I was recently asked for a breakdown of my daily device hygiene, communication stack, and physical safety boundaries, so I wrote about it. These are not my recommendations or options for others, but what I actually do myself.

https://blog.yaelwrites.com/what-my-privacy-and-security-stack-actually-looks-like/

Support OONI and Your Favourite Internet Freedom Tools in the New Quadratic Funding Campaign
https://ooni.org/post/2026-support-ooni-internet-freedom-quadratic-funding-campaign/

You can donate to a project directly or fund the matching pool.

Join the campaign, and help sustain the future of internet freedom. ✊
https://internetfreedom.torproject.org

#FundInternetFreedom

@torproject @securedrop @guardianproject @lockdownsystems @OpenArchive @unredacted

Surveillance Watch now maps 765 entities and over 900 funders powering the global surveillance industry. This is the public record that accountability demands.

#Surveillance #Privacy

RE: https://federate.social/@mattblaze/116591843195523492

Computer security as a field of academic study is really, really new. When I entered a Ph.D program in computer science in 2003, I had to phrase my research interests as "failure analysis and software reliability".

At age 51, I'm beginning to have some of the younger engineers look at me like I'm part of the Old Breed. Me, I'm looking around at the real Old Breed — people like Peter Neumann — and all I can think is the old lions are leaving the savanna, and I have absolutely no idea how I or anyone in my generation can live up to the examples they set for us.

But with God as my witness, I will try.

Well this is concerning.

I just suspended 14 Russian LLM generated bot accounts that were created around April 17 on my Mastodon instance, twit.social. Somehow they circumvented manual registration approval. I've turned on Captchas (much as I hate them) for new member requests in the hopes that will stop the bots. They must have discovered a registration bypass bug.

Thanks to IFTAS SW-ISAC for noting and reporting the bots.

The rumors are true-- the reason RightsCon in Zambia was cancelled was because of China pressuring the Zambian government to disallow Taiwanese participants and possibly other "sensitive" topics. This is of course unacceptable for perhaps the most important human rights conference in the world.

The Chinese government is not benign, in case anyone has any doubt, and with the fall of the US their global influence is growing and they are emboldened to wield it. (My theory is that China is keeping the rest of us at war in order to come out on top later.)

Full details:

https://www.rightscon.org/rc26-statement/

#RightsCon #RightsCon2026 #HumanRights #FreeSpeech #FreeExpression #Zambia #China #Taiwan