Feeling extremely honoured and grateful to be selected by @elpais.com as one of the 10 most influential thinkers in the world on tech, along with giants like @meredithmeredith.bsky.social and @dacemoglumit.bsky.social. Thanks so much for the shout-out. 🙏🙏🙏 #AIEthics elpais.com/ideas/2025-1...

Interested in this topic? Come join us for a @financialtimes.com Global Boardroom this coming Thursday Dec 11th to discuss this very topic, with Anne Neuberger, @meredithmeredith.bsky.social, moderated by Kieran Smith globalboardroom.ft.com/agenda/sessi...

computer culture

THANK YOU, READERS'!

Ingrid and I made this years ago, when it was easier to have fun around computation, and I still love it

UNIX, the first usability abstraction layer

I spoke to @mjgault.bsky.social as to why it was concerning to the US DOE take the position of using generative AI for safety cases and licensing at the IAEA symposium, while also advocating for eliminating human intervention during normal nuclear operations.

PSA: If anyone is looking for a smart, solid, experienced tech policy analyst w a global perspective and UK/EU-specialization, @heatherburnstech.bsky.social is great! Over the past years she's been an invaluable help at Signal, and across the ecosystem more broadly.

You know what to do baby ❤️

Missed Signal’s President @meredithmeredith.bsky.social on #Buitenhof? About #Signal, the power of Big Tech, and why privacy matters. Watch it back here🍿: www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTD5... Not using Signal yet? Try it out for free: signal.org/install #signalapp #signalmessenger #privacy #whatsapp

For our Dutch followers and people with access to Dutch TV 🇳🇱 Tomorrow Signal's president @meredithmeredith.bsky.social in #Buitenhof (pronounce as: "BOW-tun-hoff" but we'll count "TV" as correct) It's about #signal #privacy & #bigtech 📺Nov 30, 12:10 CET Channel: NPO1 www.vpro.nl/buitenhof/ar...

Looking for a convivial convo w me & Michael Moynihan covering everything from Snowden to Babbage to why Michael actually cares about privacy to our impoverished def of "AI" and the need to expand it? 👉 7pm EDT tonight, Nov 13th, streaming + archived thereafter: www.youtube.com/live/ZYNJ0zp...

PSA: tips to protect yourself from scams on Signal. Every major comms platform has to contend w phishing, impersonation, & scams. Sadly. Signal is major, and as we've grown we've heard about more of these attacks--scammy people pretending to be something or someone to trick and abuse others. 1/

PSA: tips to protect yourself from scams on Signal. Every major comms platform has to contend w phishing, impersonation, & scams. Sadly. Signal is major, and as we've grown we've heard about more of these attacks--scammy people pretending to be something or someone to trick and abuse others. 1/

Great expose on the status of attack capabilities at Cellebrite, the defense company used by homeland security agents to crack your phones both at the U.S. border, airports, and interior.👇

Now on Desktop: Customizable chat folders Keep healthy boundaries between friends & family or work & leisure. Filter 1-on-1 and group chats, put all of your unread messages one place, or make project-specific folders for related chats. Settings > Chats Or right-click any chat

When @wired.com made FOIA-based stories free, subscriptions went up. When @404media.co published public records reporting without a paywall, new sources came forward. We spoke to both about why dropping paywalls like this is good for journalism — and for business.

This thread does a better job of capturing why the cloud isn’t merely “renting a bunch of servers” than anything else I’ve seen recently.

Informative thread.

Good thread from @signal.org CEO, @meredithmeredith.bsky.social underscoring our critical dependencies on a few key orgs, and an increasing challenge in organizational and national resilience. We have a lot of work to do. cc @gate15.bsky.social

Excellent thread that I kinda had been waiting for. 👇

📣THREAD: It’s surprising to me that so many people were surprised to learn that Signal runs partly on AWS (something we can do because we use encryption to make sure no one but you–not AWS, not Signal, not anyone–can access your comms). It’s also concerning. 1/

Pray, Mr. Altman, if you put into the machine correct figures, will the right answers come out?

Die Signal-Chefin Meredith Whittaker spricht im Interview über die Chatkontrolle. Ihre Argumente für mehr Datenschutz sind auch interessant für User, die denken, dass sie „nichts zu verbergen haben“ (F+) 🔗 www.freitag.de/autoren/fges... 📝 Finn Gessert 📷 Foto: Florian Hetz

Your favorite thing is down because DynamoDB at Amazon's AWS US-EAST-1 Regionwoke up with Main Character Syndrome. This is the default /legacy backbone for a ton of things. Including Amazon's own stuff. Massive outages. Here's what's going on & what we know 1/

PSA: we're aware that Signal is down for some people. This appears to be related to a major AWS outage. Stand by.

