Developers from Signal (including its protocol's co-creator) along with Microsoft and Harvard unveil Encrypted Spaces, an open-source codebase for a new generation of private collaboration apps. Think Slack, Discord, Google Docs, all end-to-end encrypted. www.wired.com/story/signal...

Signal Alums Reveal ‘Encrypted Spaces,’ a System for Making Private Collaboration Apps

The new open-source project could serve as the basis for a future of apps with features as complex as Slack, Discord, or Google Docs—but with added protection against surveillance.

wired.com

Proud to finally share what I've been working on. I'm excited for a future where privacy is normal. encryptedspaces.org

Signal Alums Reveal ‘Encrypted Spaces,’ a System for Making Private Collaboration Apps

The new open-source project could serve as the basis for a future of apps with features as complex as Slack, Discord, or Google Docs—but with added protection against surveillance.

wired.com

this is terrible, and yet sadly so common. we need a standardized system for ownership over our digital IDs so big tech companies can’t just flip an off switch for your whole digital life (working on it, but it’s a long road). google, microsoft, etc doing this everyday too and users have no recourse

Dr Paris Buttfield-Addison@hey.paris · 8mo ago

posted about my Apple ID woes, please share widely? hey.paris/posts/appleid/

pre-writing a devastating obituary for your enemy is god-tier hating of a kind you don’t often see anymore. renaissance haterism. beautiful stuff.

Brittany Trang@brittanytrang.com · 9mo ago

A Sharon Begley byline, almost 5 years after her death. Upon hearing the news James Watson had died, a STAT reporter said in our Slack, "I wish I could read what Sharon would have written." Incredible news: Sharon in fact did pre-write a Watson obit. And it is masterful and excoriating. 🧪🧬🧫

"Tzefardea Tzedek" (Frog of Righteousness) As soon as the Portland Frog became a meme, Jewish social media blew up with jokes about the 2nd Passover plague - tzefarde'a (frogs) - and the Rabbinical commentary around it. I knew I had to make a calligraphy piece encompassing all of it. (more in alt.)

NASA scheduled a major workshop for early career researchers during the most important week of the Jewish calendar, during two of the most important days of that week and expects me to accept that this was “difficult scheduling conflicts” That’s what casual antisemitism sounds like

I really dislike how science has started calling almost any fancy computational technique AI. 🧪 The framing of this entire article makes it sound like a benevolent AI independently made these drugs. That is *pure fantasy*. Instead: a team of scientists made a machine learning model for a study.

When I die, please do not write an AI obituary of me *or* code an AI replica, however well-intentioned, but feel free to build a shockingly realistic rotini sculpture & then eat it at my shiva

The fate of ordinary Gazans trapped by Israel in a war zone and ordinary Israelis held hostage by Hamas in a war zone will be one and the same. They are starving. They are buried beside one another. They are cast aside by those with power to save them. For this we weep.

Read this in full. I'm short: The ADL has fully given up on its mission to fight real antisemitism. Instead, they are focused on unconditional support towards Israel, including justification of antisemitism if it serves that goal. Plus, working with fascists & antisemitic groups and people.

Noah Shachtman@noahshachtman.bsky.social · last yr.

I spoke with 40+ sources for a look inside the Anti-Defamation League. Here’s some of what I found. ADL’s gentle response to Elon Musk’s infamous salute was partially driven by his support of Israel. To ADL, that indicated he didn’t have “antisemitic tendencies.” (1/x) nymag.com/intelligence...

🤖 Always on the lookout for potential net positive uses of “AI”, esp for elderly…but the claims here pissed me right off: “There was no way that we could have found enough songwriters out there to be able to create those tracks in an authentic way” 🚫 No. MANY musicians [wc]ould do this. And, 🧵

NPR@npr.org · last yr.

For nearly 30 years, the nonprofit Songs of Love Foundation has created custom songs for kids with terminal illnesses. Now it has harnessed AI to expand its services to older adults with memory loss.

As a Jewish person who worked at Harvard for 7 years, including much of the period covered by the Department of Ed. investigation, I object deeply to this retaliatory bullshit being laundered as on my behalf. www.ed.gov/about/news/p...

I have been using the em dash for about 10 years (I only learned English 13 years ago, for context). I even got a whole book I published before ChatGPT to prove it. I am not stopping—too useful!

Juno@jsketch12.bsky.social · last yr.

How the hell did we let AI take away the em dash from us. it's a useful punctuation mark but now people are so stupid that society thinks it's exclusively used by chatgpt

I wrote a bit more about X’s new encrypted DMs and the Juicebox protocol. blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2025/06/09/a...

A bit more on Twitter/X’s new encrypted messaging

Matthew Garrett has a nice post about Twitter (uh, X)’s new end-to-end encryption messaging protocol, which is now called XChat. The TL;DR of Matthew’s post is that from a cryptographic…

blog.cryptographyengineering.com

This is just a flat out lie and everyone involved is either malicious or incompetent

I'd argue it's less than not great, it's bad. Since they're not using HSMs for Juicebox, and they control all the realms, they have the ability to easily brute force anyone's 4-digit PIN and get their stored secret. It's basically just backdoored.

