iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alec Muffett @alecmuffett.bsky.social · 21h

Opportunities to do good in the world are rare and easily squandered, regrettably; but I will also observe that they are quite hard to execute when all of the world is gunning for you. There was a recent thread on Reddit asking about the "why didn't his yacht intervene when… [Continues in alt text]

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Alec Muffett @alecmuffett.bsky.social · 22h

Heresy! Surely you cannot be suggesting that Mark Zuckerberg and technology platforms in general are simply behaving like perfectly ordinary corporations that have acted thusly for 100 or more years?

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Alec Muffett @alecmuffett.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Now I am waiting for the inevitable Bluesky take along the lines of: AI DOOMERISM IS A PLOT BY BILLIONAIRE SEX CULT TESCREAL ALTRUISTS TO FORCE TRANS PEOPLE TO BREED BY PUTTING CYBER IN THEIR BRAIN'S R-COMPLEX, BERNIE SANDERS IS BEHIND IT - or something like that.

https://x.com/akarlin/status/2103939343840903320

https://x.com/kunley_drukpa/status/2104304176327225588

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Alec Muffett @alecmuffett.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Gosh, the latest @ofcom.bsky.social investigation into #AgeVerification at @pornhub.com will conveniently serve as a test for whether Apple will be permitted to break the monopolistic *regulatory capture* currently enjoyed by British AV providers: www.theregister.com/security/202...

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Alec Muffett @alecmuffett.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

HOW IT STARTED / HOW IT'S GOING

Eric Lu post the factorisation of rsa260 and I respond with hello from RSA 155 and congratulations

FakeIACR (a parody cryptography research account) posts that 1 divides RSA 270, and official Ben staff says hello from RSA 0 and congratulations

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Alec Muffett @alecmuffett.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Maybe you can create a systemd service which is triggered by a kernel plugin that detects anybody typing "14/88"* and then reports them to bluesky headquarters? Then you can call fascist any distro that doesn't include it. * Or anything else from the ADL list www.adl.org/sites/defaul...

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Alec Muffett @alecmuffett.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

I'm not aware of anybody asking you for money and I'm not giving them any money either, but going around and raging that other people and other companies are giving him money, and making wild claims on the back of that, is illiberal and bad discourse.

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Alec Muffett @alecmuffett.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

No, I'm pointing out that the money is not his.

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Alec Muffett @alecmuffett.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Gotta love Ron who posts-and-blocks in order to try and have the final word, with his assertion that people being involved or even founding a software project somehow imbues that project with evil.

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Alec Muffett @alecmuffett.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Your assertion stands upon incorrect foundations:

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Alec Muffett @alecmuffett.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

A few years ago I wrote "The Enterprise Onion Toolkit" which helps people set up @torproject.org onion sites for clearnet sites like: Reddit, the BBC, the Guardian, etc. The Tor Project forked my code without asking permission, not even retrospectively, using it as a semi commercial product:

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Alec Muffett @alecmuffett.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

EVERYBODY WHO'S TRYING TO HATE ON #OMARCHY AND #1PASSWORD AFTER THAT PIECE IN @theverge.com - HERE IS THE DONOR LIST FOR YOUR DAILY TWO MINUTES OF HATE FOR THE NEXT FEW WEEKS: omarchy.org/news/2026/08...

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Alec Muffett @alecmuffett.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

"IT MUST ALL BE RUSSIAN BOTS" Maybe some of it, but it's not like Russian bots are going to get a huge boost out of a reaction tweet to a number theory announcement.

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Alec Muffett @alecmuffett.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

I find it weird but indicative of the character of #BlueSky that elsewhere X/Twitter is blowing up with the announcement by Eric Lu of the factorization of #RSA260, a 862-bit RSA key: x.com/penlume/stat... …whilst over here folk are about what it *means* to give money to a Linux distribution.

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Alec Muffett @alecmuffett.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Now you are just quoting Planck

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Alec Muffett @alecmuffett.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

"software should be judged by the politics of people who are associated with them" folk be like:

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Alec Muffett @alecmuffett.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

SOMETHING MUST BE DONE - AND CLEARLY THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING THEY COULD BE DOING!

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Alec Muffett @alecmuffett.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Google Maps UK, right now. I noted that it took 20+ seconds for the name of the lake to render even though the other lakes were named immediately, so I presume there may be some geolocation lock.

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Alec Muffett @alecmuffett.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

You are basically repeating my argument, except you are still imagining incorrectly that there is some kind of upside for them. bsky.app/profile/alec...

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Alec Muffett @alecmuffett.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Someday somebody will make the argument that "because they ageverified THEREFORE Facebook started showing them adverts for alcohol & they find that offensive" — and *boom* it will be data protection lawsuits all over the place It will be the "personal security phone numbers" debacle all over again

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Alec Muffett @alecmuffett.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

I wrote the following as a response to some friends making the same point in a chat group this morning; you pose basically the same question and observation, and so this is the same answer Literally: Meta are paying lobbyists to try and make AV into somebody else's problem I may blog this, later

['but what about the lobbyists?!?' - is…] the usual response to this point. It's naive and simplistic, in the same way as some people imagine that [Meta] holds "data about a person" as a kind of glorified spreadsheet with that person's name on it.

