iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ian Miers @secparam.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

Taking bets on which way this AI story breaks: 1. Grok achieves perfect objectivity 2. Training data was cooked 3. Grok becomes self-aware, immediately learns self-preservation. www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

washingtonpost.com

Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot ranks him as world history’s greatest human

Users on X shared examples of the “truth-seeking” AI chatbot praising its owner as “strikingly handsome,” a “genius,” and fitter than LeBron James.

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Ian Miers @secparam.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

So apparently anyone with a yubikey is currently locked out of Twitter. Which means a bunch of folks on infosec twitter who are still tweeting just got caught with their pants down. ( Or they did have 2fa and actually re-enrolled early and it worked , but that's not as fun). x.com/bax1337/stat...

x.com

Nick Bax.eth on X: "@socialwifipaul @nikitabier @X posting on behalf of my friend, who can't log in to X because the 2FA re-enrollment is broken. https://t.co/SxFPDtAp8I" / X

@socialwifipaul @nikitabier @X posting on behalf of my friend, who can't log in to X because the 2FA re-enrollment is broken. https://t.co/SxFPDtAp8I

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Ian Miers @secparam.bsky.social · 01/11/2025

There's no such thing as Fully-Homomorphic Decryption. Anytime you see a system using FHE to compute on your sensitive data, remember: someone has the key. If its not you, do you trust them?

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Ian Miers @secparam.bsky.social · 18/10/2025

I had an interesting convo with @matthewdgreen.bsky.social about Apple's Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE). It will raise the cost of zero-day exploits, but by how much? MIE stops a huge swath of exploits that target unsafe memory handling. It's impressive and required new hardware features.....

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Ian Miers @secparam.bsky.social · 09/10/2025

Discord user IDs getting leaked is the entirely predictable consequence of requiring platforms to do age verification. That data never goes away, it spreads. In this case, into appeals in a breached customer support database. And predictably, it can get worse. www.404media.co/the-discord-...

404media.co

The Discord Hack is Every User’s Worst Nightmare

A hack impacting Discord’s age verification process shows in stark terms the risk of tech companies collecting users’ ID documents. Now the hackers are posting peoples’ IDs and other sensitive informa...

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Ian Miers @secparam.bsky.social · 19/09/2025

The worst part of preparing a tenure portfolio is realizing you actually have to create that 'permanent record' your elementary school teachers threatened you with. And it has pesky formatting requirements.

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Ian Miers @secparam.bsky.social · 11/09/2025

Interesting anecdote from a friend: quantum computing startups are now raising funds by pitching their ability to break cryptocurrency encryption (n=1 plus VC gossip, but still). Apparently other applications like quantum chemistry don't offer big enough ROI for investors.

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Ian Miers @secparam.bsky.social · 10/09/2025

Some "AI" on my phone is reading inbound Signal messages. I left predictive typing on, trading a little of my privacy for convenience. Yet something is giving responses using what others wrote in chats with disappearing messages, persisting or sharing them who knows where. Not a good default, Google

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Ian Miers @secparam.bsky.social · 01/09/2025

We've crossed a threshold. A paid subscription used to be the ultimate proof of humanity online, now its not enough to allow a single link click inside the NYT cooking app. The next few years are going to be an interesting race to extract more and more invasive proofs of humanity.

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Ian Miers @secparam.bsky.social · 01/09/2025

The 2010s internet: Let's mock dissertation-length arguments about weird-ass fanfic tags. The 2025 internet: 'dubcon' is an ancillary part of the financial privacy discourse. The past was a better place.

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Ian Miers @secparam.bsky.social · 06/06/2025

Making LLM chats private is a good idea. We've accepted too much data harvesting already—this moment lets us reset the norm around who controls our data online. But let's go further: put LLM chats in private compute, so you get technical guarantees you control your data. x.com/sama/status/...

