Links
On past sites, I have just had a static linkroll on the side of a page but this time I wanted to try something different. Here I will add interesting links that I have been looking at or thinking about each month. For links that require longer commentary, I might make an individual post.
These are in reverse chronological order.
May 2024
April 2024
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Unbounded Nondeterminism: a Landscape for the Philosopher of Computing Slides - Video Link
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Tiling Agents for Self-Modifying AI, and the Löbian Obstacle
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Walkthrough of the Tiling Agents for Self-Modifying AI paper - Archive
March 2024
- Neural Networks: Zero to Hero - Archive
A course by Andrej Karpathy on building neural networks, from scratch, in code.
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Free as in ‘Do as Your Told’: An analysis of Richard Stallman’s ‘free software’ - Archive
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Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness - PDF
- Iroh Computer - Archive
Iroh is a protocol for syncing & moving bytes. Bytes of any size, on any device. At its core, it’s a peer-2-peer network built on a magic socket that establishes QUIC connections between peers. Peers request and provide blobs of opaque bytes that are incrementally verified by their BLAKE3 hash during transfer.
February 2024
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Umineko: The Opium Of The Magics by Gwern - Archive
Gwern apparently has several similar opinions to me on Umineko, though I liked it a lot more than he did apparently. I was going to write an Umineko post but now that I’ve seen Gwern already has one I’m not sure I want to. -
100 Rabbits Collective - Archive
We live and work on a 10 meter vessel called Pino, we have sailed around the Pacific Ocean and realized how fragile the modern-day computing stack was. Living in remote uninhabited parts of the world has offered us a playground to learn how technology degrades beyond the shores of the western world.
January 2024
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Ciro Santilli’s Homepage (三西猴的主页) - Archive
A very odd website run by the man who I believe operates the ‘archive’ service I use to archive links across this website. Very mysterious.
2024
December 2023
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The Visual Microphone: Passive Recovery of Sound from Video - Archive
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Lamphone: Real-Time Passive Sound Recovery from Light Bulb Vibrations
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Hard Drive of Hearing: Disks that Eavesdrop with a Synthesized Microphone
Our research demonstrates that the mechanical components in magnetic hard disk drives behave as micro-phones with sufficient precision to extract and parse human speech. These unintentional microphones sense speech with high enough fidelity for the Shazam service to recognize a song recorded through the hard drive.
November 2023
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My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file - Archive
There have been several similar discussions to this on Hacker News, and they always capture my interest. I don’t generally use anything other than checklists and textfiles for my own productivity anymore. It is just much easier to keep everything in an app like Obsidian. -
Mircea Popescu’s Urbit Poker Bet - Archive
A historical post about how useless Urbit is as an operating system, and the difficulty of using it to write non-trivial pieces of software. Years later it is still exceedingly difficult to write non-trivial software that can run on Urbit.
October 2023
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Haphaestus: Lightweight browser engine written in Haskell - Archive
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Encrypted traffic interception on Hetzner and Linode targeting the largest Russian XMPP (Jabber) messaging service - Archive
We have discovered XMPP instant messaging protocol encrypted TLS connection wiretapping of jabber.ru (aka xmpp.ru) service’s servers on Hetzner and Linode hosting providers in Germany. The attacker has issued several new TLS certificates using Let’s Encrypt service which were used to hijack encrypted STARTTLS connections on port 5222 using transparent MiTM proxy.
September 2023
2023
June 2021
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On the Construction of a Post-Quantum Blockchain for Smart City - PDF
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Indistinguishability Obfuscation from Well-Founded Assumptions - PDF
May 2021
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Hiding Among the Clones: A Simple and Nearly Optimal Analysis of Privacy Amplification by Shuffling - PDF
- Traffic Confirmation Attacks Despite Noise - PDF
We propose a traffic confirmation attack on low-latency mix networks based on computing robust real-time binary hashes of network traffic flows. Firstly, we adapt the Coskun-Memon Algorithm to construct hashes that can withstand network impairments to allow fast matching of network flows. The resulting attack has a low startup cost and achieves a true positive match rate of 80% when matching one flow out of 9000 with less than 2% false positives, showing traffic confirmation attacks can be highly accurate even when only part of the network traffic flow is seen.
- Opportunistic multi-party shuffling for data reporting privacy - PDF
An important feature of data collection frameworks, in which voluntary participants are involved, is that of privacy. Besides data encryption, which protects the data from third parties in case the communication channel is compromised, there are schemes to obfuscate the data and thus provide some anonymity in the data itself, as well as schemes that ‘mix’ the data to prevent tracing the data back to the source by using network identifiers.
