Happy winter solstice (or happy summer solstice to those of you in the southern hemisphere).

Tis the season

happy birthday to Keith Richards, who proves that life doesn't have to be boring.

Are these the roaring twenties? Oh wait no - I was just listening to Rhapsody in Blue, which is from the previous era of the twenties.

my wife found this flashlight in a drawer. It still works. 🧐

there was a period in my life when I weighed the choice between going to Vietnam and going to prison. Prison was the clear choice, but I got a high lottery number. I hope you never have to face that choice.

I've been going over the responses to the survey from IACR members about publishing and conferences, and I keep coming back to the fact that I think there should be _fewer_ conferences and _more_ journals. This coupling of talks to papers is not healthy.

Every day I wake up and get reminded that you never know what will show up in your email.

the amount of SMS spam that I get increases every year. at some point I will find out how big a list of blocked numbers android will support.

Dear 47.246.164.0/24. Fuck you very much.

It's that time of year again. I'm in group W, creating a nuisance. They don't like my kind.

My new design for an IACR logo.

For some of us old people, we look at the calendar and feel sad today. 😢

The attacks have now spread to cic.iacr.org. It reminds me of the old joke about the hiker who starts putting on his track shoes when a bear appears.

I really hope that the last words he hears whispered into his ear are "Quiet piggy".

Is this a record?

every company in 2025

I have come to the conclusion that the data quality in #OpenAlex is generally pretty bad. It shows me as having an affiliation at Weizmann Institute of Science, but I've never even been to Israel. Among my 50 or so coauthors, I don't think I've ever had a coauthor who had an affiliation there. 🤡

eprint.iacr.org is receiving a flood of http requests from a subnet in Singapore that apparently serves VPNs. I guess I'll have to start using fail2ban on https. 🤕 The bot situation is getting out of hand.

While I can understand how some reviewers in cryptography research are frustrated with the process, I cannot imagine how bad it is in machine learning. ncfrey.substack.com/p/publishing...

Little known fact: I used to live 2 miles from the house where Walter White lived in Breaking Bad. 😜

Trump Says Epstein Emails Only Prove He One Of The Most Emailed-About Men In History https://theonion.com/trump-says-epstein-emails-only-prove-he-one-of-the-most-emailed-about-men-in-history/

The US should start issuing wooden nickels to acknowledge inflation.

seems like air traffic controllers should just walk out and bring all air travel to a halt. That might put some pressure on.

You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. - Bob Dylan, in another complicated time

my wife and I own cars that are 20 and 16 years old. I like the fact that they do not receive software updates.

Vibe Coding: a technology that enables one developer to create enough technical debt to keep 10 developers employed for 10 years.

I should keep mentioning this to the IACR board.

it's true. I wasn't at my desk yesterday. Monterey California, 72 degrees.

Stitching Us All Together, 2014, glass sculpture by Canadian artist Carol Milne #womensart

I can’t qWHITE figure out what’s wrong here.

I asked gemini to provide some pros and cons for different document formats like LaTeX, docx, markdown, and HTML. It gave a reasonable answer, though I didn't learn anything new from it. It offered to export the answer as a spreadsheet. Holy shitbrains it really does NOT understand the question.

As we end #OpenAccessWeek I have a meeting next week to review whether IACR should go completely open access for conference proceedings. I think the bigger problem for IACR is how to conduct peer review. On that subject: openreview.net/pdf?id=VObyC...

Katy Perry Releases New Single About Superiority Of Canadian Manufacturing

I was amused in reading the comments from the IACR survey that someone used the term "out house publishing" when I think they meant "out sourced publishing". Similar meaning, don't you think?

IEEE S&P has removed the decision types of "major revision" and "minor revision". Instead they have introduced the concept of "accept with reservations", in which there is a public metareview published with the paper. I think I like this idea.

I'm surprised that internetofcr.app is not registered.

Luckily the IACR mail server is in US-EAST-2 (Ohio) instead of US-EAST-1 (Virginia). 🫣

How dominant is LaTeX in computer science? Very. It turns out that among the 1895 papers uploaded to eprint.iacr.org this year, it looks like 3 were produced from typst, 10 were produced from Microsoft Word, and three of indeterminate origin. The rest were various flavors of LaTeX.

It's a little hard to tell from this photo, but that door opens straight out to a cliff. There is no ledge at all. Another peculiar sight in Santa Cruz, CA.

I sometimes miss New Mexico.

CA Voters - mark YES on your ballot, then return it by mail, dropbox or at a polling place. You can also vote in person. Click below to find a polling place or ballot drop off location. If you're not registered, you can do it on the day you vote! #Voterizer social.fieldteam6.org/s/DACpQEHI

There must be some unstated law that mail servers and smoke alarms are only allowed to fail between midnight and 5am.

If you do standards work, you should not waste your time with ISO because they charge for access to their standards. As a result I almost never implement them. Charging for standards is just ridiculous, and you should not agree to work on them unless the final result becomes public.

dear @financialtimes.com Fuck you very much for your dark pattern website.

History has many painful lessons.

If you have kids whom you love and cheris, I hope your home doesn't look like this.

I saw a funny video where a guy said "if the US wants to sell citizenship for $5M, then can I sell my citizenship and get the fuck out of here?" That raises an interesting point in economics - if there was a free market for people to trade their citizenship, what value would be placed on them?