David

IT security student. Programmer of digital duck tape, learning to write digital plumbing. Aspiring cryptographer. Personal research interests include zero-knowledge credentials (to counter online antisocial conduct while protecting privacy) and AV/image non-repudiation (to counter deepfakes).

 Anti-exceptionalist egalitarian. Empirical pragmatist: evidence over ideology, results over rationalization. Theory is as good as the least of its falsifiability, its internal consistency, and its withstanding of attempted disproof. It is as useful as one is willing to revise or replace it when it fails.

Public Key

npub1ltjs98zjpqsdfvpk2an4vvt3kdyeqcx6z42dlnmnr6835739n92sa95j9y

NIP-05 Address

defractal_at_infosec.exchange@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs04egzn3fqsgx5kqm9we6kx9cmxjvsvrdp24xleae3arc60gjej4gpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wd68ytnzvuq3gamnwvaz7tmjv4kxz7fwv3sk6atn9e5k7qgdwaehxw309ahx7uewd3hkckww658

Publishing to

relay.nostr.bg

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1ltjs98zjpqsdfvpk2an4vvt3kdyeqcx6z42dlnmnr6835739n92sa95j9y

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Last Notes

2026-05-13 16:37:18 UTC

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Indeed. In a typical year, well over 100 hours of my work is providing private support in use of Canadian government websites.

2026-02-11 00:19:51 UTC

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Any guesses what #Microsoft broke with some #slop-stained part of the patch set this time?

2026-02-01 19:27:56 UTC

RE: https://mstdn.social/@Npars01/115996932693787995
It may be rhetorically figurative when @npub1fdr…lvhs calls these creatures "eminently guillotinable plutes," but if ever there were a group so zip-thuddingly worthy, it is the #Epstein class:
#note18dd…47hj

2026-02-01 19:11:52 UTC

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Hey, @npub1sme…s590 or other combat vets: Suppose someone is writing a fictional story of a youth resistance movement.
Hypothetically, if a group of characters were far more athletic and agile than the #gestapo in the story, they were well practised in parkour and urban evasion, and they knew their city fluently without need to consult a map, what would be the safest tactical options for the group to soak gestapo masks with water and then escape?
Would the gestapo sooner waterboard themselves through a soaked mask, or take the masks off even while on camera?
Would water alone be best, or would it be better with a little oil and just enough soap to keep that oil dissolved, to stick better to polyester and other synthetic fibres as the water sticks to cotton and other natural fibres?
Asking for an author.

2026-01-29 09:29:40 UTC

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And some more options for #iceOut to defeat the #LRAD:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXKTBQBugIA

2026-01-29 01:27:51 UTC

Of particular importance to #iceOut organizers in #Minneapolis #Minnesota and other cities under #gestapo occupation: how to protect yourself and others against an #LRAD, including how to reflect the attack towards the attackers.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3sqIvak-4Ek

2026-01-17 07:08:20 UTC

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The technofeudalists are trying to price individuals, families, SMBs, and smaller organizations out of the market, in order to force everyone permanently into renting compute time and storage from them, and to donate all our data to their slopware training in the process.
It will take an organized international campaign, comparable to the model advocated by @npub1fdr…lvhs at #39C3, to forcibly counteract this. Ultimately, we'll need to restore competition in our IT parts supply chains. That may require state-level investment by economic peers of the US and China, which itself may require sustained organized civic engagement.
Meanwhile, in the USA (and elsewhere, but especially there), everything that can be done to reduce demand for technofeudalist corporations' products and services, hence everything that could expedite insolvency of the #genAI sector, would help return affordability to PC parts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9wW2IVUxOA
#technofeudalism

2026-01-16 02:38:14 UTC

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Start frequenting a gym if you don't already. Emphasize functional fitness, balance, mobility, injury prevention, endurance, and especially agility. If you can afford them, take classes in parkour, freerunning, tricking, or acrobatics; or, if you have the skill, teach classes.
Help the #gestapo continue to follow in the example above. Let them self-inflect a bit of justice.
#ice #iceOut #doNotComply