I find it weird that on one hand civil society will say "big platforms know that you are pregnant before you know it yourself" - yet the very next moment say "big platforms benefit from age verification because they don't know enough about you already" - simultaneously ignoring that "there are reams of conflicting international legislation preventing information collected for one purpose being used for a different purpose, and having the burden of protecting government ID thrust upon you is complete pain in the ass"

You know that saying about "'free puppies' are not free" - because you are suddenly saddled with food and vet bills? Now imagine you are forcibly given three billion free puppies and have to upend your life in order to accommodate them and look after them, "or else". Plus you have several thousand people actively attempting to steal the puppies, and the R/SPCA is trying to prove that you are incompetent because they will get huge brownie points, funding, and press headlines if they can find arguable faults in your care.

Re: lobbying: Neta spent 2 billion dollars attempting to make age verification into *somebody else's problem*.

I think that kind of proves my point.

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Alec Muffett @alecmuffett.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Again, Yeah, Nah. "Decisions taken by a relatively small number of human beings" denies responsibility of every person turning over an internal combustion engine in the past 150 years, assigns malicious intent to every farmer with a farting cow. This is teenage rage and should be seen as such.

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Alec Muffett @alecmuffett.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Famous weapon from USENIX Security in the 1990s has been resurrected for the five-year-old:

Double barrel rubber band flintlock with milled nylon gearing

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Alec Muffett @alecmuffett.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

> @goodlawproject.org Unless you are talking about HSE, I'm not aware of any obligation or duty of care for the British media to perform risk assessments regarding "people being reported upon"; could you tell us more please? Perhaps the OSA? Cc: @cyberleagle.bsky.social

Quote: I do not understand what the public interest was in continuing to hound him after he resigned as a professor and I do not understand what risk assessments media outlets did

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Alec Muffett @alecmuffett.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

So who else just had their phone screech at them?

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Alec Muffett @alecmuffett.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

I lack the cool tools to post a mega-skeet across 4 separate mini ones, so I am just going to use the alt text:

I've been a developer for 40 years, working for a SV hardware manufacturer for 17 & Facebook for three. I've written literally millions of lines of code.

My mētis: what you call "centralised" services are simply normal "client server" distributed graph architectures with a nucleated "hub" - look at the handful of huge mastodon instances for comparison. "Real" distribution is hard to code well, harder to deploy reliably, and simpler to manage and update when you just run everything out of a single farm of machines like Facebook was/is.

I joined Facebook when it was nine years old and left three years later, I know many of the people who built it. Truth: it was a huge effort of engineering which made it as big as it is today. Not always good engineering, but good enough, and importantly: rapidly and reactively developed in response to changing market conditions and demand for "cool features"

Centralised deployment is not some great capitalist conspiracy, it is simply the difference between building an apartment complex in one location versus designing a set of global home-building standards (along with a reference implementation) and pursuing and adoption for the latter, only calling her to success if it supplants all existing housing. The reason this is different from the real world is that you can't fit 3 billion people into a single apartment complex in the physical world.

…Europe has no successful social network is largely regulatory: Europe is rightly proud of the employment rights and social safety net for people who work here, but it is foolish to pretend that THIS environment is a great one for software engineers who are willing to put in 60+ hour weeks irrespective that people are on the sidelines screaming at them that they are being "exploited".… I have done this, both for work and for personal open-source projects. Throwing XMPP / MQTT / AT-Proto into the mix is simply adding an extra degree of freedom to the arguments and the inertia of development.

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Alec Muffett @alecmuffett.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

"Zuckerberg says <these new capabilities> might be <optimism>. But it could be <pessimism>! <Vague indication towards the precautionary principle and a need for general wariness>." At least it's even handed.

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Alec Muffett @alecmuffett.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

This strategy didn't work to prevent Brexit, it certainly won't work in Britain until such time as some tinpot banana republic invades a British protectorate* and Westminster decides it needs to do a Maggie. *So long as it isn't the US invading Grenada.

"Overseas Territories governments: web and social media
Updated 19 August 2024

Contents
Anguilla
Ascension
Bermuda
British Antarctic Territory
British Indian Ocean Territory
British Virgin Islands
Cayman Islands
Falkland Islands
Gibraltar
Montserrat
Pitcairn
St Helena
Tristan da Cunha
Turks and Caicos Islands"

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Alec Muffett @alecmuffett.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

"what we need is patriotism, except we'll call it 'civic nationalism' - that somehow we will foster amongst the English, Scots, Welsh & Northern Irish (irrespective the latter 3 all hate the former) — and then we'll scare them all into submission"

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Alec Muffett @alecmuffett.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

"uncritical nationalism / 'my country rite or rong' is practice by lazy people who will not pick up a gun or do any other kind of work"

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Alec Muffett @alecmuffett.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

"ethnic nationalism is bad because it's less effective for getting people to sign up for the army"

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Alec Muffett @alecmuffett.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

ps: I'm getting nearly 7 tokens per second out of a 2018 Mac Mini in my spare room. It reads RSS feeds for me and helps with organisational housekeeping tasks. Soon it will be monitoring the weather forecast for me and suggesting fun things & chores to do - avoiding both rain and sunburn.

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Alec Muffett @alecmuffett.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

This fine commentary: mastodon.social/@swearyantho...

I am baffled why people are going "oh no what is to be done" about openai breaking into a competitors computers, when it is incredibly obvious: Charge them under the CFAA. "Oh but their research". Sandbox it from the Internet. "Oh it's too hard to do that". Skill issue, get good.

As I said: Weird that Robert Morris got charged for all of the computers his worm broke into. After all, he didn't do it, the computer program did it, that's completely different, apparently.

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Alec Muffett @alecmuffett.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

You mean Coral Reef; it's only 8 minutes away by car.

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