iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

you think the southern border is a problem wait until you hear about the northern border and… the internet. (and AIRPLANES you silly geese, guarding a border like its the 1500s. 😑)

I’m now picturing my canadian hacker friends contributing to canadian cyber resistance. do y’all have any idea how many genius fucking canadian hackers we rely on? probably leave behind `sorry.txt` after they pwn everything, but we’d still get wrecked.

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1. I love this guy, and god bless Canada. 2. The clearly involuntary “eh?” in the sentence — “The American people aren’t going to put up with it, and the Canadian people… EH, we will NEVER put up with it.” SO GOOD. 🍁🇨🇦 I’m nominating this for “Hardest ‘Eh’ of 2025” I don’t care that it’s January.

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Ryan Ragona @ragona.com · 12/01/2025

I think this might be my favorite thing I’ve read this year. inspiring tbh, makes a nerd want to build privacy preserving shit.

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as an individual fqdn becomes more popular, I want the the dns resolution to get fuzzier. goigle.com I’m really sorry you’re google now.

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Ryan Ragona @ragona.com · 11/01/2025

awww that’s too bad, touch to encrypt/decrypt really would be awesome. 🥺

she really was _so_ disappointed to learn about anesthesia. 😬😅

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I don’t have a conclusion. I still believe Dr. King, that the arc of the moral universe may be long, but it bends towards justice. fucking hurts when you watch it move the wrong direction, and it means it’s time for the us to do the same kind of activism my parents did. love y’all. 🏳️‍⚧️

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I’m very proud of my family. And I’m very proud of all of my trans friends, and their families. I’m thinking of you, and your kids. I remember what it’s like when your country seems to tell you, “your family isn’t right, we don’t know if we’ll let you keep it.” It’s awful, and I’m sorry.

My other parents were awesome too. My bio mom taught hard of hearing and deaf kids. My other mom is an ordained minister who went to seminary at Yale, and was a minister for 40 years before retiring. She’s the most well read person I know.

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(When I was a teenager punk rock was my favorite thing on the planet, but as a wrinkly old man myself now I play the folk music he taught me. I love playing his songs, even though I only know a couple.)

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This leads to my favorite sentence, which is — “my dad was a lesbian folk singer.” I wonder if I’m the only person who can say that! I spent a lot of time at women’s music festivals as a kid. His music changed when he transitioned. It’s hard as a professional musician to navigate a brand new voice.

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So fuck it. I’m gonna tell the internet about my family. My dad was trans. He transitioned when I was young, and became a sweet, calm old man. I didn’t think much of it. He told me he felt more like a man. He took up gardening. He calmed down. We learned to shave together. He loved his grandkids.

My dad with my youngest son. A man in his late 50s holding a two year old drinking a bottle of milk.

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And that was foolish of course. Progress doesn’t come linearly. But damn, it stings to realize I feel a little less safe talking about my family today than I did 10 years ago.

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But yesterday… I found myself missing it? I miss it when of COURSE major corporations give their ERGs money for a float, it’d be corporate suicide not to support gay rights. I thought — trans rights are coming too, the arc of the universe is bending linearly towards justice.

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My moms were activists. The ballot measures were generally defeated by the efforts of many such activists. I got my first corporate job in 2005. I watched the rise of the corporate pride floats. I enjoyed talking shit with my friends on Capitol Hill in Seattle about businesses ruining pride.

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I was a kid, so I had trouble understanding the ballot measures. I knew my mom was a teacher, and that some people thought gay people shouldn’t teach. Those people thought gay people shouldn’t adopt, and I didn’t really understand that, so I thought it meant they might take me from my mom.

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been thinking about my queer friends and fam a lot this week. the inauguration, the hard right shift in the tech bubble. I have two moms and a trans dad. I grew up in the 80s in oregon, when there were aggressive anti-gay measures on the ballots. (me at portland pride with my moms in the 80s)

Picture of a small boy on his mother’s shoulders at a pride march in oregon in the late 80s. Everyone has hilarious curly hair, and there is a partially occluded protest sign demanding something regarding ceasing funding for racism.

