FebWhat is Jesus for?
3. 20 Feb“I was a tech worker at ByteDance, where I helped develop tools and platforms for content moderation. In other words, I had helped build the system that censored accounts like mine. I was helping to bury myself in China’s ever-expanding cyber grave”
4. 19 FebLooks like there is some technomedievalist anti-abortion lobbying kicking-off in Iowa https://twitter.com/ACLUiowa/status/1362497722108895232
5. 17 FebIf you feel pessimistic about tech, if you feel that “tech” is a social negative, is addictive, a risk, is turning our (or childrens’) brains to mush — this podcast is amazing and may bring you fresh perspective:
6. 17 FebThe @NSA gets some stuff right about #DNSoverHTTPS, but it also is astonishingly “tone deaf” about some aspects of enterprise #security, so also gets some stuff dead wrong… #DoH
7. 17 FebFrom January; alas, poor #Bugtraq…
8. 17 Feb“YouTubers have to declare ads. Why doesn’t anyone else?” # if you care about advertising, or about ensuring transparency from “influencers”, I recommend this video from @tomscott — because why doesn’t anyone else?
9. 17 FebIn the USA some #LawEnforcement officers are playing copyrighted music in an attempt to prevent videos of their behaviour being shared; of course, in the EU, with #CopyrightFilters, this will prevent both #Upload and/or #Streaming of Police abuses. /cc @Senficon
10. 17 Feb#CarringtonEvent — it turns out that a global #Pandemic is not the only kind of once-a-century-ish / eventually-inevitable event that might reshape the world. Take a look at this:
11. 16 FebNo Port 53, Who Dis? A Year of DNS over HTTPS over Tor — final version (I hope) #DNSoverHTTPS #DNS #DoH #Tor #NDSS21 @torproject
12. 16 FebArrow
13. 13 FebTom is not really helping, but it’s funny
14. 12 FebIn Myanmar, China is helping the illegitamite military government to install a great firewall like on the mainland. How can I get around this? # some disturbing comments in this thread
15. 12 FebAnybody who wants to know why there are such vitriolic and abusive threads on social media sometimes, simply needs to watch this video
16. 10 FebIf governments and academics are “concerned” about big platforms, they will be terrified of small, individual, distributed ones which will come in their wake.
17. 10 FebData in transit is data at rest, rules UK Court of Appeal – I can kinda see their point, but also this highlights the challenges (unintended consequences?) of artificial distinctions in data protection legislation #SnoopersCharter
18. 9 FebNEW #DARKWEB THREAT: shipping LSD via fax-machine. For real, it said so on this website. Alert GCHQ to track down “fax” users.
19. 8 FebWANTED: public review of the v2.0 draft of “A Year of DNS over HTTPS over Tor” ; includes absolute and comparative performance measurements, Will be submitted for publication in ~ 1 week.
20. 7 FebOne aspect of post-#Brexit Britain that had eluded me is that we’d see Nigel Farage hawking financial advice on YouTube against a bad greenscreen of London and from the safety of his local gastropub
21. 6 FebWow: the request latency for DNS over HTTPS over Tor does not appear to be as bad as you would expect. In fact, far from it. #DoHoT
22. 6 FebA Resolution To The Bucatini Shortage in America # interesting: if you produce food in the USA and fail to adulterate it with enough vitamins, you end up trashing it as economically unsaleable
23. 5 FebDefinition: #GDPWAAAH – data-privacy form of #CurtainTwitching or #GodwinsLaw, where #GDPR (or similar) is invoked mid-argument in an “Appeal to Force” in an attempt to chill or quell discussion
24. 5 FebThose who do not embrace @torproject are forced to reinvent it. Badly?
25. 5 FebPSA: MENTHOL SOAP
26. 4 FebYellen seeks to ‘understand deeply’ GameStop frenzy as market regulators meet # do you get the feeling that they should have invited a few teenagers along?
