When does a privacy enhancement become a privacy distribution mechanism? OPS was a distributed content tagging system with the idea that various organizations would rate web content, and browsers would subscribe to the user’s desired system. I wrote this article about it in 1997, but it’s become relevant again as we discuss how to do distributed content-moderation on federated systems like Mastodon. Bluesky has proposed a similar system as well. What’s interesting is that the threat and privacy models have changed considerably since then.

At the same time that the United States is encouraging the people of countries like Iran to exercise their right to disagree with their government, American technology is being used to prevent freedom of speech in those countries....  In a age when word processors get shipped with restrictions which require them to validate their license with a remote server, it seems to me that software which can be used to limit the liberties of people around the world should be locked down quite a bit tighter....  For more details on the use of American censorship software in other countries, see the OpenNet Initiative at http://www.opennetinitiative.net/.

I think people who say "I'm more comfortable talking to people who use their real names" or "they should find another social network" don't realize just what a broad swath of the population is being eliminated by this policy. ... For some excellent personal statements on the importance of name privacy, see http://my.nameis.me/ If you're wondering where I came up with "ten or more percent of the population", that's what I believe is a conservative estimate, based on the number of people on Facebook who don't use their real names.

Have you written software for your employer to do things that were unethical or illegal?

Remember when Ghostscript was a huge thing?

I know this teapot well.

It's not your eyes. . .

Fire (and lots of it): Berkeley researcher on the only way to fix cryptocurrency

My wife just got one hell of a targeted scam. Spearphishing level.

There's been a lot of flak over this tweet about recognizing the mythical "10x engineer"—the engineer that is so good that it doesn't matter if they reduce the productivity of everyone around them. But tearing down someone's list is easy. What we need is a set of rules that recognizes what the right person looks like. Here's my point-by-point rewrite.

Just a come-on for people to launder money for the Russian Mafia, but I found it amusing.

At the end of 2016 Wired declared it to be the year that we won the battle for encryption. Unfortunately, as we increasingly move towards an authoritarian State, it becomes obvious that was a very short-lived victory.

❝ the operatives use their phones to record about two dozen spins on a game they aim to cheat.

What do you do when you can’t use an H-1B to hire someone here? You outsource to them there.

https://twitter.com/kjhealy/status/1159055303746424832

China used those requirements to gain expertise and climb up the supply chain. And it worked. Now they own the entire process, and every design sent to them to build becomes a new piece of knowledge they own.

Today I’m going for pure entertainment. Hermes is a Pandora player. Much lighter-weight than using the web interface. It’s simple, functional, free, and open source. All the Pandora functions are there in a compact window that you can float on top or hide out of sight.