ying tong

@mossy.bsky.social

A fascinating read. The process of making law is so fuzzy, especially when it comes to the intersection of civil liberties and frontier technologies. And this memoir only covers state surveillance, specifically in the US! Some of my favourite quotes:

"Privacy's Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance", by Cindy Cohn

"To a significant extent, cryptography has been a search for desirable abstraction boundaries. And it’s not mathematical or scientific truth that helps you find good abstraction boundaries. They are drawn by those who work in a field to advance it in a chosen direction." - Phillip Rogaway (2021)

🏗️ Building a resilient tech ecosystem, community-driven privacy endeavours, and collectively owned ISPs 📡 💡 This and more in the latest DWeb Meetup, with Will Scott from Protocol Labs, Riley Wong from Community Privacy Residency, and Lars Gierth from Freifunk. 📹 Watch the recording

Screen capture of Will Scott from the meetup videocallScreenshot from a keynote slide, titled “Examples of Community Infrastructure”, with logos of “Cooperation Jackson”, “Tengo Puerto Rico en mi corazon”, as physical community infrastructure and “Mastodon”, “Wikipedia” as digital community infrastructure.Screen capture of Riley Wong from the meetup videocallPhoto of people setting up antennas on a roof.

A funny idea for a "vampire Uber" app: both drivers and passengers use Uber with zkTLS, and submit their matches to vampire Uber. On vampire Uber, we remove Uber's cut of the profit, so the driver is paid more and the passenger pays less

This is the right response to the Mississippi law from Bluesky. "Age verification" laws are nothing more than a massive expansion of government surveillance and censorship. They make kids less safe, not more safe. Get a VPN and call your lawmakers. Time to fight. www.wired.com/story/bluesk...

Bluesky Goes Dark in Mississippi Over Age Verification Law

Bluesky has chosen to block access in the state rather than risk potential fines of up to $10,000 per violation.

wired.com

Is it worse to show a physical ID at the liquor store, or to tap your Google Wallet and create a zk proof of age (and a digital trace of this interaction)?