27. 4 FebI’ve not watched #TheDig and after seeing this I no longer feel that I ever might be inclined to:
28. 4 FebIf you’re vexed by Android Google Chrome’s new multi-stage “Share” dialogue, you need this Reddit post to switch it off
29. 4 FebWatch “Toyah & Robert Fripp – Caffeinated Mouse Tap Dancing to “Fracture”” on YouTube
30. 3 FebGuardian: “Leak reveals Labour plan to focus on flag and patriotism to win back voters” # what we don’t need is more bloody flag-waving nationalism
31. 3 FebI feel seen.
32. 2 FebExcellent little Reddit thread on UK Coffee subscriptions
33. 1 FebLooks like I have to finish that DNS over HTTPS over Tor paper :-) #DoH #DoHoT #DNSoverHTTPS @torproject
34. 1 FebIntroducing the Ultra EPYC AMD Powered Sun Ultra 24 Workstation # THIS
35. 1 FebNominet faces showdown with British internet industry: Extraordinary vote called to oust CEO, board members • The Register

January 2021

1. 31 JanBBC News: The real people pretending to be ‘Boris bots’ on Facebook # a fine primer on “coordinated inauthentic behaviour”
2. 30 JanNext Up: “RESEARCH: @Spotify knows when you’re shagging, streams Barry White playlist” … within the next month?
3. 30 Jan“BBC News: From #SeaShanty #TikTok to a record deal” – with this, the @WhatsApp policy goof, the rise of @Twitch, @Discord, @SignalApp, @Telegram, & @Reddit moving markets, we should stop calling @Facebook a “monopoly”
4. 29 JanIt’s Friday, and apparently there is a bug in #Libgcrypt; I suspect this means that #Infosec Twitter will spend all day pointlessly pouring scorn upon #PGP & #GnuPG & #GPG. Does anyone have any happy news?
5. 29 Jan#DinnerForBreakfast: a lockdown-inspired foodie way to bootstrap the day
6. 28 JanI’m torn; I understand where @rop_g’s sentiment comes from, but I can’t practically agree regarding @signalapp
7. 28 JanMacrohard Onfire
8. 28 JanThis morning I will mostly be making cheesecake
9. 28 JanThis is an awesome hack: “Spotify Streaming on my 17-year-old iPod Classic” on YouTube
10. 27 JanHow to become a Super #Privacy Activist (Unrolled)
11. 27 JanImportant thread from Alexis Ohanian; the market institutions which used to assume imperfect knowledge and individual action, are facing new challenges from free and open, ad-hoc or decentralised communities
12. 27 Jan[Person] designed and built a water tank quick-access funnel to make it way easier to fill the [espresso machine] reservoir
13. 27 JanReddit: If life is a simulation, and none of it’s real, why care about anything?
14. 27 JanThe attached is a nice explanation of the “sudo” bug, but somehow I feel that it would be better coming from @XKCD
15. 26 JanAnatomy of a British Racist’s Meltdown
16. 26 JanIt’s a shame that this got removed from Reddit, to a certain demographic it’s hilarious…
17. 26 Jan#Coffee: #JamesHoffman video on RDT / Ross Droplet Technique for #Espresso, with bonus idea: spritzing the puck /cc @jimseven
18. 26 JanBy @jon_rauch: “Trump’s presidency can be described in many ways, but one accurate description is as a relentless, continuous war on professionals and professionalism”
19. 26 JanFunniest tweet I’ve seen all day. HT @jimfinnis.
20. 26 Jan“The following Tweets are part of a live conversation detected by an algorithm”
21. 26 JanTwitterSearch “my business” AND “brexit”
22. 26 JanThe Santa Claus Problem: an article by @CaseyNewton, amplifying @greggcorp, regarding “abuse” on @SignalApp and @Moxie’s response to it: this is a very old argument, and here’s the problem with it…
23. 26 Jan“Gritter Bicycle” on YouTube
24. 26 JanAdobe Flash Shutdown Halts Chinese Railroad for Over 16 Hours Before Pirated Copy Restores Ops
25. 25 Jan“In other words, I think we’re trying to fix social media in part because it’s too hard and too scary to fix our political system” – “Fixing disinformation won’t save us” by @EthanZ
26. 24 Jan“This has to be one of the greater absurdities of #Brexit. British companies are being told by the British government that the way to survive is to lay off British workers and transfer their jobs to folk across the Channel”
27. 24 JanGreat thread by Cab Davidson on Cyclist Intimidations
28. 24 JanAward-winning actor Kenneth Branagh is to play Boris Johnson in a new TV drama charting the country’s COVID pandemic through the eyes of the prime minister. # is this really appropriate?
