evan

@latent_space
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102 Following
115 Posts
A few things to know about the security of Signal:

Signal is end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) and is open source. A lot of people today are saying those two things make it secure enough for government classified communications. This is absolutely not the case, for several reasons: 🧵

And now Trump himself is trying to blame this on Signal: "I think Signal could be defective, to be honest with you."

Don't shoot the (encrypted) messenger.👇https://www.wired.com/story/signalgate-isnt-about-signal/

SignalGate Isn’t About Signal

The Trump cabinet’s shocking leak of its plans to bomb Yemen raises myriad confidentiality and legal issues. The security of the encrypted messaging app Signal is not one of them.

WIRED
@CStamp @GottaLaff In particular, Signal lacks specialized features found in classified systems, including security labels on data, user identification that includes names and clearances, and automatic enforcement of policies. It would be almost impossible to make a mistake like this in the government-approved systems they should have been using.

For anyone that wants to know how to make good rips of DVDs and Blu-Rays, for either preservation and archiving purposes or for adding to your own streaming server, NAS, or whatnot, I wrote up a handy guide on how to work with Handbrake and MakeMKV to get those rips!

https://wiki.hackmanhattan.com/How_to_Rip_Blu-Rays_and_DVDs

How to Rip Blu-Rays and DVDs - Hack Manhattan Wiki

What's to stop Musk, who's already tried meddling with German elections, from seizing Zelenskyy's, or any other European leader's X account, and posting something with dire geopolitical consequences? We're way past the point where it's wise for European leaders and institutions to rely on a presence on X—and other US platforms are not a good long-term solution either. More should follow the example of the @EUCommission and provide their updates directly, without middlemen, through the fediverse.
Other shoe. Is dropped. This is coordinated. FYI.

ICE agents come to the house of an immigrant activist, he tells them he will come out of the house to them if they have a judicial warrant, as people are told to do now.

They bring a dozen more agents, a Bearcat armored vehicle, battering ram and stun grenades, and break in.

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/immigration/2025/02/03/phoenix-ice-arrest-61-year-old-man-involves-armored-vehicle-stun-grenades/78189148007/#

Family member condemns use of armored vehicle, stun grenades in Phoenix ICE arrest

The arrest took place amid Trump's immigration crackdown. An armored vehicle with battering ram and dozens of ICE agents were present to arrest a man.

The Arizona Republic

If you work in government and are asked to remove content from websites (as a result of executive orders), please use the HTTP status code 451 instead of 404.

451 is the correct status code to use for these cases, and you'll be doing the rest of the country a service by using it.

Addendum: you should also include a Link header with the link relation "blocked-by" that "Identifies the entity that blocks access to a resource following receipt of a legal demand."

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7725.html

RFC 7725: An HTTP Status Code to Report Legal Obstacles

My takeaway from DeepSeek for current AI research culture:

- Groupthink (i.e., scaling is all you need) is bad
- Twitter research culture (i.e., groupthink) is bad
- Anyone who tells you they "know" how to achieve AGI disqualifies themselves (or has other motives)
- Open science and open source/weights can correct the above