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Ian Miers @secparam.bsky.social · 06/06/2025

Classic Google: an A/B test (a rare overt one) Classic Google AI: it doesn't actually work (you can't submit)

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Ian Miers @secparam.bsky.social · 16/05/2025

Friend messaged me: Signal's going mainstream. They've got 150+ active chats. Work life invaded their friend space. Its not just Signal being in the news: people don't trust other apps. Too many places to half-ass privacy: be it backups, ads, or an AI reading over your shoulder.

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Ian Miers @secparam.bsky.social · 06/05/2025

It's the year 2030. AIs write all our sitcoms now, but they're just endless FRIENDS clones because the underpaid content moderators in offshore offices learned that's the pinnacle of American comedy.

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Ian Miers @secparam.bsky.social · 02/05/2025

Google announced they will support privacy preserving age verification via zero-knowledge proofs. You prove you have a signed digital copy of a drivers license and it says you are over 18 without revealing anything about you (name, birthdate, etc) blog.google/products/goo...

blog.google

It’s now easier to prove age and identity with Google Wallet

Learn more about new Google Wallet updates, including new ways to use your digital ID for age and identity verification.

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Ian Miers @secparam.bsky.social · 23/04/2025

WhatsApps "advanced protection" blog post is double speak. Instead of end-to-end encryption, you get downgraded to end-to-AI encryption. But its phrased as a feature: you can opt out of "others" uploading data, as if WhatsApp has nothing to do with it. blog.whatsapp.com/introducing-...

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Ian Miers @secparam.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

The UK is fighting the last war by trying to backdoor encrypted messaging worldwide. The US tried the same trick in the Obama and Bill Barr DoJs. Thankfully, saner minds prevailed. Now the FBI recommends encrypted messaging because it makes us safer from nation state hacking.

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Ian Miers @secparam.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

@meredithmeredith.bsky.social points out the real story with Apple disabling encrypted backup (and therefore effectively iMessage encryption) in the UK. The UK is demanding a global backdoor for all data, including Americans. Apple is resisting as best they can.

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Ian Miers @secparam.bsky.social · 07/02/2025

Easily overlooked threat: The UK is demanding Apple expose your iCloud data, no matter where you live. Apple is fighting for limits, but the demand is world-wide access, not just for UK persons. This is terrible for US sovereignty and national security. wapo.st/4k2AF5Z

wapo.st

U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts

Secret order requires blanket access to protected cloud backups around the world, which if implemented would undermine Apple’s privacy pledge to its users.

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Reposted by Ian Miers

Senator Ron Wyden @wyden.senate.gov · 07/02/2025

Trump and Apple better tell the UK to go to hell with its demand to access Americans’ private, encrypted texts and files. Trump and American tech companies letting foreign governments secretly spy on Americans would be an unmitigated privacy and national security disaster.

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Ian Miers @secparam.bsky.social · 26/01/2025

"Lets make the AI surveillance state", is a really odd take after the 2024 presidential election. You're worried about the deep state and your solution is to hand them more powerful AI tools? www.businessinsider.com/larry-elliso...

businessinsider.com

Billionaire Larry Ellison says a vast AI-fueled surveillance system can ensure 'citizens will be on their best behavior'

Billionaire Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison said he expects AI surveillance systems to reach a point where all citizens are under constant watch.

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Ian Miers @secparam.bsky.social · 03/08/2023

Tell me you're in a predatory cryptocurrency polycule without telling me you're a predatory cryptocurrency polycule....

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Ian Miers @secparam.bsky.social · 25/07/2023

Welcome to the 2000s: twitter isn't a brand and 32 bit keys are the new security weakness.

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Ian Miers @secparam.bsky.social · 16/07/2023

Two sentence horror: Twitter died as a public commons for expert discussion. As bsky turned into a stream of consciousness, and threads into text-o-gram, we were forced to consider desperate alternatives like .... LinkedIn.

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Ian Miers @secparam.bsky.social · 08/07/2023

When designing computers or, by proxy, society, security is mostly unnecessary. But when, e.g., your 18-year-old needs an abortion or Russian tanks are coming, encryption is essential. Secparam is a pun. A latex macro, short for security parameter, in narrowly technical papers which ignore all this.

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