29. 24 JanAt Random: That Time… “When Star Trek predicted a united #Ireland in 2024”
30. 21 JanDaughter posting about mom (Kelly Ann Conway) a few hours ago # this is rough :-(
31. 20 JanBye bye, Donald #AirForceOne #AirForce1
32. 20 JanIf you have a Rap Battle with Puns, is it a Punic War?
33. 20 JanThis deserves memorialisation:
34. 19 JanWhat would your advice be, if you were going to set up a blog to host a civil-society non-techie activist campaign and were worried that [a small totalitarian dictatorship] was going to attack, DDOS, and try to kill it?
35. 19 JanThere are so many *choice* bad takes in this @CircleID piece that it’s hard to know where to begin: apparently the failure of cybersecurity is due to #Section230 causing #CryptoAnarchy; but I did learn something amazing…
36. 18 JanWell, this isn’t triggering at all. #Unicode superscript rendering bugs, by @alokmenghrajani
37. 16 JanDo Nothing With This Part Until You Are Told
38. 16 JanHer Majesty’s Government: it’s okay for someone to spy upon, filter, and report/block your communications, so long as they are an #ArtificialIntelligence #MachineLearning robot
39. 15 JanIf “The #Wellerman” was a swag-bearing representative of a #Whaling contract company, that means the #Whalers were #GigEconomy workers? #SeaShanty
40. 15 JanThis man has a better standing desk than your standing desk:
41. 15 Jan“The Peculiar Origins of the Performance Review, and Other HR Bureaucracy” # this is funny, politically-incorrect business dynamite – and I fear that it’s true:
42. 15 Jan…one idealistic administrator was so unhappy about this that he said he would unlock the Bush page and look after it. After eight hours of dealing with nonsense, he said: “I’m locking it, that’s fine” #contentModerationInANutshell
43. 14 JanSometimes I have to pinch myself and remind myself that Rudy Giuliani served as the 107th Mayor of New York City from 1994 to 2001
44. 14 JanQuote from: Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
45. 14 Jan2016: Dave Grohl. Dude.
46. 14 JanY’all remember when the general public in liberal Twitter used to complain about the risks of (Tinder, etc) geotracking?
47. 14 JanAttempted Coo
48. 14 JanGoogle for: Murray Gell-Mann on Dwarves
49. 14 JanThis:
50. 13 JanI implore that people, @IanDunt included, would not say “Trump’s admirers are wrong to pretend that free speech has no *limits*” and instead say “…wrong to pretend that free speech has no *consequences*”
51. 13 JanGreek History for D&D Adults
52. 13 JanBizarre: this LinkedIn post re: a solar-and-wind-powered traffic sensor, and the people violently mansplaining physics at each other because of it:
53. 13 JanWatch a debate on Online Anonymity in Westminster Hall this afternoon at 1430h London time, led by @DamianHinds. Will be interesting to see whether MPs understand that real anonymity includes “from them”. HT @WebDevLaw
54. 13 JanWow, Github
55. 13 JanEU Temporarily Permits Data Transfers To The UK Pending A Decision On Adequacy # expect what… #Schrems3? #Schrems4? #MadMaxFuryDataTransfers?
56. 12 JanImportant thread by @cyberlegal:
57. 12 JanTip for @OpenSCAD: define “iota=0.001” and begin using the intersection offset symbolically. This makes the code clearer, reduces errors, & means you can mess with the value globally to aid debugging.
