Alec Muffett

@alecmuffett
337 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
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".
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?
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. :-)
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
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
‘…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
‘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
I read of social media causing mental health crises & despair re: the meaningless & futility of life. Folk should study Astronomy instead. The Sun one day will bloat & consume the Earth, yet we fritter away our time with trivialities like "power" & "conquest". Do better.
[Europe] voted today to end chat monitoring 1.0. This ends an exception that was used, in particular, by US Big Tech companies to monitor billions of people’s private messages without suspicion
https://alecmuffett.com/article/151697
#ChatControl #EndToEndEncryption #surveillance
[Europe] voted today to end chat monitoring 1.0. This ends an exception that was used, in particular, by US Big Tech companies to monitor billions of people’s private messages without suspicion

The European Parliament has thus formally concluded the legislative process . The Digital Society Association and many individuals had previously contacted the Members of Parliament, appealing to t…

Dropsafe
MEPs block tech firms from scanning for child sexual abuse material | POLITICO
https://alecmuffett.com/article/151666
#ChatControl #ClientSideScanning #EndToEndEncryption #csam #surveillance
MEPs block tech firms from scanning for child sexual abuse material | POLITICO

“perhaps there’s a different approach they could try taking, other than surveilling everybody’s messages?”

Dropsafe