David Thiel

@grumplicio.us

Infosec person focused on harm reduction in technology; fmr tech, data science and T&S research at https://io.stanford.edu & https://tsjournal.org https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0947-5921 Also music things + open data.

Also counterintuitively: unlike real names, stable pseudonyms *more identifying* and a more limited resource. There's plenty of people with a display name of "David Thiel" backed by an email, but if I act like a prick and lose my unique id, I can't just swap to a new one without a loss.

Micah@rincewind.run · 2mo ago

every single study done on this shows that the actual best behavior is done under consistent pseudonyms and people behave worse under real names it’s counterintuitive but at this point the real names thing is willful denial of evidence

Everyone even mildly politically literate at the time read the DHS to be a fascist project, fascists included. No one found it reassuring, and I honestly don't remember anyone even pretending to frame it as "unity". This is weird revisionism ala "everyone was in favor of the war in Iraq".

NPR@npr.org · 2mo ago

DHS was originally conceived in the interest of unity and harmony — and the phrase "homeland security" was originally meant to be reassuring. n.pr/4nOx8KP

I also think that inasmuch as there’s an AI bubble, its collapse will be brought about not just by the broken economics of the giant models, but by migration to local open ones. Qwen on a Mac Studio is near last year’s frontier, and actually pretty fast.

post malone ergo propter malone@proptermalone.bsky.social · 4mo ago

I think a lot of AI/corporate doomers are still fundamentally not understanding that open-source models you can run locally on consumer hardware are no worse than two years behind the frontier models and for most purposes a lot closer

This is great; further complicated by the lineage of Super (❖), which is vaguely equivalent to the Windows key but referred to as Meta in various internals, except Alt is considered Meta elsewhere and many use it as Command. 🥳 The "Menu" key remains a mystery.

Marcin Wichary@aresluna.org · 5mo ago

I wrote an essay about the history of the [Fn] key, and my annoyance with how Apple has been handling it for the last many years. Hope you enjoy it! aresluna.org/fn/

They unlocked the MacBook with her fingerprint, and the warrant allowed them to unlock the phone with FaceID (they don't say if they did, but not much stopping them). It seems Lockdown Mode is preventing them from *imaging* the devices, probably because it requires auth to connect peripherals.

Freedom of the Press Foundation@freedom.press · 6mo ago

Investigators could not unlock an iPhone seized in the FBI raid on a @washingtonpost.com reporter’s home because Apple’s Lockdown Mode was enabled, court documents reveal. Read our digital security team’s analysis in our newsletter, and subscribe.

Don't let anyone tell you that the Commission's DSA enforcement against X is about speech or censorship. That would, indeed, be interesting. But this is just the EU enforcing some normal, boring laws that would get bipartisan support in the U.S. (I bet similar bills *have* had that support.) 1/