58. 12 JanI’m a neophyte to 3D CAD; it’s fun to learn, but @Autodesk #Fusion360 @adskFusion360 feels so hostile to technical learner-hobbyists now that I’ve started learning @OpenSCAD instead /cc @autodesk_uki
59. 12 JanAs a former colleague put it, “what an oddly specific number!” – #Parler was not designed by anybody in the expectation of growth
60. 12 JanNerds in their field of interest are particularly dangerous to argue with:
61. 12 Jan“There was an API on this server, a URL with a number at the end. If you incremented this number, you saw the next…”
62. 12 JanGotta love all these kind-hearted, activists, indulging in (checks notes) doxxing and all the social-network privacy abuses which so many of them have previously criticised trolls, spooks & corporations for doing.
63. 12 JanTrump shunned by Tech. And Banks. And Golf. Not the obvious trifecta of activism.
64. 12 JanThis, folks, is what is known as a “side channel”
65. 12 JanUPDATED: Why have @WhatsApp changed their E2E white paper regarding “at no time…access to private keys”? Answer: Because Facebook plan to offer Bots in the Cloud for WhatsApp “Business” Users
66. 11 JanReuters: Parler sues Amazon over removal from web hosting service, alleges political animus #ReadItForTheSnark
67. 11 JanI’d like to compare the implosion of #Parler and risks of giving lots of sensitive identity data to hacky startups, to the @UKHomeOffice drive for #VoCO #AgeVerification and #AgeAssurance (#PAS1296)
68. 11 JanThe Demicolon
69. 11 Jan“We were notified that Parler was using a free trial of Okta’s product and we have terminated Parler’s access to the Okta platform” … wow. Just, #wow.
70. 11 JanStripe Stops Processing Payments for Trump Campaign Website
71. 10 JanADVICE WANTED: #RaspberryPi 4 maximum USB current-draw, versus: connecting a 2.5″ SATA SSD and thrashing it with writes. There’s just one small question…
72. 10 JanFans of Iain Banks’ “The Crow Road” may enjoy this short video by @tomscott
73. 10 JanYes, Pamela Anderson really is tweeting Nietzsche quotes, filtered through the lens of American politics; and now I’m just half-wondering if it’s about Assange…
74. 10 JanA naked eye comet for Christmas 2021? #CometLeonard via @TheSkyLive
75. 9 JanThis is hilarious #Parler
76. 9 JanCheney told Fox… “The president…could launch a kind of devastating attack the world’s never seen. He doesn’t have to check with anybody. He doesn’t have to call the Congress [or] check with the courts. He has that authority because of the nature of the world we live in.” @Slate in 2011
77. 9 JanExcellent thread, on where Sun failed and AWS succeeded…
78. 9 JanSome Great Tweets…
79. 9 JanIf you’re new to #FreedomOfSpeech debates, here is the classical, non-extremist, non-glib #FreeSpeech way to resolve the #Trump vs: #Twitter issue…
80. 9 JanAaaaaand Apple kicked Parler.
81. 9 Janholy shit, this is snarky, @Microsoft
82. 8 JanMirabile Dictu
83. 8 JanMaking Coffee in a Moka Pot
84. 8 JanXena roasts Hercules
85. 8 JanOver Christmas I finally got to see #Ratatouille in its entirety, and it instantly became my Pixar favourite*; the best part being that the Journalist, at the end, writes the story that is *right*, and not the story that is *easy*
86. 8 JanSeeking Urgent Technical Review: “No Port 53, Who Dis?”; a year of DNS over HTTPS over Tor
87. 8 JanCovid Cycle Taxis
88. 7 Jan“The nation is now in the surreal position of having a president whom Twitter deems too dangerous to send messages, but who still is commander in chief and controls the nuclear codes.”
