Guess who is dressing up tonight‽ And it would not be complete without a Hacklore.org QR code. (Be sure to scan on public WiFi!)

If this article is right, they're rolling back software on the A320s because of the rapid altitude change incident last month, but also intense solar radiation was involved. That is fascinating. I love the rollback with urgency, and I hope they publish a full postmortem on this.

13yo is begging me to go to Microcenter to buy computer parts on Black Friday, so I guess genetics wins again.

Wait. What was that book about again?

I'm finding it a little distressing that AI video is coming of age right in sync with massive robotics advances, so I can't actually tell how scary the robots are right now, at least not from watching videos online.

Avoiding public WiFi, QR codes, or public USB chargers doesn’t prevent you from being hacked. Happy to sign onto this open letter alongside 80+ cybersecurity veterans urging a shift from folklore to guidance that actually helps people avoid the most common attacks. www.hacklore.org

Because it always feels dangerous *not* to follow security advice, the outdated and sometimes never justified security advice piles up. Don't get bogged down by the hacklore. hacklore.org (Thanks to the always awesome @boblord.bsky.social for this initiative)

It seems pretty clear to me that we're going to need something like c2pa to authenticate the chain of editing of real photos / videos. 10 minutes of playing with Nano Banana Pro and just, wow. Also, Google, can we go back to descriptive product names like "Google Photos" and "Google Docs"?

Trying to think of something serious to say about the “cryptographers lose the key for the cryptographer election” story and, mostly, hey: I just love that cryptographers are actually using the weird cryptography! www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/w...

The International Association for Cryptologic Research has used heliosvoting.org – my online voting system – for a number of years. This year, a trustee lost their secret key. The election has to be re-run. Below, a few thoughts that didn't fit in the NYT piece. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/w...

One of the most interesting recent privacy developments is the deployment of big two-hop IP blinding VPNs by companies like Apple and Google. These systems are designed to ensure that even those companies can’t link web requests to IP addresses.

Sometimes, voter fraud does occur. It's rare, inconsequential, and harshly punished. www.bangordailynews.com/2025/11/20/b...

"Adversarial Poetry". Today, I know just from that title where this paper is going. Five years ago, I would have had no clue. What a weird world we live in. arxiv.org/html/2511.15...

Look if we're gonna slap AI on everything, could we do simple things like *really* great automatic slideshows in Google Photos? That take into account where people's faces are? That upscale/downscale automatically? Come on!

@voting.works is also helping the State of Pennsylvania run a post-election audit. Check out their fantastic new Auditing status page: www.pa.gov/agencies/vot...

@voting.works is proud to be helping Georgia audit their elections. Georgia has been one of the states on the forefront of rigorous post-election audits, a practice I hope every state adopts in the next few years.

#hugops to the @cloudflare.social team.

I will never tire of this awesomeness.

A shout-out to mail-tester.com, a fantastically useful tool to debug SPF/DKIM records for reliably sending out emails.

The new Turing test is to ask an AI Chat bot to write you a joke about a particular theme. OMG they're all soooo bad. Like an uncanny valley of humor where you can kind of see why the AI finds it funny, but it's just not.

As much as it would be so convenient to vote on our phones, it's just not a safe thing to do. That said, we also need more transparency in voting systems, in particular open-source software. So kudos to this team for open-sourcing their voting system. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/13/u...

Empathy is a simple but profound mechanism for building social cohesion, says @claireadida.bsky.social of @stanfordcddrl.bsky.social. Using quantitative and field methods, Adida studies what creates or dissolves cohesion, and how that can be used to inform better policymaking.

Happy Election Day! More than 6 years of powering elections across America with @voting.works, it's just as exciting and inspiring as the first time.

Genius. This reminds me of the time I guessed my French high school's minitel password (look it up) on the first try. It was the name of the school.

Even as I am fairly optimistic about many uses of AI, I'm increasingly uncomfortable with the security ramifications of the rapid expansion of agents + public web content + API access to private content. I'm looking at you, new @github.com Slack app.

Ummm.

It's 2025, and we're still fully dependent on us-east-1 eh? I know, it's super hard to change these dependencies. But also, ouch.

mmmhmmmm yes, exactly this. Also, one of my better oldies: benlog.com/2008/06/19/d...

De-identification is hard.

My talk – "Building a Voting Machine Everyone Can Trust" – from USENIX Enigma is now up. www.usenix.org/conference/u... Thanks to USENIX Open Access!

This is amazing research by Nadia Heninger and her co-authors Wenyi Morty Zhang, Annie Dai, Keegan Ryan, Dave Levin and Aaron Schulman. TL;DR a huge number of satellite links over our heads are totally unencrypted. satcom.sysnet.ucsd.edu

Yesterday, news broke that Dominion Voting Systems was sold to a new company, Liberty Vote. Dominion, the second-largest voting systems vendor in the US that currently tabulates 1 in 5 American votes, is no more. www.voting.works/news/public-...

In the digital age, we all need and deserve truly private communication. ChatControl is a disaster of a legislative proposal. Glad to see it stopped for now, and we gotta keep fighting for it.

Nothing like waiting endlessly for a wire transfer to land in 2025.

This is what Depeche Mode warned us about.

I've been playing pickleball. There's this pickup culture where you show up to open play and rotate playing doubles with different people. The sport and the culture are fascinating. Playing strong and hard isn't necessarily the winning move. Tennis skills translate somewhat but very imperfectly.

If you missed yesterday's great session of @caltechlcssp.bsky.social Co-Director @rmichaelalvarez.bsky.social's #ElectionScienceOfficeHours webinar-part of the #CaltechElectionIntegrity project-featuring @voting.works' @benadida.com, watch on YouTube here: youtu.be/MJkiWDh7igk?...

This afternoon, 2pm eastern. Should be fun. Audience questions included.

This week's Election Science Office Hours! @benadida.com will join me to talk about election technology, voting system security, and cryptography in elections! I'll be a great conversation, join us live at 11am Pacific on Wednesday!

Lol, so apparently downtime on iOS devices can be defeated by kids changing the system clock? Seriously Apple? Unfortunately for me, my kids inherited my hacker brain. Unfortunately for them, their father still notices things like bad timestamps on Signal messages.

Looking forward to chatting with my old colleague @rmichaelalvarez.bsky.social about all things voting technology next week.

Huntington's Disease featured prominently in my medical genetics class, one of my favorite ever in grad school. Famously known to be devastating in middle age, without treatment options. Except now, in 2025, we have treatment options that work wonders. Medical science is incredible.

It's important to put these conspiracy theories, like other voting conspiracy theories before it, to bed. Good article.

Look I'm biased, but this NYT summary of Robert Redford in Sneakers feels way off the mark.

One major reason -- maybe the most important reason -- for paper ballots and air-gapped tabulators is resilience.

Holy cow, this talk has me in tears. There are so many people doing so many good things for the world. www.ted.com/talks/david_...

I have spent 18 years working with Cindy Cohn at EFF, defending digital rights. There is no one I would rather fight beside and I cannot imagine this place without her. www.wired.com/story/eff-ci...

Cindy has fought the hard bottles for digital rights – which, really, just means rights. Those are going to be some big shoes to fill. Thank you for everything you've done for the world, Cindy.

This should be very interesting.

Vote-by-mail fraud does occasionally happen. It's very rare, the safeguards are in place to catch it (at least for federal elections), and the punishment is stiff. orangecountyda.org/press/costa-...