This mixing is usually implemented by utilizing special mix networks in the data collection framework. In this paper we focus on schemes for mixing the data where the participants do not need to trust the mix network or the data collector with hiding the source of the data so that we can evaluate the efficacy of peer to peer mixing strategies in the real world. - Scams in modern societies: how does China differ from the world? - PDF
We study a set of high-profile scams that were well engineered and have hit people hard in China in recent years. We propose a simple but novel theoretical framework to examine psychological, situational and social fabric factors that have played a role in these scams. We also use this framework as a tool to explore scam countermeasures. In so doing, we identify how these Chinese scams differ from their Western counterparts.
April 2021
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Anonymous Card Shuffling and its Applications to Parallel Mixnets - PDF
- Is APL dead? Not anymore - Archive
Is APL dead? Not anymore. Changes in modern hardware, business needs, development methods, and our understanding of programming makes APL in its modern state perhaps more relevant and viable than ever before.
- I’m Going To Use My Real Name Everywhere - Followup
I had decided to use a pseudonym online to put out my political and philosophical thoughts. The central reason for this was the fear of being cancelled and potentially hurting my career and employment. Recently I’ve been rethinking this and decided to abandon the pseudonym and use my real name instead, let me tell you why.
March 2021
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General purpose intelligence: arguing the Orthogonality thesis - Archive
- The Fall of Silicon Valley - Archive
I remember the fall of Silicon Valley. I was there. People still live in Rome long after the collapse of the Roman Empire, and people continue to live and work in Silicon Valley. But it is not the same. The spirit of innovation is gone.
- Multipathing Traffic to Reduce Entry Node Exposure in Onion Routing
Users of an onion routing network, such as Tor, depend on its anonymity properties. However, especially malicious entry nodes, which know the client’s identity, can also observe the whole communication on their link to the client and, thus, conduct several de-anonymization attacks. To limit this exposure and to impede corresponding attacks, we propose to multipath traffic between the client and the middle node to reduce the information an attacker can obtain at a single vantage point.
February 2021
- The OceanStore Project
OceanStore is a global persistent data store designed to scale to billions of users. It provides a consistent, highly-available, and durable storage utility atop an infrastructure comprised of untrusted servers.
- AutoCrypt: Convenient End-to-End Encryption for E-Mail - Archive
Autocrypt is a set of guidelines for developers to achieve convenient end-to-end-encryption of e-mails. It specifies how e-mail programs negotiate encryption capabilities using regular e-mails. For users, Autocrypt Level 1 offers single-click, opt-in encryption, eases encrypted group communications, and provides a way to setup encryption on multiple devices.
January 2021
- Doxcare: Prevention and Aftercare for Those Targeted by Doxxing and Political Harassment - Archive
This step-by-step guide explains how to protect yourself from online stalkers, why it is important, and what to do if you are targeted for “doxxing”—the publishing of your private information.
- Randomized Living - Archive
Starting in 2015 I let a computer decide where I lived and what I did for over two years. It sent me all over the world—everywhere from small town bars in rural Iowa to cat cafes in Taipei, Taiwan. When the computer chose a location I would live there for roughly a month. Once there, the computer chose places to go, people to meet, and things to do within the selected city.
2021
December 2020
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DECO: Liberating Web Data Using Decentralized Oracles for TLS - PDF
- Dalten: A Sovereign Collective - Archive
A for-profit member-focused organization devoted to the individual success of its members, in order to empower them to help other members succeed. In Dalten we are more interested in how we do things than what we do. We practice and build sovereignty both personal and collective.
- Building an Organic Computing Device with Multiple Interconnected Brains - Archive
Recently, we proposed that Brainets, i.e. networks formed by multiple animal brains, cooperating and exchanging information in real time through direct brain-to-brain interfaces, could provide the core of a new type of computing device: an organic computer. Here, we describe the first experimental demonstration of such a Brainet, built by interconnecting four adult rat brains.
November 2020
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Intelligence Led Policing: Pasco Sheriff Targeted Families - Archive
- Publius: A robust, tamper-evident, censorship-resistant web publishing system
We describe a system that we have designed and implemented for publishing content on the web. Our publishing scheme has the property that it is very difficult for any adversary to censor or modify the content. In addition, the identity of the publisher is protected once the content is posted.
- Tor Hidden Service Scaling
Tor’s hidden services in its current state does not fully utilise multi-core architecture or provide any load balancing options in regards to multi-server systems. This thesis explores possible techniques which could be used in scaling Tor’s hidden services horizontally, more precisely looking at possible load balancing techniques and hidden service resiliency.
