The worst part of preparing a tenure portfolio is realizing you actually have to create that 'permanent record' your elementary school teachers threatened you with. And it has pesky formatting requirements.

Interesting anecdote from a friend: quantum computing startups are now raising funds by pitching their ability to break cryptocurrency encryption (n=1 plus VC gossip, but still). Apparently other applications like quantum chemistry don't offer big enough ROI for investors.

Some "AI" on my phone is reading inbound Signal messages. I left predictive typing on, trading a little of my privacy for convenience. Yet something is giving responses using what others wrote in chats with disappearing messages, persisting or sharing them who knows where. Not a good default, Google

We've crossed a threshold. A paid subscription used to be the ultimate proof of humanity online, now its not enough to allow a single link click inside the NYT cooking app. The next few years are going to be an interesting race to extract more and more invasive proofs of humanity.

The 2010s internet: Let's mock dissertation-length arguments about weird-ass fanfic tags. The 2025 internet: 'dubcon' is an ancillary part of the financial privacy discourse. The past was a better place.

Making LLM chats private is a good idea. We've accepted too much data harvesting already—this moment lets us reset the norm around who controls our data online. But let's go further: put LLM chats in private compute, so you get technical guarantees you control your data. x.com/sama/status/...

Classic Google: an A/B test (a rare overt one) Classic Google AI: it doesn't actually work (you can't submit)

Friend messaged me: Signal's going mainstream. They've got 150+ active chats. Work life invaded their friend space. Its not just Signal being in the news: people don't trust other apps. Too many places to half-ass privacy: be it backups, ads, or an AI reading over your shoulder.

It's the year 2030. AIs write all our sitcoms now, but they're just endless FRIENDS clones because the underpaid content moderators in offshore offices learned that's the pinnacle of American comedy.

Google announced they will support privacy preserving age verification via zero-knowledge proofs. You prove you have a signed digital copy of a drivers license and it says you are over 18 without revealing anything about you (name, birthdate, etc) blog.google/products/goo...

WhatsApps "advanced protection" blog post is double speak. Instead of end-to-end encryption, you get downgraded to end-to-AI encryption. But its phrased as a feature: you can opt out of "others" uploading data, as if WhatsApp has nothing to do with it. blog.whatsapp.com/introducing-...

The UK is fighting the last war by trying to backdoor encrypted messaging worldwide. The US tried the same trick in the Obama and Bill Barr DoJs. Thankfully, saner minds prevailed. Now the FBI recommends encrypted messaging because it makes us safer from nation state hacking.

@meredithmeredith.bsky.social points out the real story with Apple disabling encrypted backup (and therefore effectively iMessage encryption) in the UK. The UK is demanding a global backdoor for all data, including Americans. Apple is resisting as best they can.

Easily overlooked threat: The UK is demanding Apple expose your iCloud data, no matter where you live. Apple is fighting for limits, but the demand is world-wide access, not just for UK persons. This is terrible for US sovereignty and national security. wapo.st/4k2AF5Z

Trump and Apple better tell the UK to go to hell with its demand to access Americans’ private, encrypted texts and files. Trump and American tech companies letting foreign governments secretly spy on Americans would be an unmitigated privacy and national security disaster.

"Lets make the AI surveillance state", is a really odd take after the 2024 presidential election. You're worried about the deep state and your solution is to hand them more powerful AI tools? www.businessinsider.com/larry-elliso...

Tell me you're in a predatory cryptocurrency polycule without telling me you're a predatory cryptocurrency polycule....

Welcome to the 2000s: twitter isn't a brand and 32 bit keys are the new security weakness.

Two sentence horror: Twitter died as a public commons for expert discussion. As bsky turned into a stream of consciousness, and threads into text-o-gram, we were forced to consider desperate alternatives like .... LinkedIn.

When designing computers or, by proxy, society, security is mostly unnecessary. But when, e.g., your 18-year-old needs an abortion or Russian tanks are coming, encryption is essential. Secparam is a pun. A latex macro, short for security parameter, in narrowly technical papers which ignore all this.