Diego F. Aranha

So much ICE out there today in South Minneapolis. They’re prowling around harassing schools.

Stay frosty, friends

WhatsApp Encryption, a Lawsuit, and a Lot of Noise It’s not every day that we see mainstream media get excited about encryption apps! For that reason, the past several days have been fascinating, since we’ve been given not one but sever…

I wrote a short blog post on the WhatsApp lawsuit, or whatever it is. blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/02/02/w...

An NYT headline reads “Federal Officers Shoot Person in Minneapolis”

It has gotten so bad that the @nytimes.com has stopped using the passive voice to describe the violence.

Software error in continuous glucose monitors caused 736 serious injuries, and seven deaths. abbott.mediaroom.com/press-releas...

Bad news for other minorities, for the media, for civil society, the rule of law and democracy, too

Bad news for immigrants in Europe.

Come work with Peter Scholl @schollster.bsky.social and me in Aarhus!

If you want to impose strict deadline and word counts, enable the REBUTTAL feature in HotCRP which gives word count to authors and a system-wide deadline.

If you believe that smart people cannot do utterly dumb things, just look at the Eurocrypt'26 rebuttal process.

And started a Cryptanalysis division in the kitchen!

Achievement unlocked.

Know your rights. Protect your neighbors.

New York is — and always will be — a city for all immigrants.

CRITICAL security vulnerability in a really popular web framework React server. Maximum severity (CVSS: 10.0). Unauthenticated remote code execution. May be WORMABLE. Patch immediately. This could get very nasty. Patch this, and all that depends on it (like Next.js) react.dev/blog/2025/12...

I think it’s pretty clear at this point that one of the main impacts of LLMs is to disrupt thinking: to make it so that far too many people never properly learn how to do it, and then to control the output so there are thoughts that people never learn how to think.

The "What are the best gifts for men?" in the end is some dystopian shit.

My thoughts on the IACR election issue (since many have asked privately):

- This was an honest accident, and Moti Yung deserves being cut some slack. Yes, it’s a silly mistake, but mistakes happen.

- The IACR board reacted excellently and scheduled timely follow up elections.

Continued in thread

git push -f

Against ‘chat control’: we can’t eliminate child abuse by eliminating privacy Banning online anonymity tools like Tor won’t stop crime. It will only drive people underground and normalize government control over the internet

Against ‘chat control’: we can’t eliminate child abuse by eliminating privacy

a woman in a purple sweater says they are the same picture ALT: a woman in a purple sweater says they are the same picture

The “age verification” and the “human identification” problem are the same problem. It upsets me to be around people who think they’re working on the first, but don’t understand they’re actually working on the second.

Against ‘chat control’: we can’t eliminate child abuse by eliminating privacy Banning online anonymity tools like Tor won’t stop crime. It will only drive people underground and normalize government control over the internet

"Governments across the world are expanding surveillance, weakening encryption, and curtailing freedoms under the guise of staunching the proliferation of sexual images and videos of children" https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/13/chat-control-child-abuse-internet-privacy #Privacy

This is amazing research by Nadia Heninger and her co-authors Wenyi Morty Zhang, Annie Dai, Keegan Ryan, Dave Levin and Aaron Schulman. TL;DR a huge number of satellite links over our heads are totally unencrypted. satcom.sysnet.ucsd.edu

The 400 richest Americans are now worth a record $6.6 trillion.

The entire bottom 50% of America is worth just $4.2 trillion.

Read that back.

When 400 people control more wealth than half a country’s population, we have a very serious problem.

Germany has agreed to stop ChatControl for now, due to huge amounts of public pressure. Good job! The bad news is that it could come back as soon as December, and the German government has interpreted the feedback as a need to “moderate” the proposal.

I hear that the EU ChatControl situation is going better today. I cannot believe how close the EU has gotten to passing this crazy regulation.

One-man spam campaign ravages EU ‘chat control’ bill A software developer from Denmark is having an outsized influence on a hotly debated law to break open encrypted apps.

This dude is a hero: www.politico.eu/article/one-...

Today is a day when arts degrees are worthless, but the product of those degrees is so valuable it would kill an entire industry if they were made to pay for it.

You're a much better person than me, Dan :)

Someone please make me understand how Denmark can be at the same time freaking out about hybrid war with Russia AND pushing for government-mandated spyware as Chat Control.

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...

Sounds just like the Justice Minister of Denmark, who is pushing Chat Control with a crime-free society narrative.

bsky.app/profile/robe...