October 2020
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Why Isn’t There More Progress in Philosophy? - Lecture Video
A really fun paper that attempts to survey the opinions of professional philosophers globally to see which issues have some level of consensus. Some of the results of the poll are quite unexpected actually. - Scalable Onion Routing with Torsk
We introduce Torsk, a structured peer-to-peer low-latency anonymity protocol. Torsk is designed as an interoperable replacement for the relay selection and directory service of the popular Tor anonymity network, that decreases the bandwidth cost of relay selection and maintenance from quadratic to quasilinear while introducing no new attacks on the anonymity provided by Tor, and no additional delay to connections made via Tor.
- Cryptpad - Archive
CryptPad is a private-by-design alternative to popular office tools and cloud services. All the content stored on CryptPad is encrypted before being sent, which means nobody can access your data unless you give them the keys (not even us).
- Obfuscating Finite Automata - PDF
We construct a VBB and perfect circuit-hiding obfuscator for evasive deterministic finite automata using a matrix encoding scheme with a limited zero-testing algorithm. We construct the matrix encoding scheme by extending an existing matrix FHE scheme. Using obfuscated DFAs we can for example evaluate secret regular expressions or disjunctive normal forms on public inputs.
September 2020
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The Policy Analysis Market (and FutureMAP) Archive - Archive
One of the historical pages on the controversial prediction market created by Robin Hanson. -
Longevity FAQ: A Beginner’s Guide to Longevity Research - Archive
- Are Ants (Hymenoptera, Formicidae) Capable of Self Recognition? - Citation
Although further experiments are required, preferentially on ants and social hymenoptera with an excellent visual perception, our observations suggest that some ants can recognize themselves when confronted with their reflection view, this potential ability not necessary implicating some self awareness.
- SchellingCoin: A Minimal-Trust Universal Data Feed - Archive
Here, I provide a mechanism that allows you to create a decentralized data feed. The economics of it are not perfect, and if large collusions are possible then it may break down, but it is likely close to the best that we can do. In this case, we will use the price of ETH/USD as an example; the temperature in Berlin, the world GDP or even the result of a computation that does not lend itself to efficient verifiability can also be used.
August 2020
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Introduction to Organized Pseudolegal Commercial Argument Litigants (2012) - Meads v Meads Commentary - Archive
- viXra
ViXra.org is an e-print archive set up as an alternative to the popular arXiv.org service owned by Cornell University. It has been founded by scientists who find they are unable to submit their articles to arXiv.org because of Cornell University’s policy of endorsements and moderation designed to filter out e-prints that they consider inappropriate.
- Dissolving the Fermi Paradox - PDF
When the model is recast to represent realistic distributions of uncertainty, we find a substantial {\em ex ante} probability of there being no other intelligent life in our observable universe, and thus that there should be little surprise when we fail to detect any signs of it. This result dissolves the Fermi paradox, and in doing so removes any need to invoke speculative mechanisms by which civilizations would inevitably fail to have observable effects upon the universe.
July 2020
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Further Limitations on Information-Theoretically Secure Quantum Homomorphic Encryption
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WTF is Neurocam? - Archive
The answer: A very interesting experiment in reality games. - Dark Web Drug Sellers Dodge Police Crackdowns - Archive
Despite enforcement actions over the last six years that led to the shutdown of about half a dozen sites — including the most recent two — there are still close to 30 illegal online markets, according to DarknetLive, a news and information site for the dark web.
- Bus Ticket Theory of Genius - Archive
Everyone knows that to do great work you need both natural ability and determination. But there’s a third ingredient that’s not as well understood: an obsessive interest in a particular topic.
June 2020
- Hitman Hires Hitman - Archive
Five hitmen have been jailed for attempted murder after each one avoided carrying out the contract themselves so they could make a profit.
- ‘Drop Gangs’ the Latest Evolution in Darknet’s Avoidance of Law Enforcement - Archive
In the not-so-distant past, darknet markets like the Silk Road were the cutting-edge in transactional freedom. Today, that model is already obsolete, displaced by a more decentralized alternative called “drop gangs.” Drop gangs use invite-only encrypted chatrooms to connect buyers with sellers, who then “dead drop” the wares in a public place where the buyer later retrieves.
- Cypherpunk Desert Bus: My Role In The 2016 Zcash Trusted Setup Ceremony
Nothing you will read below changes the fact that you’re trusting me and five other participants not to collude. Full stop. End of story. It is IMPOSSIBLE for myself and the other participants to prove to a third party that we did not collude to keep the secret key. If you do not believe you can trust me, you should stop reading now.