2026-01-10 01:24:41 UTC

RE: https://c.im/@cdarwin/115867867113553037
A dream new "weapon" I'd like to see for Peoples like those of #Iran: weatherproofed and camouflaged solar-and-battery-powered mesh networking hardware on #UAV platforms with multi-band radios, retractable solar arrays, proximity sensors (to deactivate radios and fly away if approached), and explosive self-destruct triggered by physical tampering (to prevent intrusion through physical access).
Onboard software would provide #surveillance- and #censorship-resistant mesh networking and tunnel to the Internet over #Tor, as well as automatic response to proximity by deactivating radios, folding the #solar array, taking off, flying by a randomized path to a random new hard-to-reach and low-visibility location out of line-of-sight of anywhere within line-of-sight of the previous location, landing, re-deploying the solar array, and reactivating the radios.
I'd love to see a world where hackers with crowdfunding could build swarms of these and disperse them en masse from high-altitude low-radar airship carrier #drones over areas where Internet access denial is part of a regime's oppression strategy. I could see us building a few at the local hackerspace, but it would need to be a major international effort to produce enough.
#IranProtests #drone #hardwareHacking
#note13ve…52h2

2026-01-01 20:41:05 UTC

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uBlock Origin blocks it.

2025-11-20 03:33:19 UTC

Hey @npub1qmg…s6k5 / @npub1595…kxyf,
When are you going to credit and compensate Myranda Kazos for her work in your so-far plagiarized story?
@npub1psa…j5uh, are you going to cover the #plagiarism?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4A33f0t4FrQ
#ProPublica #journalism #ethics #MyrandaKazos

2025-09-28 21:38:36 UTC

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Going after the money is one important tactic. Another is going after the bigotry. Retrospectives by formers confirm, as social psychology has long show, that bigotry is only unlearned through positive experiences and relationships with members of the targeted group.
Organize and carefully facilitate and proliferate occasions for such connections, and you cut another pillar. With well-prepared facilitators and an audience of mostly non-bigoted people, arts and other cultural events are a viable way to do so. Particularly useful are popular music events, especially if two performers who draw differing audiences a featured.
Other good options besides music include cuisine sharing or urban–rural volunteering exchanges (as through Habitat for Humanity or other pro-social causes). In each case, well-prepared leaders are necessary, but if you get people on different sides of divide-and-conquer lines to start cross-identifying, you inoculate them against bigotry.
The goal of bridging divides is so, the next time they hear someone speak hate about an Other, they take it personally, as though it were about themselves: because they're no longer talking about an abstract category; they're talking about that friend they danced with at the concert after building a house with them the week before.

2025-09-28 02:56:08 UTC

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The RNC is just as off-topic as the DNC. (Unless: any RNC leaders in this thread?)
We're talking about what *we* can do, not what *they* can do.

2025-09-28 00:26:33 UTC

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Tariq either couldn't discern or didn't care about the difference between disagreement in the course of discussion of one topic and changing the topic. Let an ideologue derail a discussion and make it about their favourite grievance instead, and that's all that will get discussed. The misdeeds of corporate Democrats go without saying and are off topic in this context. It's worth discussion within the DNC or among those who have sway therein, but irrelevant here. (Unless: any DNC leaders in this thread?)
We're talking about what *we* (in the public resistance movement) can do, not what *they* (in the party) could do.

2025-09-27 20:46:53 UTC

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I think the majority of American people are so used to neither needing needing to meaningfully oppose the power structure of their country, nor having any idea how to do so effectively, that they needed the relatively small and easy victory of the Kimmel show. Those with whom I've tested framing this issue as a proof case of what they can do when they act in unison, across the lines of divide-and-conquer, seem receptive. With the right messaging, and with the pragmatism to promote solidarity and scale (rather than ideologically purity testing and infighting), this can be the start of some real momentum.
It's like in the point in the learned helplessness experiments where they had to show the dog it could now escape the shock, by lifting it and placing it on the other side of the barrier. Now that the populace is starting to climb out of the pit of helpless complacency, we just need to reach down and help them up, rather than stepping on their hands to punish them for ever having been there, as had long been the norm among the left throughout the preceding few decades.
Think, act, and speak like a therapist disabusing survivors of the lies and self-limiting beliefs their abuser taught them. When you see or hear someone acting like Christian Picciolini, Jill Duggar, Rich Logis, or Monte Mader did when they were younger, let your every interaction with them—except as strictly necessary for physical safety—be controlled by how you can guide them to and through an exit like all those formers. When you see someone already peaking out that exit, offer them a ride away, not a slap in the face. And when you see them take their first meaningful action to oppose what they used to support—whether directly or through silent complicity—affirm and encourage more in that direction.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5DOmkLpLHU

