Max Dale

Molly Molly is an improved Signal app for Android

Maybe a bit out-of-scope, but it also might be worth giving a mention to the Molly FOSS Signal client for Android. It has a handful of extra features like at-rest encryption, de-Googled notifications, and TOR support. Great for if you need to be even more cautious.

molly.im

The censored 60 Minutes' segment, Inside CECOT, is now available.

Download from @ddosecrets.com: data.ddosecrets.com/Inside%20CEC...

Download/stream from @archive.org: archive.org/details/insi...

The original video was recorded by @jasonparis.bsky.social, and cleaned up by @emma.best

Periodic reminder that Microsoft actively makes your systems worse and takes away the control and security you crave, and once had.

For the love of fxck, stop using Microsoft, 365, et al.

I wonder if Santa knows the locations of all 60,000+ surveillance cameras the Atlanta Police Department has access to? Maybe he can give that data to the public as a kind of collective Christmas gift?

Great podcast, great guest, great book. All-around banger.

@emma.best Pardon my ignorance, but have you ever done something like this before?

Check the link to the direct download. There are more files in that directory.

This surely won’t be used against queer communities. Surely!

RE: The Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill ICE Raids

Nearly 3/4s of my cousin’s majority hispanic elementary school class didn’t show up today. Profoundly grim.

HOPE Hacking Conference Banned From University Venue Over Apparent ‘Anti-Police Agenda’ "The lack of due process on its own is extremely disturbing," the conference said.

The legendary HOPE hacking conference has been banned from its venue at St. John's University over what the university seems to be calling an "anti-police agenda." Part of a broader crackdown on security research / hacking / open source: www.404media.co/hope-hacking...

How Trump Has Used ICE, the National Guard and Other Federal Forces Across the U.S. Charlotte and Raleigh in North Carolina became the latest cities to see federal forces move in. Here’s a rundown of what’s going on in each place.

Charlotte and Raleigh in North Carolina became the latest cities to see federal forces move in. Here’s a rundown of how President Trump has used ICE, and what’s going on in each place he's sent them.

I got to do a really fun demo yesterday where I did a small-scale recreation of Apple’s “Illusion of Thinking” study using GPT-OSS. I’ll be out of town for next week’s paper on the Spectre vulnerability (might do a demo remotely), but we’ll be hands-on with NixOS the week after! 🤖

Hey everyone! I wanted to share that Dr. Kaki Ryan and I have put together a systems research reading group for UNC computer science majors — or really, anyone who just thinks computers are neat. Meetings are Mondays at 4 PM in FB141. Great turnout so far, but we’d love to have more people join us!

I can’t stop chuckling as I read more about this company. Everybody on their executive team is some level of Q-Anon crank and/or has a background in surveillance.

Exciting stuff!

This is so frustrating. I admire and agree with the principled stance that the PSF is taking on this, but principles don’t pay the bills. If you benefit from Python at all, toss them a couple of dollars.

www.python.org/psf/donations/

We’re Suing ICE for Its $2 Million Spyware Contract 404 Media has filed a lawsuit against ICE for access to its contract with Paragon, a company that sells powerful spyware for breaking into phones and accessing encrypted messaging apps.

New: We have just sued ICE to demand it turns over a secretive spyware contract that it refuses to release:

www.404media.co/were-suing-i...

Respectfully, it seems a bit unfair to tell people that ICEBlock could help to invest in new hardware that’s both subject to local availability, and is going to have support dropped this autumn with iOS 26. I understand that Android support can be fragmented, but this being dropped is a guarantee.

Why not release on F-Droid or push the APK to GitHub to load with Obtainium? Android is more accessible to lower-income communities, and its marketshare vastly outstrips that of iOS’s in international markets. There are plenty of reasons for the communities at risk here to opt for an Android device.

🚨 Introducing our @tmlrorg.bsky.social paper “Unlearning Sensitive Information in Multimodal LLMs: Benchmark and Attack-Defense Evaluation”
We present UnLOK-VQA, a benchmark to evaluate unlearning in vision-and-language models, where both images and text may encode sensitive or private information.

I get extended time through my university's disability office that offsets the slowness quite a bit, and I've considered pursuing this too. It's just difficult as a disabled person to not feel like you're constantly asking for the world with these things.

This is exactly my feeling. I've got joint hypermobility that forces me to grip pencils in the most ridiculous way, so writing by hand is very slow and tiring. My writing process is also super non-linear. Awful that AI has infringed on my ability to use the tools that let me best express myself.

Update: Just figured out how to do this, actually. New weekend project!

I just upgraded to a Kona EV with BlueLink support and would love those features, but Hyundai's privacy policy is just far too egregious. The car is great, but I miss my old one's option to swap out whatever's in the DIN slot with something that allowed me to physically disconnect the radios.

"Age verification" laws are actually "upload your ID or get your face scanned to access every website, ending anonymity and associating your identity with everything you do online" laws and if more people understood that they would not be down for this authoritarian nonsense

If your organization supports censorship bills like KOSA I don’t want to see your Trans Day of Visibility post

incredibly depressing to read the replies here. "this is what they voted for" is just the stupidest, meanest response and if you start writing it please do yourself and me a favor and log off and pet the cat or something

This isn't theoretical. It's trivial to get into most online accounts and commercially available devices if you have the resources of a state. You don't have to be notable to be worth the effort, because the effort is next to nothing. Dr. Wang is a threat to this digitally-enforced repression. Good.

I cannot emphasise enough that though the best time to take your digital security seriously was years ago, the second best time is *right now*. Anything and everything in your digital footprint has the potential to be evidence of a crime if the government is motivated enough. Cover. Your. Tracks.

This is harrowing. We are about to see incursions on our digital liberties so comprehensive that nobody will be spared. Develop a threat model, know your resources, and stand your damn ground.