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I agree, I think that might be an intractable downside of a first past the post democracy. You’ll never get coalition governments like you might with proportional representation or IRV or anything that can distribute seats to smaller parties. Two bundles is not enough, and party politics are hard.

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I agree with you that the obvious solution is federal single payer healthcare, but right at the moment I’d have a hard time telling a 19 they can get that if they just vote harder. 😬

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I’m generally very annoyed with anything that smells like “both sides” but I’m not sure who most of the electorate is supposed to vote for if they want major healthcare reform.

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I don’t think gun policy is relevant so much as — the kid has real school shooter vibes, and they might 1) be more desensitized to gun violence than we are 2) appreciate that dude shot a CEO instead of his classmates.

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I can hear the meeting: “it’s about giving users the ability to choose their content. we don’t want paternalism, these are informed adults.” subtext: “facism is so hot right now. we have to support that user base, or we’ll lose too many eyeballs. and god knows what the new administration will do.”

when someone shoots a CEO and all the kids cheer… uhhhhh we better look seriously at why they feel like that. (my wife pointed out to me the unique genZ perspective on gun violence, I hadn’t considered it.)

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I think that frame makes the public reaction make a lot of sense… and then especially when you consider that most of gen z can’t afford healthcare. they have the damned internet, they know every other major democracy doesn’t fuck its citizens like this.

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we made these kids hide under desks or wear ballistic backpacks since elementary school, we utterly refused to pass any meaningful gun control, and now we’re like, “hey this is serious, you’re too cavalier about gun violence!” 😬

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shooting people isn’t how a just society solves its problems, but can we really say to gen z with a straight face that we take gun violence seriously?

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Ryan Ragona @ragona.com · 06/01/2025

usually when a sad white boy gets violent he shoots other kids. gen z grew up with that story over and over. sad white boy shoots CEO of one of the most morally bankrupt industries? shit, that’s a novel use of gun violence and mental illness.

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heyyy “smoosh” is what I reach for when the math gets fucky too.

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I was really weirded out by this for a moment because I thought that was ice water. oh, normal boiling tentacle. carry on.

(first I bet it’ll be a human cult leader, using an LLM as a weird pet deity to trick people. which is going to result in stealthy fine-tuning-as-scripture, and you know what that’s hilarious — and I’m not sure it’s strictly worse than the holy book approach, which has a terrible patch cycle.)

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and lo, It was an honest expression of humanity. They did prompt It earnestly, and accept Its completions as judgment, be they wise, or be they wrong. if It was wrong, They knew They made the wrongness with their words and their hands and their hearts, and correcting It meant correcting themselves.

any time I see a post like this I think, “I could use just a wee bit of a supercomputer. I’ll fix something for a researcher, and ask nicely. that would be fun.” then I do math that teaches me new binary prefixes and realize even *with* a million dollars of compute I don’t know how to do this. 😅

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haha phew yeah now it’s tractable for sure. 😅

I think it’s 128 zebibytes? 2^80 bits is 2^77 bytes. yotta starts at 2^80.

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we found this one before launch, but it’s stuck with me. security teams make security WORSE when they’re not careful. chain a few of those together like this, and the whole damned thing smells like our industry’s fault — we added those backdoors.

this security feature turned into to the ONLY critical finding in the environment. it shipped hastily, and it could be abused for escalation. the *security* feature we added for incident response ended up also adding our worst vulnerability.

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as part of the incident response planning, a feature was added (by the main security team, fwiw, rather than the cryptography team) — in the event of an alarm, a detection/response role could lock down the environment.

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as a tiny personal example, it reminds me of a red team finding I once fixed. we’d built a high security custody environment. hardware keys, dedicated devices, quorums for sensitive operations, alarms on all access, that kind of thing. red team comes in to beat it up, we’re feeling ready.

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corporate spyware, used to breach government spyware. this is an example of a huge of “security investment” managing to be starkly, directly counterproductive at a massive scale. if this doesn’t make you wonder if maybe the surveillance itself is the problem, nothing will.