"I don't have anything to hide why should I care about privacy?"

LOL all morning picturing some finance quant slouched at his desk prompting Dalle, like, "make me a picture of pikachu having sex with the Apple logo" or whatever tf those guys use these things for, then throwing up his hands like "WHY WON'T THIS FIND ALPHA?!" www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

I wish more people knew that there’s virtually no way to prove media or text is AI-generated unless you created it yourself. “AI detectors” aren’t proof. Among other glaring issues, this makes it more difficult for journalists to report on media being AI-generated even when it seems obvious

We’re excited to welcome Meredith Whittaker, President of Signal Foundation, to ADVANCE 2025, ADAPT’s flagship AI, industry & policy forum happening tomorrow. Join leading voices shaping the future of AI. #ADVANCE2025 #AI #Innovation @researchireland.ie @signal.org

m.youtube.com/watch?v=YZ48... ❤️🕯️

Die Signal-Chefin Meredith Whittaker spricht im Interview über die Chatkontrolle. Ihre Argumente für mehr Datenschutz sind auch interessant für User, die denken, dass sie „nichts zu verbergen haben“ (F+)

For those who want to know about how I chop vegetables between meetings, or grind my coffee, have I got the article for you www.businessinsider.com/day-in-the-l...

これ面白かった。秘匿性が高い通信アプリの筆頭格であるsignalのMeredith Whittaker（元Googleの研究者）のインタビュー。 GoogleやMicrosoft、Apple等々のテック企業は基本的にユーザーの個人情報や利用情報などのプライバシーを餌として利用することを通して利益を上げていることや、その最たる例として昨今のAI技術が使われていることを解説している。私たちがネット上で日々交わしているあらゆるメッセージは、常に誰かに利用されるリスクに晒されており、それに対して人権としてのプライバシーが主張される。 youtube.com/watch?v=8BUU...

We love to see it <3

A speech about what drives me, how science and open source are bitter victories, unable to make improve the world if society does not embrace them for the better: gael-varoquaux.info/personnal/a-...

We're so relieved to see Germany reaffirm its opposition to the dangerous Chat Control proposal--the one that would mandate mass scanning of communications. Germany's long been a solid champion of privacy, and the news that it was considering backing mass surveillance was alarming. 1/

FWIW I've written to the Irish Minister for Justice - an enthusiastic supporter of Europe's hideous "chat control" phone-scanning proposal - asking him to imagine when that technology is used against him. If you're German, please, PLEASE write to your justice/interior minister today.

Take action! fightchatcontrol.eu to contact your ministers, permanent representation, MEPs, and, if you are German or Italian, your national MPs!

feel free to join this petition against #chatcontrol here: weact.campact.de/petitions/ch...

Here's a video explaining how Chat Control surveillance would work by the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy... fair.tube/w/72DCPMByyS... #speirgorm

No, my message is that govs are containers for power, which can be exercised brutally or w wisdom, & tech is a collection of methods that can be abused or leveraged for good. TLDR tech and gov aren't stable categories. Validate both (like, by examining Signal's open source code) before you trust.

This is an EU proposed policy with the benign-sounding name "Child Sexual Abuse Regulation" which proposes to screen private online communications using sketchy image-scanning algorithms. It is technically unworkable, and would be a privacy catastrophe, especially for those in authoritarian states

OK, by this logic...the surveillance of every facet of life--from comms to movement to social relationships to etc--which has become the norm over the last decades c/o the surveillance biz model, makes LE surveillance MORE possible than it's ever been in history. But somehow e2ee is the problem?

📣 Germany's close to reversing its opposition to mass surveillance & private message scanning, & backing the Chat Control bill. This could end private comms-& Signal-in the EU. Time's short and they're counting on obscurity: please let German politicians know how horrifying their reversal would be.

NEW: breach of Discord age verification data. Including some users passports & DLs Age verification is a badly implemented data grab wrapped in a moral panic. Mark my words, as age verification mandates expand, we'll end up more surveilled and less secure. 1/

We are alarmed by reports that Germany is on the verge of a catastrophic about-face, reversing its longstanding and principled opposition to the EU’s Chat Control proposal which, if passed, could spell the end of the right to privacy in Europe. signal.org/blog/pdfs/ge...

Setting the table for vibe paychecks www.theverge.com/news/787076/...

Messenger-App Signal: Meredith Whittaker kritisiert Pläne der EU zur #Chatkontrolle und droht, mit dem Messenger dann den europäischen Markt zu verlassen www.heise.de/news/Chefin-...