2025-09-23 20:39:12 UTC

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As @npub1fdr…lvhs elucidates regarding the many causes of ecology becoming recognized as one cause with the development of the concept of ecology, and regarding so many technology-mediated social injustices and all the facets of #enshittification ultimately having a singled root, the solution to cause fatigue is to unify causes.
Whether #chatControl and the assault on #privacy, or #RightToRepair, or #censorship, or any of the many forms of bigotry, ultimately, the unifying cause is to reverse the centralization of power—to redistribute power towards the many: not as power over others, which is the same shit in a different direction, but as power over ourselves. (Distribution of wealth is contained within this, for what is money but, as Beau and #BelleOfTheRanch call it: power coupons.)
Information about you is power over you, and chat control is therefore the unilateral taking of our power to have private lives by leaders of government who themselves have their secrets protected by force of law.
Ultimately, the unifying cause is the antitheses to Wilhoit's law: there must be no group that the law binds but does not protect, and no group that the law protects but does not bind. Anything opposing this cause, including chat control, is just another means to regress towards the original and defining objective of the right: absolute monarchy.

2025-09-14 03:31:29 UTC

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If #NATO countries need a deterrent, this is what to target. Demonstrate the capacity to invert the function of the Great Firewall, to block propaganda and surveillance and allow accurate but prohibited information, in response to intrusion into infrastructure.
#moviePlotCyberwar

2025-08-20 00:13:36 UTC

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Surprise, surprise: the Yelp-for-humans app founded and run by a man, purported to exist for women's safety, was in fact predatory, negligent of women's safety, and actually a grift to extract money by exploiting women's fear and selling a false sense of security.
And that man usurped the identity of his ex, impersonating her and speaking in her name to other women, in order to manipulate women into giving him (well, his company, but without #E2EE, that's functionally equivalent) sensitive information about themselves which can endanger their lives and liberty.
And when a woman refused to do what he wants for him, he didn't take her "no" for an answer. Instead, he took her "no" as an obstacle to overcome. And women are harmed as a result.
And when he gets caught, what's his response? Avoiding accountability, by forcing women still using the app to accept updated terms waive their right to class action. (How does one delete one's account without using the app and thus "accepting" those terms?)

2025-07-20 02:44:50 UTC

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The "nothing to hide" line is a manipulation ploy by those who have the most power and seek to keep it and gain more, as information about you is power over you.
The same people preaching the supposed death of privacy go to extraordinary lengths both to protect their own privacy—such as Mark Zuckerberg buying the houses surrounding his own ¹, to deny camera angles towards his own home—and at the same time invest literally billions in anti-consensually ² surveilling the public for the power and revenue they derive therefrom.
If anyone needs any further response, [@Mer__edith](https://mastodon.world/@Mer__edith ) comprehensively dismantles the "nothing to hide" rhetoric in her first answer to Guy Kawasaki at SXSW 2025, here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyH7zoP-JOg&t=88s
¹ The particular hypocrisy of Zuck and the houses is one I first heard noted by @npub1fdr…lvhs.
² By "anti-consensually," I mean, not only in absence of consent, but in active contempt thereof: despite knowing it is opposite the express will of the non-consenting person.
#privacy #surveillance #surveillanceState #surveillanceCapitalism

2025-06-19 21:54:11 UTC

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About that "important update": Google does not allow registering Gmail addresses with hyphens. The only non-alphanumeric character it allows is one or more (non-initial, non-final, nonconsecutive) periods, which after registration, it considers essential when signing in, but optional when addressing email.
(It necessarily follows that no two Gmail accounts can differ only in periods, so any two Gmail addresses differing only in periods refer to the same account.)
Is there any chance the period resulted from a typo or poorly implemented word wrap?
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/114/712/175/239/413/569/original/bfb4acf0c16a5454.png
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/114/712/206/719/546/534/original/72e10ebbe5f5b95e.png

2025-06-08 16:24:19 UTC

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Are any #veterans organizing to stand between the anti-ICE protesters and the illegally deployed Guards and Marines? Where are the vets who protested the #VA cuts two days ago? It’s the same Nazi ordering the National Guard and Marines around as is gutting the VA.

2025-04-24 02:08:17 UTC

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IANAL, but from what I've seen of US case law, when police fail to self-identify as such and, while not recognizably police, impose imminent risk death or grievous bodily harm (which is generally presumed in cases of kidnapping), if the attacked person survives police-gang revenge, the trial outcome usually depends on the race of the person asserting self-defence to excuse use of lethal force against an assailant.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/10/texas-no-knock-swat-raid/
However, there was one at least one exception case: that of Cory Maye.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Maye

2025-03-16 04:10:29 UTC

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I’d follow up by asking their understanding and opinion of the Paradox of Tolerance.