89. 7 Jan… And there’s more
90. 7 JanThis is one for remembering…
91. 6 JanWhich is worse: 2 weeks of Trump, or 2 weeks of Pence? https://twitter.com/IlhanMN/status/1346934098384793606
92. 6 JanXbox 20 Year Anniversary: How an American Video Game Empire Was Born – Bloomberg # This is very much worth a read, moreso if you’ve ever worked for a hardware company
93. 6 JanWork in Progress: “No Port 53, Who Dis?” – A year of functional and entirely adequate home broadband with considerable freedom from DNS tracking, surveillance, or blocking, by using DNS over HTTPS over Tor
94. 6 JanThis is also the kind of scam that will leverage the legal obligations for #AgeVerification and #AgeAssurance which the #OnlineHarms bill is mooting. #UnintendedConsequences
95. 6 JanUpdate: Making Porridge from Groats; or: How much Water to add to Porridge?
96. 6 JanDinosaur! Digger! Dinosaur! Digger!
97. 6 JanBBC News: Was I wrong to fall for a cheating cat? # I had this issue with one of my cats; he started staying at home a lot more after I put a ‘SPECIAL DIET, PLEASE DON’T FEED ME’ tag on his collar
98. 6 JanCute
99. 5 Jan“The turbine, which is capable of producing as much thrust as the four engines of a Boeing 747 jet” – Umm. I don’t think that’s how it works. Am I wrong?
100. 5 JanCute Maths Tweet
101. 5 JanWhat’s a good title for a short paper on actually living with DNS-over-HTTPS-over-Tor? Context and explanation on my blog:
102. 5 JanI have no practical knowledge of #Manga but I think I may need to read / watch this: The Way of the Househusband
103. 4 JanGood Pun Is Good
104. 4 JanHow You Can Do Something Helpful And Good : How-To Report #SMS Spam & Fraudulent Text Messages in the UK, USA, & Perhaps Other Countries, Too
105. 4 JanRandom Thought: I wonder how many of the people calling for “Edit” buttons on Tweets, are also into Functional Programming?
106. 4 JanYou ever get the feeling that Trump was hoping for more disruption to the US Postal Service than he actually managed to achieve?
107. 4 JanCan’t help but wonder whether someone smart @GCHQ has tooled-up a password cracking farm with triple-word dictionaries
108. 4 JanThis is a fun piece of Science Fiction which treads upon Humanities Fact #MAINCHAR #LongThread #algorithms @hondanhon
109. 4 JanThe thing that vexes me is that @realDonaldTrump has likely done worse, far worse, on tape, repeatedly in the past 4 years; but only with the clock at less than 20 days is it being leaked & called-out by officials. #DonaldTrump #TrumpTapes
110. 3 JanPerspective on Encryption Backdoors and Future Safety
111. 3 JanAbout that home-made Porridge
112. 3 JanBoris in a Nutshell
113. 3 Jan#TrumpTapes #TrumpGate
114. 3 JanMuch as I do not like linking to the Daily Mail, this is Trump acting like Berlusconi, and calling it wrongly:
115. 3 Jan“Suppressing ‘Hate Speech’ on Social Media Drives Users to New Platforms” – #Management vs: #Censorship, and why we must resist the censorious impulse
116. 3 JanDropsafe
117. 3 JanNBC News: Pornhub crackdown by credit card companies cuts off sex workers’ livelihoods / @oliviasolon @ubiquity75
118. 3 JanDO NOT ASSUME A PHYSICAL FORM
119. 3 JanWhy national boundaries around content are a harmful, bad idea, number #1478 in a series… @foodnetwork @foodnetwork_uk
120. 3 JanIf you are reading this blog via RSS, please drop me a comment, below.
121. 3 JanBBC News: Primary schools: Send children to school on Monday, says PM # so , we should expect a U-turn by when? Dinner?
122. 2 JanBBC News: Adobe Flash Player is finally laid to rest
123. 2 JanInspiroBot is on a roll
124. 2 JanDutch bike part dealer shipping to every country in the world except UK because of Brexit VAT change | road.cc
125. 1 JanWow, Apple does this?
126. 1 JanNEWS: must-watch BBC Instagram video on the detention of #ZhangZhan, citizen-journalist & human rights vlogger