Matthew Green@matthewdgreen.bsky.social · last yr.

Good discussion on Twitter’s new encrypted DMs. TL;DR the cryptography doesn’t seem bad, but it isn’t great. mjg59.dreamwidth.org/71646.html

If your DMs are “encrypted” but one org holds all the keys, you haven’t distributed trust – you’ve built a backdoor. Juicebox only works when boundaries are real. Separation isn’t optional. Replication != distribution.

Don’t Put All Your Juice in One Box

At Juicebox, we believe key recovery should be secure, user friendly, and actually… work. That means it has to be more than cryptographic theater. It has to reflect the real world, where systems get h...

juicebox.xyz

We are truly living in the worst world. Who asked to have AI monitor every aspect of their digital lives, by default? These features should be opt-in, not out. If you can even justify their existence at all.

Jason@elnawser.bsky.social · last yr.

Thanks. I had no idea. This setting is wiiiiiild. Can't believe this is a default.

A dragon emerges from an egg, within a nest among others waiting to hatch atop a majestic castle. The dragon is embedded with a DragonRNA, a DNA strand covalently extended with an RNA tail. Variants of precursor DNAs are backlit by a glowing polymerase within each egg,

Incredibly proud of the brilliant work Emily has done – these little monsters have so much potential in RNA therapeutics! So glad it’s finally in the world. It was a privilege to help with some figures and artistic renderings (spot the dragon flying through the abstract!). Mazel tov to all involved!

Emily Greenwald@emilymbgreenwald.bsky.social · last yr.

I’m excited to share our paper in @narjournal.bsky.social on DragonRNA: DNA-primed RNA extension! We developed a fluorescence gel shift assay to detect DragonRNA activity by enzymes, & characterized this activity using gel assays, sequencing, & bioinformatics. academic.oup.com/nar/article/...

let’s be clear that personalisation amounts to determining a person’s future based on recurring patterns of the past. if you belong to a groups that society has not been kind to in the past (black & brown, LGBTQI, poor, disabled, etc), AI personalisation ensures your future encodes past injustice

Ok, look people: Signal as a *protocol* is excellent. As a service it’s excellent. But as an application running on your phone, it’s… an application running on your consumer-grade phone. The targeted attacks people use on those devices are well known.

Niche adorableness (if you get this you’re my people): Teaching 6th graders at Hebrew school. A passage has the word “mitzvah.” 6th grader interrupts lesson to excitedly yell “wait the commandments are GIRLS.” After a beat they continue: “the Torah is a GIRL! Who run the world?! Girls!”

Having been on the inside, I can say: the Signal Foundation is in a tough spot. It’s an unstable balancing act – and I’m not sure they’re prepared for what’s coming.

Matthew Green@matthewdgreen.bsky.social · last yr.

I don’t mean to be doom and gloom about things. I guess my takeaway (1) is: no matter what people tell you, actual privacy in communications is one of the most important services in the entire world, yet (2) it is a totally unstable balancing act for for-profit companies to provide this, long term.

Signal was designed to be a consumer-grade messaging app. It’s really, really good for that purpose. And obviously “excellent consumer grade” has a lot of intersection with military-grade cryptography just because that’s how the world works. But it is being asked to do a lot!

Before you travel, minimize risk: • Encrypt your devices (FileVault, BitLocker, etc) • Backup + sanitize data (assume others may access it) • Power OFF your devices to ensure full disk encryption is active This gives you the best chance of keeping your data safe, even if your devices are seized.

Jenny Cohn@jennycohn.bsky.social · last yr.

“France’s research minister said a French scientist was denied entry to the US this month after immigration officers at an airport searched his phone and found messages in which he had expressed criticism of the Trump administration.” He had been traveling to a conference near Houston, TX. 3/19/25

anyway, this is Curtis Yarvin talking expressly about the motivation underlying the Trump Pentagon's shift to drone-centric warfare: they want a cryptographically verifiable thousand-year reich which excludes the possibility of popular revolt or democracy forever.

rev. howard arson@theophite.bsky.social · last yr.

the basic idea behind the VC fascists, and I have heard this expressed explicitly, is that by 2026, they think they will be able to construct a universal autocracy run by chud Skynet which can murder anyone on Earth who thinks a woke thought with a loitering drone.

Purim reminds us that resilience and joy go hand in hand. The world is uncertain, but at least we get cookies (made with @emilymbgreenwald.bsky.social!). Chag Purim Sameach!

Double Union was my home away from home in SF, and it was a pleasure to help run it for the last ~6 years! DU’s not just a makerspace, but a vital community space that helps spark creativity, friendship, and a feeling of safety and belonging that such spaces often lack. Donate if you can ❤️

Double Union@doubleunion.bsky.social · last yr.

Double Union is a 100% volunteer-run #nonprofit #makerspace for women and non-binary people. About 60% of our operating costs are covered by sliding-scale member dues. #Donations cover the remaining 40% to keep this space accessible to the widest range of members: doubleunion.org/support/