Alec Muffett

@alecmuffett
344 Followers
390 Following
2K Posts

everybody deserves good security.
https://alecmuffett.com/about

This account gets used for comments and replies and general Mastodon interaction, because WordPress ActivityPub is not quite good enough for that yet.

Attributionshttps://alecmuffett.com/attributions
Bloghttps://alecmuffett.com/@alecm
Alec Muffett13h ago
Age Verification causing people to stop installing security updates on iPhone
https://alecmuffett.com/article/153062
#AgeVerification #OnlineSafety #OnlineSafetyAct #censorship #irony #surveillance
Age Verification causing people to stop installing security updates on iPhone

What could possibly go wrong?

Dropsafe
Alec Muffett2d ago
Australian eSafety: “It is a ‘dark pattern’ to permit people to 1/ amend mistakes 2/ be in control of information about themselves 3/ be obliged to validate abuse reports”
https://alecmuffett.com/article/152831
#ESafety #OnlineSafety #SocialMediaBan #australia #censorship #surveillance
Australian eSafety: “It is a ‘dark pattern’ to permit people to 1/ amend mistakes 2/ be in control of information about themselves 3/ be obliged to validate abuse reports”

Clearly the perspective which the Australian eSafety Commissioner brings to the table is “users are untrustworthy scum and must be whipped into control” – basically like MPs, then…

Dropsafe
Alec Muffett2d ago
It's April 1st & I'm doing my best to stay off social media today, because I'm already angry enough at all the real badness in the world that I don't want to risk adding fake badness to the heap. Good day to be doing garden work.
Alec Muffett3d ago
Spent much of the last 12 hours drinking coffee & reading too many papers on metaphysics, came to the conclusion that not enough philosophy students watched #StarTrek when growing up. Especially the "transporter/replicator accident" episodes like "Second Chances".
Alec Muffett4d ago
It's vexing to have wasted ~2h trying to kludge abogen+kokoro into running on an 2018 Intel Mac - BECAUSE #PYTORCH IS EOL ON THAT PLATFORM - so I install Docker and build the same code for Linux with pytorch latest, and it works; like WHAT'S THE BLOODY POINT OF THE EOL?
Alec Muffett6d ago
It's taken 3 years of solid research to learn that an idea I've been brewing for about 20 years was mostly preceded by a paper in Journal of Philosophy published in 1997… and I couldn't be happier. This makes life so much easier. :-)
Alec Muffett6d ago
The Timeless Fear of Corrupting the Youth | WSJ
https://alecmuffett.com/article/151916
#OnlineSafety #OnlineSafetyAct #SocialMediaBan #censorship
The Timeless Fear of Corrupting the Youth | WSJ

Excellent piece: The lesson from these examples isn’t that protecting children online is misguided or an unworthy goal. It is that the means proposed to achieve this end pose significant risks to h…

Dropsafe
Alec MuffettMar 27
The Big Tech verdicts you’re cheering for are actually terrible for free speech | The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
https://alecmuffett.com/article/151865
#FreeSpeech #OnlineSafety #meta
The Big Tech verdicts you’re cheering for are actually terrible for free speech | The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

Read this: Declaring the target to be “design features” — such as infinite scroll or notifications — instead of speech doesn’t change things. The First Amendment isn’t fooled by synonyms, and what …

Dropsafe
Alec MuffettMar 27
‘…all of the evidence submitted to “prove” Meta knew their product was harmful was internal safety research they were conducting to improve their moderation and detection’
https://alecmuffett.com/article/151818
#OnlineSafety #Section230 #meta
‘…all of the evidence submitted to “prove” Meta knew their product was harmful was internal safety research they were conducting to improve their moderation and detection’

There are a bunch of “must read” Threads on Bluesky today, which to me indicate that people crowing about a “safer internet for children” due to the Meta lawsuits, are actua…

Dropsafe
Alec MuffettMar 27
‘The Encryption Problem: Where “Design Liability” Leads’ | … IF YOU ARE CHEERING META LOSING 2X RECENT LAWSUITS YOU ARE SUPPORTING THE END OF ONLINE PRIVACY
https://alecmuffett.com/article/151775
#EndToEndEncryption #OnlineSafety #OnlineSafetyAct #censorship #meta #surveillance
‘The Encryption Problem: Where “Design Liability” Leads’ | … IF YOU ARE CHEERING META LOSING 2X RECENT LAWSUITS YOU ARE SUPPORTING THE END OF ONLINE PRIVACY

…under the “design liability” theory, implementing encryption becomes evidence of negligence, because a small number of bad actors also use encrypted communications […] encryption itself harms no o…

Dropsafe