📢 Come be my colleague: the School of Computer Science at 🇦🇺 #USyd is hiring! Multiple tenure-track-equivalent positions across the board (including theory!), but with a specific focus on Cybersecurity and Trustworthy Digital Systems, and ML/AI. ⏰ Dec 1 usyd.wd105.myworkdayjobs.com/en-GB/USYD_E...

Japan once again wins the IG Nobel Prize, this year for research showing that painting a cow to look like a zebra decreases bug bites by close to 50% www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/artic...

a bug in this may have already been found

New campus, who dis?

Academic authors, here's a peek into the black box of journal publishing from an journal editor if you can bear it:

Your favourite remote castle just started skeeting. bsky.app/profile/dags...

This cartoon is so on the money and could as easily be about OpenAI as about any AI powered startup www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Anyone who has been an IACR member in 2023-2026 should have received a link to respond to a survey about conferences and publishing. So far over 500 people have responded, but it will remain open for responses until Sept 12, 2025. I would also encourage people to use their forum invitations.

USENIX chair report: "six individuals appear as co-authors on 20 or more submissions, with two authors appearing on 36 and 39 submissions respectively. At such volume, it becomes difficult not to question the nature and depth of the contributions" www.usenix.org/sites/defaul...

In a new digital twist to environmental individualisation of responsibility, the UK government is now advising people to “[d]elete old emails and pictures” in data centres to help with the current drought. www.gov.uk/government/n...

Springer publishes a P ≠ NP "proof" and Eric Allender has words to say. blog.computationalco...

A milestone for open AI: ETH Zurich and EPFL will release a fully open multilingual language model, trained on CSCS’s “Alps” supercomputer. Built for the public good, this model promotes transparency, inclusion, and innovation. Read more:

More MP-SPDZ users, Dagstuhl edition

@researchorgs.bsky.social We started gathering ROR for affiliations in 2022, and it now provides a way to see where research in cryptology is being done. eprint.iacr.org/geo/index.html As with all data collection, there are occasional errors.

German SQL found in the first LNCS volume in the Dagstuhl library

German SQL found in the first LNCS volume in the Dagstuhl library

Replication Crisis xkcd.com/3117/

Last Friday Scott Aaronson gave a plenary talk at STOC titled "The Status of Quantum Speedups". acm-stoc.org/stoc2025/key... Here are his slides: www.scottaaronson.com/talks/status...

Uploaded (replaced) a paper to arXiv today for the first time in a while.. and discovered some new features! 🤩 ✅ You can choose your compiler (incl. pdflatex) ✅ You can select the top-level TeX file ✅ There is a new "Review Files" stages that detects which files are unused! 🥰 and more: ... 1/3

An out-of-schedule update to my quantum landscape chart: sam-jaques.appspot.com/quantum_land..., prompted by @craiggidney.bsky.social 's new paper: arxiv.org/abs/2505.15917. A startling jump (20x) in how easy quantum factoring can be! Also: much improved web design!

Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences implemented OT on FPGAs and made MASCOT up to 600 times faster: ojs.ub.rub.de/index.php/TC...

The next time you need an example of a real world side channel try this wild article that explains how the absence of any pizza joints in the Pentagon complex creates a one-bit information leak www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

Good Science xkcd.com/3101/

This is the inevitable path of the APC model. For-profit and values-misaligned publishers are bad for science and society. So what can you do? Here are 4 things.

Apple announces that TLS client connections in version 26+ will be using hybrid PQ X25519MLKEM768 by default support.apple.com/en-us/122756

periodic reminder about: github.com/veorq/awesom..., PRs and Issues are welcome

Powered by MP-SPDZ

We are reviewing the current state of scientific publishing, and we want to hear from researchers on their perceptions of publishing in the current context and how it might develop in future. Complete our short survey now:

“Anonymous GitHub” — I just discovered this today. What a great idea!! (Apparently I am the 46,631ˢᵗ to find it.) Provides an anonymized portal to your GitHub respiratory suitable for submission to double-blind review for research conference papers or journal articles. anonymous.4open.science

Eamonn and I received a Zama Cryptanalysis Grant to help with the lattice estimator github.com/malb/lattice.... We hope to hire interns to work on the estimator over two periods over the next 18 months. Zama are still taking applications for this grant, see here: www.zama.ai/post/announc...

The latest version of MP-SPDZ adds two protocols with function-dependent protocols. Also in the bag is functionality that helps finding papers and code locations relevant to the computation at hand. github.com/data61/MP-SP...

This is such an excellent piece on navigating ADHD in science by @plantnerd.bsky.social for @nature.com . Thank you so much!! Also, happy I could contribute as an interviewee. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

www.linkedin.com/posts/mfesgi... PhD and postdoc opportunities in post quantum cryptography at Monash University. Esgin is an amazing researcher. Do apply if you are interested.

My latest paper investigates the relationship between semi-honest 3PC with replicated secret sharing and similar schemes with function-dependent preprocessing, and I conclude that the additional cost is unlikely to justify the benefits of the latter.

A new use of the asterisk in the paper author list for credit assignment

Incidentally, if your Signal is now flooded with work chats, you can organize chats into folders Settings->Chats->Chat Folders. Looks like its Android only for now.

Honoured to be invited as a keynote speaker at the workshop on Systems for MPC to share the latest progress on MP-SPDZ: www.bu.edu/riscs/events...

Policy makers: Let's count the number of publications to assess research quality! Scientific community: OK! ... Total annual scientific publications rose from 2 million (2010) to 3.3 million (2022).

I am first-gen (and I think fair to say reasonably successful in my field), and I think one thing that helped a lot was having supervisors, both in undergrad and PhD, who were also first-gen. Still it was a mountain of bullshit, and it still is, but if it helps anyone like me: It gets easier.

Happy our paper on the real-world security of MPC implementations is finally out! This project goes back to Frederik & Alexander's masters thesis from 2 years ago @csaudk.bsky.social, it's not easy work but hope to see more of this type of research in future.

Our paper on attacking concurrent MPC implementations is finally on eprint 🎉 (And @schollster.bsky.social will present it at S&P 2025!) A summary 🧵

Shout-out to my colleagues for the responsible disclosure of security issues in MP-SPDZ. They have been fixed in 2023.

What stuck with me: “One difference with America is that parties don’t have to mobilize the vote: The state gets the vote out for them. There’s not the same benefit in highlighting these sorts of issues around sexuality, gender, religion, which is seen in America. Your base is going to vote anyway.”

Chatbot therapist helping me work through abandonment issues because my cat bonded to the AI vacuum & now ignores me.

Here's bit of an explainer I was involved in on how the NEM works, and the energy transition unfolding within it. (..including why it's a tough gig for 'baseload' technologies .. like nuclear) 🔌💡 www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04...

"The Australian Academy of Science is excited to announce the establishment of a Global Talent Attraction Program [...] to rapidly recruit to Australia leading US scientists and Australians returning home." 🇦🇺 www.science.org.au/news-and-eve...

New from 404 Media: an AI startup offers to call your parents for you if you don't have time (or can't be bothered). I tested it out. My mum said: “I would feel terrible and that they are not bothered about phoning me themselves.” www.404media.co/i-tested-the...

It took a little while, but GitHub now uses the coveted "k" to display the number of stars on MP-SPDZ. github.com/data61/MP-SPDZ