2025-03-15 16:44:39 UTC

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“Neoliberal” is one of too many examples of leftists and other progressives tending to be strategically self-defeating in our choice of labels for concepts. The misunderstanding of the term would have been entirely foreseeable and mostly avoidable, had the people coining the term taken a moment to consider the perspective of the unpersuaded audience: particularly in light of non-vocational post-secondary education being, in most countries (certainly including the US), a class privilege.
In other words: it’s one of many examples where we really should’ve taken a lesson from capitalist marketers in branding. Condsider, as a counterexample, the term from leftist @npub1fdr…lvhs, #enshittification. There is roughly zero chance uninformed readers or listeners will mistake that for labelling anything good, or anything about themselves.

2025-03-14 03:21:58 UTC

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Hon. @npub12j4…vque, please advise the PM urgently to get his head out of the sand and advise HM Charles to order stationing of UK deterrent aircraft in Canada and ships in Canadian waters. We'll need our own soon, but for now, we don't have time to make them.
#cdnpoli

2025-03-06 06:48:32 UTC

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Related: There are four lights!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moX3z2RJAV8

2025-02-07 22:29:53 UTC

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This is a #nationalSecurity disaster in the making, and a personal #cybersecurity disaster for hundreds of millions. The moment a server to person with access to keys gets compromised, the data exposure will make the #SaltTyphoon breach seem like one of those times a cop or journalist leaks the gender of a source through a pronoun. The data currently protected by #E2EE is much of the most sensitive data there is.
The assurances provided by iCloud #AdvancedDataProtection have undoubtedly led to its being trusted with data which would harm the UK by falling into MSS/PLA and SVR/GRU hands: and that can't be prevented if the UK's imperial global surveillance law is complied with.
#Apple would be better off blocking iCloud access in the UK, and explaining on Apple devicesin the UK why that is necessary, till that Investigative Powers Act amendments are rescinded.

2025-02-02 21:52:45 UTC

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Day 2 is coming and going with too little additional action against the US oligarchs backing the US tariffs. On day 3, Justin and Pierre and Jagmeet and Paul should agree to have the GG reconvene Parliament explicitly to drop the DRM laws Canada enacted in exchange for the free trade treaty the US is now violating. This would harm the financial interests of US oligarchs like Musk and Bezos (as by letting Canadians legally jailbreak Teslas and Audible books), and it would create a lot of much-needed high-value work for Canadians, and a new set of products and services to distribute globally (except to the US, where those would remain illegal).
Even if we're not going to heed @npub1fdr…lvhs regarding tariffs, we should enact his recommended anti-DRM reprisal, and we should do it tomorrow if not today. Don't give them time to hedge against it. Every day US oligarch's net wealth is not declining, so long as tariffs or other US trade aggression against Canada is in effect, is a day the Government of Canada is derelicting their duty to Canadians.
#cdnpoli

2025-02-02 07:22:05 UTC

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That's a start for day 1, and let's not act alone: Let's partner with other countries to respond with coordinated reprisals, such that a trade attack on one is a trade attack on all, for which all will answer in unison. The US, and especially Trump and his oligarchs personally and their companies, must be assured to always lose more for every trade attack, so long as it persists, than anyone they attack. The way to do this is in close and *rapid* cooperation with all other trade partners.
#cdnpoli

2024-12-30 19:35:50 UTC

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And one or dehumidifiers of sufficient power for your home air volume.

2024-12-15 02:03:22 UTC

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Ah, minorities and near-minorities: the only way to get sufficient results from a legislature anywhere near sufficiently quickly. Nothing motivates politicians to get of their hands their hands and do something more than a performative drip-feed of just enough to seem like they're doing something like that constant threat of losing power.

2024-12-11 21:50:40 UTC

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Hon. @npub12j4…vque (since you're the only one I've seen here), please give this a read and forward it to your peers and counterparts.

2024-12-11 20:12:37 UTC

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Others have already covered the “no such product exists in the market” answer, so I’ll just throw some wishful thinking into the Ethernet winds and suggest to the #infosec / hacker community that it seems we’ll collectively need to create the @npub15f7…m7wr of cars. There’s enough knowledge and money among a sufficiently large subset of us, especially if enough late career professionals decide they’d rather not entrust the detailed time-series geolocation of their family to a company which can’t avoid recapitulating the vulnerabilities of the 90s, and to the data brokers to which it sells that data, and to the advertisers and governments and criminal organizations buying from those data brokers.

2024-11-27 01:10:31 UTC

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An interesting application of machine learning may be camouflage recognition—analogous to fingerprint or face recognition. The exact alignment of a pattern to fabric pattern pieces per article of clothing or luggage is presumably unique.