Last week, I wrote a blog post succinctly titled, Don’t Use Session. Two interesting things have happened since I published that blog: A few people expressed uncertainty about what I wrote ab…
TL;DR from oss-security:
At a glance, what I found is the following:
- Session only uses 128 bits of entropy for Ed25519 keys. This means their ECDLP is at most 64 bits, which is pretty reasonably in the realm of possibility for nation state attackers to exploit.
- Session has an Ed25519 verification algorithm that verifies a signature for a message against a public key provided by the message. This is amateur hour.
- Session uses an X25519 public key as the symmetric key for AES-GCM as part of their encryption for onion routing.
Additional gripes about their source code were also included in the blog post.
Permanently Deleted
That's a reasonable thing to dislike about it.
I dislike that I can't reply to another message with a sticker.
I also dislike that, despite having admin access, I can't delete abusive messages left in groups for anyone but myself. That makes it unsuitable for building communities.
Last year, I outlined the specific requirements that an app needs to have in order for me to consider it a Signal competitor. Afterwards, I had several people ask me what I think of a Signal fork c…
How much can you control the conversation if the entity you are discussing only wants their name published?
It's not about what they want published. It's about what they don't want published.
Sure there will be a few GDPR letters and maybe an inquiry by some regulatory body. Satisfyingly annoying to them, but compared to the cost of an advertising campaign; would this not be just a drop in the bucket.
Advertising campaigns generally don't include OSINT on the people behind it and evidence of their crimes. How does what I published help them increase their revenue or reduce their costs? Everything is ruled by incentives.
That sort of comment might be true if I had responded with a shallow, emotional response. Something like "how dare these outrageous motherfuckers claim to 'roast' my hand-crafted artisanal open source beauty with their AI slop!!".
I didn't do that. I sifted through the public information, assembled a profile of the people behind it, discarded the irrelevant details, and used it to describe their conduct as illegal in the country their business is incorporated in, with enough receipts for anyone else who finds their AI grift to leverage to give them immense amounts of legal and compliance pain. And then I released this all on my furry blog with the keywords that other open source developers would likely to try in a search engine if confronted with their same outrageous behavior.
Rather than let my outrage make me a useful idiot, I've surveyed the landscape and made sure that I'm controlling the conversation. I'm also keeping the evidence preserved, and not giving them any SEO backlink juice. This all dovetails into how bad their AI is at what it even claimed to be doing.
If any of this plays into their hands, then they're playing chess on a dimension that the void cannot comprehend, let alone my mortal ass. But I'm willing to wager that the amount of legal anguish my blog post will create for their grift will significantly outweigh any benefit they get from the possible name recognition my blog creates.
Yeah, business children is an apt description.
Roasted Christmas Spam from Muhu.ai
I wrote what I thought would be the final blog post of 2024 last week, and was looking forward to starting 2025 strong with a blog I’d been drafting since July 2023. But then, a little after …
I’ve spent the better part of 2023 and 2024 trying to imagine the specific changes we technology nerds could make to improve things somewhat. Meme remix of Matt Bors’s comic and Stan Ke…
What is it about being queer that makes loneliness, isolation, and rejection so much more intense than enduring than what our straight friends and family purport to experience? Harubaki Are we just…
I honestly don’t see the reason to hope for bluesky to win…
It was explained in detail in the other post, which was linked to in the section that said what you're referencing.
Imagining Private Airspaces for Bluesky
Recently, I shared my thoughts on the Twitter Exodus. The short of that post is: Even though I’m quite happy on the Fediverse, I think the best outcome is for Bluesky to “win” the…
In 2010, Coda Hale wrote How To Safely Store A Password which began with the repeated phrase, “Use bcrypt”, where the word bcrypt was linked to a different implementation for various pr…
This post is the first in a new series covering some of the reasoning behind decisions made in my project to build end-to-end encryption for direct messages on the Fediverse. (Collectively, Fedi-E2…
It’s been more than five years since The PGP Problem was published, and I still hear from people who believe that using PGP (whether GnuPG or another OpenPGP implementation) is a thing they s…
Spoiler: It’s nothing scandalous or bad. Every once in a while, someone posts this photo on Twitter to attempt to dunk on furries: Midwest FurFest 2018 Over the years, I’ve seen this di…
Every hype cycle in the technology industry continues a steady march towards a shitty future that nobody wants. CMYKat Note: I know this isn’t unique to the tech industry, but I can’t w…
Every hype cycle in the technology industry continues a steady march towards a shitty future that nobody wants. CMYKat The Road to Hell Once upon a time, everyone was all hot and bothered about Big…
Yeah, I've got a proposal that's being worked on: https://github.com/soatok/mastodon-e2ee-specification
There are two mental models for designing a cryptosystem that offers end-to-end encryption to all of its users. The first is the Signal model. Predicated on Moxie’s notion that the ecosystem …
I don’t consider myself exceptional in any regard, but I stumbled upon a few cryptography vulnerabilities in Matrix’s Olm library with so little effort that it was nearly accidental. It…
XMPP is a messaging protocol (among other things) that needs no introduction to any technical audience. Its various implementations have proliferated through technical communities for decades. Many…
If they actually read the whole thing, including the addendum, there should no longer be any confusion.
As a rule, I never change titles after pressing Publish.
Anyone incapable of reading past the title is not worth listening to
The framing is as follows:
Matrix, OMEMO, whatever.
If it doesn't have all these properties, it's not a Signal competitor. It's disqualified and everyone should shut the fuck up about it when I'm talking about Signal.
That's the entire point of this post. That's the entire framing of this post.
If that's not personally useful, move on to other things.
This is a very technology focused view. In any user system, the users themselves have to be a consideration too.
As I wrote here: https://furry.engineer/@soatok/112883040405408545
My whole thing is applied cryptography! When I'm discussing what the bar is to qualify as a real competitor to a private messaging app renowned for its security, I'm ONLY TALKING ABOUT CRYPTOGRAPHIC SECURITY.
This isn't a more broad discussion. This isn't about product or UX decisions, or the Network Effect.
Those are valid discussions to have, but NOT in reply to this specific post, which was very narrowly scoped to outlining the specific minimum technical requirements other products need to have to even deserve a seat at the table.
A lot of recent (and upcoming) blog posts I’ve written, and Fediverse discussions I’ve participated in, have been about the security of communication products. My criticism of these pro…
Thanks to Samantha Cole at 404 Media, we are now aware that Automattic plans to sell user data from Tumblr and WordPress.com (which is the host for my blog) for “AI” products. In respon…
Dhole Moments is not a music blog. I will not pretend to be an expert on music, music theory, or music appreciation. But it goes even further than that: I am so untalented at music that I exert a v…
That's a personal matter that I don't really feel like commenting on, but I'm not naive about politics and how it affects people.
I quit my job towards the end of last month. When I started this blog, I told myself, “Don’t talk about work.” Since my employment is in the rear view mirror, I’m going to b…
Some of you may be surprised to learn that my fursona is not a fox, nor a wolf; nor is it a fictitious fox-wolf hybrid popular within the furry fandom (which is usually called a “folf”)…