CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@moses_izumi I'm too exhausted to write about anything

The most disgusting part of writing cryptography and security blogs is you inevitably get some truly heinous websites in your referrer logs

Gee thanks, Blizzard.

I feel like we're only a few months away from "repeal the Constitution to own the libs" being a mainstream right-wing talking point

Gonna make a Microsoft version of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion that replaces the speechcraft "Not now, not later, not ever" response with "Ask me again in 3 days"

There are probably grown-ass adults who cannot get laid entirely because they're getting dating/relationship advice from ChatGPT.

And this will probably become an increasingly prevalent issue.

Moore's Law is about doubling the number of trans sisters every 18 months

wHY ISN'T the coffee working

Banned from the Linux user group for saying "so this is like a kink thing, right?"

#FreeAsInFreeUse

Last thing: When I said "No" is a Privacy-Enhancing Technology, I didn't just mean an opt-out.

I mean the engineers growing a fucking spine and telling their boss, "No, we shouldn't collect this data in the first place."

During the coffee breaks and dinner conversations, everyone I talked to about these things echoed my frustrations.

In 2024, a speaker from Intuit spoke about their distributed key generation protocol. It involved multiplying a number by a hash. They did not elaborate on whether that's just a bigint operation or an elliptic curve group operation. @sophieschmieg was like, "Why would they do that? What if they set it to zero?" and the backchatter was full of "Why are the tax people rolling their own crypto?"

So, like, I'm not super worried about adtech rotting the RWC community.

At an earlier track, one of the invited speakers suggested using Fully Homomorphic Encryption to allow folks to have private conversations with an AI chatbot for therapy.

My mind was instantly filled with news stories of OpenAI and self-harm. Lawsuits from grieving families.

Are they deeply out of touch?

Or was it just "hmm, what do people want privacy for? I'll just throw a bunch of hypothetical examples of things FHE would be good for without interrogating them deeply"?

I'm not sharing this to shit on anyone at #RWC2026. My favorite people in tech are often found there, and the organizers put a lot of thought, effort, and care into making the vibe good.

I also don't ascribe any malice to the speakers. They probably didn't think to ask these questions, and didn't think to put them in their slide deck. Maybe they've self-selected into an environment that doesn't foster that kind of inquiry. Maybe they considered it but cut it out for time.

But if we're going to talk about this sort of thing,, we need to actually address these questions, even if there isn't a comfortable answer.

"No" is a better privacy-enhancing technology than the state-of-the-art differential privacy techniques.

It's efficient! Not collecting data requires at most O(1) bandwidth, O(1) storage, and O(1) compute.

"No" is not "Maybe later".

"No" is not "Ask me again in 3 days".

"No" is not "Maybe after a few more beers", since many of the people that need to hear the first part of his message likely also needs the second.

Here's a privacy-enhancing technology for you to consider:

"No."

You don't need to know. You don't need to measure. The efficacy of advertising campaigns, market segmentation, and relevance targeting should be minimized for the good of humanity.

At #RealWorldCrypto this year, there was a session on "privacy-enhancing technologies".

The first talk in the session was about a new encryption method for Tor.

The next two were painful examples of "a person cannot be convinced of something when their salary depends on them not knowing it".

Advertisers wants to collect signals about populations without being individually identifying. So let's talk about differential privacy techniques to let them do that.

One example was "Meta wants to know what percentage of its teneage users blocked a contact today".

At no point did they address the elephants in the room.

• Why do they want this data in the first place?
• What are they even doing with this signal?
• Have you considered telling them to fuck off and not collect it in the first place?

As tempting as it might be to hand wave it, and say "well yes but their business model depends on it", I say to advertisers, "then perish".

I'm not gonna say it

Just read this story

It says more about my point than I ever could

https://www.404media.co/proton-mail-helped-fbi-unmask-anonymous-stop-cop-city-protestor/

I find myself somewhat convinced of what most would probably call a conspiracy theory.

It's not the outlandish "therefore {aliens, mind control}" variety. It's much more boring and in line with Big Business MO.

It involves the top-down AI hype, TSMC, the US government, the bubble-shaped economics of LLMs and Nvidia, the recent Anthropic / OpenAI spectacle, and some history lessons about trains and government bailouts.

This is a significant departure from what I normally like to write about.

Should I blog about it?

I guess I should just tap the sign whenever I encounter this sort of personality:

https://soatok.blog/2026/02/25/cryptography-engineering-has-an-intrinsic-duty-of-care/

@mttaggart I guess their forecast for the evening was:

Claudey with a chance of outages