May 2020
- Pond Technical Overview
Pond is forward secure, asynchronous messaging for the discerning. Pond messages are asynchronous, but are not a record; they expire automatically a week after they are received. Pond seeks to prevent leaking traffic information against everyone except a global passive attacker.
- How to Read a Legal Opinion: A Guide for New Law Students
This essay is designed to help new law students prepare for the first few weeks of class. It explains what judicial opinions are, how they are structured, and what law students should look for when reading them.
- Police Interrogation and The Art of Staying Silent -Archive
This article is tasked with briefly explaining how police interrogation works, what preparation goes into it, which techniques are used, and why it is best to stay silent. Silence is a virtue, especially when under interrogation. We will try to show why no one should try to talk their way out of it and how the moment the subject engages is the moment he loses control.
April 2020
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Proofs and Types by Girard - PDF
Of particular interest here are the foundational chapters on linear logic and types. - Terence Tao on Anonymity
Anonymity on the internet is a very fragile thing; every anonymous online identity on this planet is only about 31 bits of information away from being completely exposed.
- Fungal Automata - PDF
The underground mycelium network can be seen as a distributed communication and information processing system linking together trees, fungi and bacteria. Mechanisms and dynamics of information processing in mycelium networks form an unexplored field with just a handful of papers published related to space exploration by mycelium, patterns of electrical activity of fungi, and potential use of fungi as living electronic and computing devices.
- War With China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable - PDF
Premeditated war between the United States and China is very unlikely, but the danger that a mishandled crisis could trigger hostilities cannot be ignored. Thus, while neither state wants war, both states’ militaries have plans to fight one. As Chinese anti-access and area-denial (A2AD) capabilities improve, the United States can no longer be so certain that war would follow its plan and lead to decisive victory. This analysis illuminates various paths a war with China could take and their possible consequences.
March 2020
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Cypherpunk Bitstream Podcast -Youtube Channel
Hosted by Smuggler and Frank Braun. -
How to Share a Secret by Adi Shamir (1979)
It is amazing to see just how simplistic a lot of older research was. It was so easy back in the day to just write down a couple pages of thoughts, a handful of citations, and still be published. - US DOJ Calls Bitcoin Mixing ‘a Crime’ in Arrest of Software Developer - Archive
Larry Harmon was arrested earlier this week for allegedly participating in a money-laundering conspiracy worth more than $300 million in cryptocurrency involving darknet marketplace AlphaBay. However, the family of the Coin Ninja CEO claims he was never involved with AlphaBay.
Many bitcoin experts are concerned this could establish a precedent where simply creating a bitcoin mixer is seen, in itself, as a money-laundering conspiracy.
The public policy group Coin Center argued non-custodial mixers should not be subject to regulation because they offer user-hosted software tools. Only time will tell if the court agrees this reduces the developer’s liability. - Supplier Blacklist: International Blacklist of Bad Suppliers
The legitimacy of so-called “verified supplier” directories is highly debatable. To complicate matters, there is no functional Better Business Bureau or government entity willing to crack down on scams and unethical practices overseas. SupplierBlacklist.com is a free, user-generated platform designed to fill this void in the marketplace.
February 2020
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Mechanical Computing Systems Using Links and Rotary Joints - PDF
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Introduction to Computational Finance Without Agonizing Pain
- Pyramid Scheme - Archive
A dialect of the Scheme programming language that targets the Ethereum Virtual Machine(EVM). Pyramid Scheme is implemented using the appropriately-named Racket. This article covers the high-level design of the Pyramid compiler: The compiler’s components and Pyramid’s runtime environment.
- How Cybercriminals Can Abuse Chat Platform APIs as C&C Infrastructures
Our research focuses on analyzing whether or not and how the otherwise beneficial API of a chat platform can be turned into a C&C infrastructure. This research paper examines several platforms, including chat programs, self-hosted chat clients, and social networks. For each platform, we tested the unique possibility of using its API as a C&C server. We also explored if these chat platforms are already being abused by known malware.
- When Coding Style Survives Compilation - Archive
If we encounter an executable binary sample in the wild, what can we learn from it? In this work, we show that the programmer’s stylistic fingerprint, or coding style, is preserved in the compilation process and can be extracted from the executable binary. This means that it may be possible to infer the programmer’s identity if we have a set of known potential candidate programmers, along with executable binary samples (or source code) known to be authored by these candidates.
- Palaeological Grammar - Archive
I was told about this rare book by a close friend and managed to snag a copy. This is one of the few reviews or references to the text that can be found online.