ying tong

Missing Zcash <3

We're starting to plan for Community Privacy Residency in 2026, Berlin!

A look back on 2025, and ways to collaborate on the next iteration: community-privacy.github.io/recap-highli...

Drivers can also detect if they are being offered different wages for the same customer (algorithmic wage discrimination) -- in general this would be a good tool for crowdsourced algorithmic audits like FairFare arxiv.org/pdf/2502.11273

A funny idea for a "vampire Uber" app: both drivers and passengers use Uber with zkTLS, and submit their matches to vampire Uber. On vampire Uber, we remove Uber's cut of the profit, so the driver is paid more and the passenger pays less

Bluesky Goes Dark in Mississippi Over Age Verification Law Bluesky has chosen to block access in the state rather than risk potential fines of up to $10,000 per violation.

This is the right response to the Mississippi law from Bluesky.

"Age verification" laws are nothing more than a massive expansion of government surveillance and censorship. They make kids less safe, not more safe.

Get a VPN and call your lawmakers. Time to fight.

www.wired.com/story/bluesk...

We require interaction for device-binding, and want deniable presentation i.e. don't want public verifiability

I'm increasingly convinced that interactive zk is the correct tool for digital ID systems, more than zk-SNARKs

Is it worse to show a physical ID at the liquor store, or to tap your Google Wallet and create a zk proof of age (and a digital trace of this interaction)?

Zcashers support trans rights.

Two-party computation in halo2 ✨

blog.ezkl.xyz/post/cosnarks/

I'm co-organising a Community Privacy Residency in Taipei next Feb: focused on researching, co-designing, and prototyping applications for community privacy 💗

We invite community builders, designers, researchers, and advocates for digital safety and privacy to join us.

community-privacy.github.io

i'm finally sick of Twitter, i'm coming here to share pics of flowers + my cat Odette

Abstract. Contact discovery is a crucial component of social applications, facilitating interactions between registered contacts. This work introduces Arke, a novel approach to contact discovery that addresses the limitations of existing solutions in terms of privacy, scalability, and reliance on trusted third parties. Arke ensures the unlinkability of user interactions, mitigates enumeration attacks, and operates without single points of failure or trust. Notably, Arke is the first contact discovery system whose performance is independent of the total number of users and the first that can operate in a Byzantine setting. It achieves its privacy goals through an unlinkable handshake mechanism built on top of an identity-based non-interactive key exchange. By leveraging a custom distributed architecture, Arke forgoes the expense of consensus to achieve scalability while maintaining consistency in a Byzantine fault tolerant environment. Performance evaluations demonstrate that Arke can support enough throughput to operate at a planetary scale while maintaining sub-second latencies in a large geo-distributed setting.

Arke: Scalable and Byzantine Fault Tolerant Privacy-Preserving Contact Discovery
(Nicolas Mohnblatt, Alberto Sonnino, Kobi Gurkan, Philipp Jovanovic) ia.cr/2023/1218

Extremely cool private programmability presented by @mossy.bsky.social