Zen and the Art of Espresso Machine Maintenance

Moving from old-school HTML to Next.js on Netlify was intimidating; I felt dead in the water. I recently took the time to better understand it, and it was completely worth it. The modern stack is very cool, and my website is slowly coming back to life.

(The paper is supposed to be published in Yale JoLT shortly. My co-author, Joel Reardon, gave a version of the talk on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZ_1...)

I presented a paper at PLSC in 2024 showing how companies continue to tell courts and the public that hashed email addresses are an “anonymous identifier.” A few staff came to the talk, so they saw fit to update this last year: www.ftc.gov/policy/advoc...

While at the FTC, @edfelten.bsky.social wrote this in 2012: www.ftc.gov/policy/advoc...

Hashing isn’t a magic incantation that anonymizes your data.

It is so easy to spin up a custom AI-built web app now, especially one tailored to the needs of a very small set of users (me, my family, my small business). But ummm, security. My kingdom for @tailscale.com native hosting. Maybe @fly.io or @render.com could do this?

numbers stations are so weird and neat

LLMs beat coding benchmarks yet lose badly at video games; the reason why is not what most AI practitioners expect.

Oh neat, for more complex setups, chezmoi is a templating engine that handles this. It takes a compiled approach, which is a bit different from my choice of live, git-updated symlinked .dotfiles: www.chezmoi.io

I expanded on the technical details here and the advantages of versioning your .dotfiles in a longer post on LinkedIn. If you want to dig into the full breakdown: www.linkedin.com/posts/joseph...

Returning from aid trip to Cuba, Americans have phones seized at US airport | The Verge www.theverge.com/policy/90228...

Lawmakers in Europe have voted against allowing tech companies to continue to scan for CSAM. therecord.media/eu-parliamen...

Yes, Iranian group Handala hacked Kash Patel's (older, personal) email—not the FBI, as they claimed. This week they also put a $50M bounty on Trump and "doxed" Lockheed Martin staff. (We checked: mostly non-working phone numbers) www.wired.com/story/irania... Chaotic, dangerous but...kind of silly.

Jacob Mchangama and I have a piece in the WSJ about the dangers of regulating online speech. www.wsj.com/politics/soc...

“The blind worship of the good old days, and ways, is the funeral service of civilization.” - A. H. Johnson describing Whitehead’s views in “Whitehead and the Modern World” (1950)

Today I’m grateful for 27 years of support from the National Science Foundation, funding my education, research, and service to the world. All my grants are now terminated or non-renewed, as I believe too strongly in the American dream of equal opportunity. Until we meet again, federal funding.

Finally built a truly unified, cross-platform dotfiles architecture bridging my macOS and ChromeOS machines. Instead of juggling separate Git branches for different OSes, everything is driven by OS-aware blocks in a single, version-controlled repository. 1/4

If you don't allow users to paste credit card numbers into your fucking e-commerce site, you don't want our money and you're a sociopathic designer. JFC.

Finally built a truly unified, cross-platform dotfiles architecture bridging my macOS and ChromeOS machines. Instead of juggling separate Git branches for different OSes, everything is driven by OS-aware blocks in a single, version-controlled repository. 1/4

Everyone Cheering The Social Media Addiction Verdicts Against Meta Should Understand What They’re Actually Cheering For www.techdirt.com/2026/03/26/e...

I will be presenting "Our Vulnerable Networks" at #Sikkerhetsfestivalen 2026, talking BGP & RPKI history, status & "how to get it done". Thanks to Internet.nl & RIPE.net for their tools & knowledge!

The Jagged, Monstrous Function That Broke Calculus | Quanta Magazine www.quantamagazine.org/the-jagged-m...

Spotify's dumb Connect protocol is way too handsy and assertive; just deny that bastard local network access to force AirPlay. I hate it

This is not good.

Anthropic just won its preliminary injunction against the Trump admin. Judge writes that, “Nothing in the governing statute supports the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the U.S. for expressing disagreement with the government.”

😓 hk.usconsulate.gov/security-ale...

The AI economy looks...really precarious. So @matteowong.bsky.social & I did a bunch of reporting to try to figure out what happens when a potential bubble collides with a war in Iran and a potential resource shortage. The answer is...arguably the most dire stuff i've heard from smart ppl in a while

In Kyrgyzstan, over 90% of the land is covered by mountains. Climate change is causing permafrost to melt and creating dangerous new glacial lakes. Traditional monitoring meant scientists manually checking sensors and sharing data days later. 1/6

"US Supreme Court Unanimously Defends Internet Access for Millions" by @johnperrino.com @internetsociety.bsky.social www.internetsociety.org/blog/2026/03...

These may not be the nine greatest experts on the Internet, but the Supreme Court made the right decision to protect people's online access in Cox v. Sony today.

ChromeOS = finally, the year of desktop Linux I've always wanted

In lay terms, this team hacked the update system of the chips running the Internet to track their secrets. We can finally automate the discovery of severe hardware flaws that were previously invisible. www.ndss-symposium.org/ndss-paper/f... 3/3

Starting April 24, GitHub Copilot will use your interaction data for training by default. Be sure to manually opt-out in your settings if you'd rather not. github.blog/news-insight...

Cox v. Sony summary: The Thomas decision basically says there are two ways for there to be secondary liability in copyright and neither apply. Sotomayor concurrence disagrees, says there's more ways, like aiding/abetting liability. BUT she says that requires intent, which was absent here. Cox wins.

"Trans People are Facing a 'Dual State' in Trump's America" Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net interviewed by Brooke Gladstone @brookegladstone.bsky.social On the Media | WNYC Studios www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm...

Lenzen et al. reverse-engineer the CPUs powering the Internet and their paper is a wild ride. They took an Intel chip in "Red-unlocked" engineering mode and hijacked the microcode update interface to inject custom hooks into its micro-operations. What? Yes. 1/3

While I was reading this I thought, "People, you really want Anna doing your cryptography."

Whoever invented the rice cooker should get a Nobel prize

Having a complex passcode and upgrading to a new iOS is a harrowing experience

There are simply no words for how awesome this is for EFF and for Nicky! "Nicole Ozer Named as Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Executive Director" www.eff.org/press/releas...

Africa’s $2 billion bet on controversial Chinese surveillance tech - Rest of World restofworld.org/2026/africa-...

I've managed to break Anker email support

New preprint by Anna Lysyanskaya and Eileen Nolan on SMA2RT. Highly relevant for the anonymous token space. It bridges ATPMs and anonymous credentials, solving the communication complexity bottleneck for privacy-preserving rate-limited web services.

The NotebookLM podcast AI just excitedly exclaimed, "that's math magic!" while discussing homomorphic Pedersen commitments, and I actually lol'd on my walk. Couldn't help it.

josephlhall/check_tor: A zsh utility to test domain reachability and WAF status via a local Tor SOCKS proxy. github.com/josephlhall/...

Holy shit. TIL magic-wormhole: magic-wormhole.readthedocs.io

Duolingo needs a setting that says: "I am actively trying to break my streak to escape this gamified ridiculousness. Please stop shaking down my friends and family for gems and streak freezes."

SMA²RT : Secret-Metadata Attribute-based Anonymous Rate-limited Tokens (Anna Lysyanskaya, Eileen Nolan) ia.cr/2026/518

Why are people adopting AI to write? The last few weeks I have witnessed a number of interesting discussions breaking out on social media. A couple of weeks ago a US-based academic admitted using AI in some of his writing, which prompted an angry response from a prominent AI researcher. I'm not…