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Matthew Garrett

@mjg59.eicar-test-file.zip

Former biologist. Actual PhD in genetics. Security at Nvidia, OS security teaching at https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu. Blog: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org Signal: @mjg.59 He/him

10,475 Followers  |  131 Following  |  1,968 Posts  |  Joined: 25.04.2023  |  1.7641

Latest posts by mjg59.eicar-test-file.zip on Bluesky

I did a thing with an Amiga and a PiStorm and Doom that is probably not illegal but morally ought to be: mjg59.dreamwidth.org/73001.html

05.08.2025 00:32 β€” πŸ‘ 20    πŸ” 5    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 2

mobile keyboards need a "backspace until ?utm=" button

03.08.2025 16:57 β€” πŸ‘ 153    πŸ” 17    πŸ’¬ 3    πŸ“Œ 2

If you send me a 3000 word essay based on a 20 word prompt you are transferring information in an incredibly inefficient way. I'm going to have no idea what you actually wanted to convey. Just send me the prompt. I promise the outcome will be better.

03.08.2025 22:57 β€” πŸ‘ 115    πŸ” 17    πŸ’¬ 2    πŸ“Œ 1

If you're going to send me something written by an LLM then save us all time and resources and just send me your prompt instead. I'll value a text that says "Heartfelt condolence message with reference to a list of events" more, because this way I at least actually know what you were thinking

03.08.2025 22:50 β€” πŸ‘ 519    πŸ” 112    πŸ’¬ 6    πŸ“Œ 8

As someone with a PhD in genetics I am here to tell you why it is inappropriate to associate value judgements with "genes", a scientific term that is actually surprisingly poorly defined. In this essay

03.08.2025 22:30 β€” πŸ‘ 32    πŸ” 4    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Copyright is entirely a legal framework nominally intended to codify an ethical system but now largely preserving business models

02.08.2025 06:53 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Not making any accusations here, just noting that if you wanted to poison search results for "(your name) rapist", starting a company with a known rapist would be a great way to achieve that

02.08.2025 06:38 β€” πŸ‘ 16    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Yes! Several European jurisdictions have a whole bunch of additional moral rights that are really interesting here

02.08.2025 06:35 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

"How do I square wanting copyright to have less power with not wanting massive economic distortion to destroy the entire creative industry" is an easier problem if you don't try to use copyright to solve the second part

02.08.2025 06:27 β€” πŸ‘ 28    πŸ” 2    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

Did the thing when booking a hotel where I forgot how tiny Portland blocks are and thought everything was much further apart

02.08.2025 06:17 β€” πŸ‘ 16    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Ok honestly I enjoy getting to talk about whether copyright law is even the right framework to consider the ethical nature of LLM model training

02.08.2025 06:11 β€” πŸ‘ 25    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 5    πŸ“Œ 0

Heading to Portland tomorrow to speak at Fossy, let me know if you're around and would like to catch up

01.08.2025 06:13 β€” πŸ‘ 7    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Yup, thank you!

31.07.2025 17:02 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

Good morning I wrote about how the secure boot certificate rollover isn't going to break Linux for everyone: mjg59.dreamwidth.org/72892.html

31.07.2025 16:14 β€” πŸ‘ 23    πŸ” 7    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

Gotta hand it to Emil Bove for making me feel like I'm aging gracefully

31.07.2025 07:45 β€” πŸ‘ 11    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

Briefly concerned as we start accelerating out of the station and I spot a low-flying helicopter that's going to intersect our course before I remember that I'm on a train and the probability of our paths intersecting is *extremely* small

31.07.2025 02:07 β€” πŸ‘ 18    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 3    πŸ“Œ 0

Global Protect Clientless VPN appears to be what you'd get if you described Beyondcorp to an extremely drunk person over a very poor quality phone line

30.07.2025 17:38 β€” πŸ‘ 21    πŸ” 2    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

My current project is running Doom on a Raspberry Pi but displaying it on actual Amiga hardware by banging on the registers directly and never executing any 68000 code and obviously I have decided this should be called Cordoomceps

29.07.2025 19:55 β€” πŸ‘ 43    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Encoding a spectrogram of goatse into birdsong and teaching it to enough birds that it is passed down through the generations until one day in the future someone is unexpectedly shocked

28.07.2025 20:26 β€” πŸ‘ 76    πŸ” 23    πŸ’¬ 2    πŸ“Œ 1

That final duration

26.07.2025 00:23 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

It's obscene that this is happening and also the only way this is going to change is if people with actual power are convinced to wield it via whatever mechanism that takes

24.07.2025 07:35 β€” πŸ‘ 3    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

Is it awful that payment processors are getting to unilaterally determine what types of media can be sold? Yes. Is harassing the businesses who depend on not being kicked off the payment processors going to change that? No.

24.07.2025 07:21 β€” πŸ‘ 38    πŸ” 7    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

"Have you any idea how much damage that bulldozer would suffer if I just let it roll straight over you?" "How much?" said Arthur. "None at all" said Mr. Prosser

except it's "Have you any idea how much Mastercard would care if a small marketplace refused to continue doing business with them"

24.07.2025 07:20 β€” πŸ‘ 22    πŸ” 3    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

People on social will really be like "you believe in receiving money? that pales in effectiveness to my strategy, refusing to accept credit cards" and then not refuse to accept credit cards

24.07.2025 07:17 β€” πŸ‘ 29    πŸ” 2    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

The combination of my girlfriend buying a label printer, us just having watched Murderbot, and me repeatedly checking my phone means that my phone is now labelled "The perimeter"

24.07.2025 07:14 β€” πŸ‘ 70    πŸ” 8    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

Columbia University perusing the Columbia House catalogue and thinking "How hard can it possibly be to cancel" before sending off $200 million

24.07.2025 03:18 β€” πŸ‘ 15    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Working model remains that everyone saying "This is bad" means Elon doesn't get the attention hit he wants and stops caring and everyone ignores it from now on

22.07.2025 18:59 β€” πŸ‘ 10    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

A month and a half later and still no formal description of how the Twitter encrypted DMs work or documentation of their key ceremony or anything that would prevent Twitter MITMing the key exchange and getting people's private keys

22.07.2025 18:57 β€” πŸ‘ 32    πŸ” 2    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

(probably not really enough to turn into a full talk)

20.07.2025 19:49 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Eh real world customer interest was limited, I need to figure out a stronger pitch. There's some degree of spire support for TPM as an identity root, but not a lot of state attestation

20.07.2025 19:48 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 2    πŸ“Œ 0

@mjg59.eicar-test-file.zip is following 20 prominent accounts