Richard Barnes

@ipv.sx

877 Followers 813 Following

Trying to do right by the world, in part by using computers and cryptography. (🦋 DMs disabled, please use Germ 🦠)

A mostly built out new restaurant with a sign that says DELHI BELLY
A chart of international arrivals, year on year change in 30-day moving average. A thick black line shows a national decline of 5-10% over the year. A thinner gray line shows Minneapolis generally tracking the national trend, until ICE shows up and it drops to 15-20% down (vs. 0-5% nationally).
The same YouGov survey results as in the quoted post, but with Strong Oppose results circled in blue from the Male (37%), 65+ (45%), White (39%) and $100K+ (35%). The Strong Oppose result from the Northeast region (42%) is circled in pink.
The official SCOTUS guide to what color binding your brief has to have.
Various printed SCOTUS briefs bound in colors that indicate their purpose. White for a certain petition, red for appellee’s merits brief, green for amici, yellow for a merits reply brief, and tan for a motions reply brief.
The new PowerPoint "drippy orb" icon
A chart of international arrivals in the US (year on year, 3 month moving average), with separate, lighter lines for EWR and HNL. While the overall trend is about a 5% decline, EWR and HNL in positive territory.
A chart of international arrivals in the US (year on year, 3 month moving average). There appears to be a drop and bump in March/April, and a bump in Sept/Oct. But overall, things are down about 5% and trending downward.
A NeXTcube, a black cube of computing prowess last sold in 1993.
An Office 365 dialogue box: Stay signed in? With No and Yes buttons, and a "Don't show this again" tick box. The "Don't show this again" tick box is ticked.
Principal Skinner: Am I out of touch? No, it’s the children who are wrong.
Signal’s approach for groups up to 1000 members is pragmatic and effective: all members agree pairwise states for the Double Ratchet algorithm. This way the cost of agreeing keys is “front-loaded” — each new member must agree on a key with each other member before being able to send messages. When a member leaves, no special action is needed, other than notifying all members about it.
Is End-to-End Encryption in Large Groups a Real Problem? It depends on the definition of “large”, but we are assuming that “large” is any group where simple member broadcast to update keys is inefficient, so we are talking about many thousands of members.
But without the separation of services on the business level, this separation in design is purely academic rather than practical. Promoting MLS as an effective solution for E2E encryption, without disclosing the requirement for provider trust, is at best misleading, at worst — fraudulent.
Let’s apply the same reasoning to MLS. Does MLS protect message content from the untrusted provider? One of the components of MLS is the “authentication service” — a component that is supplied by a communication provider. The MLS specification states in part 16.10: A compromised Authentication Service (AS) can assert a binding for a signature key and identity pair of its choice, thus allowing impersonation of a given user. This ability is sufficient to allow the AS to join new groups as if it were that user. Depending on the application architecture, it may also be sufficient to allow the compromised AS to join the group as an existing user, for instance, as if it were a new device associated with the same user. The MLS specification explicitly requires trust in the communication provider as a condition for MLS securing the message content from the untrusted provider, which is self-contradictory — we are required to trust an untrusted party, which contradicts the purpose of E2E encryption.
There have been a lot of companies that overpromised on their encryption and security properties. What makes Germ trustworthy?
What are your favorite security conferences?
Has Germs multi-identity idea been tried with secure messaging before? What lessons do you seem them learning well from the secure messaging space?
Hi Richard, what do you see is the biggest threat we have to digital privacy today?
How do you envision government policy shaping the future of digital privacy? Is it better to be proactive or reactive?
I have a question! How would you describe your specialty? Protocol engineer? Cryptographic engineer? Something else?
Title slide from an IETF presentation, showing the title "ABR in MoQ"
Darth Vader telling Boba Fett and Lando, “I have delayed the flight. Pray I don’t delay it further.”
A screenshot from the Anthropic status page, showing a Major Outage for their API server.
An error message from Claude Code indicating repeated attempts to connect to the Claude API, all failing with 503 No Healthy Upstream. The 503 error indicates that the problem is on the server side.
A logo on a shower wall in Norway that says “Euro Bad”
A poster at McDonald’s with the tagline “Flaky & Hot” and a picture of an apple pie
An electric, self-guided lawn mower glides quietly over a green lawn in the midst of an office park.
Two thirds of a Detroit-style pizza (the other third having been devoured) on a wooden cutting board. Showing off its golden rim of crispy cheese and alternating rows of pepperoni and sauce.
A chart of non-US passenger arrivals at Miami, Chicago, and Honolulu airports, shown as year-on-year change in 30-day moving average. There is a general downward trend over time. Miami and Chicago show a sharp drop in March, which partly rebounds in early April, then fully by the end of April. Honolulu doesn't seem to drop significantly.
A poster advertising the NSDAP publication Neues Volk, showing a disabled person with the slogan in the post.
A passage from the Book of Common Prayer: Let us pray for all who have not received the Gospel of Christ; For those who have never heard the word of salvation For those who have lost their faith For those hardened by sin or indifference For the contemptuous and the scornful For those who are enemies of the cross of Christ and persecutors of his disciples For those who in the name of Christ have persecuted others That God will open their hearts to the truth, and lead them to faith and obedience.
A chart of non-US passenger arrivals at Miami, Chicago, and Honolulu airports, shown as year-on-year change in 30-day moving average. There is a general downward trend over time. Miami and Chicago show a sharp drop in March, which partly rebounds in early April. Honolulu doesn't seem to drop significantly.
That scene from The Matrix where Cypher points to the green code and tells Neo "All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead..." except the code is C and C++ and Cypher says "All I see is UAF, shell injection, buffer overflow..."
A hand-written name tag for Richard Barnes @ipv.sx
A glass wall that is usually lit with rainbow colors, but which now has three vertical stripes of red, white, and blue. This was probably intended to be a sign of US patriotism, but turns out to represent a flag used by the French Revolution.
The Kennedy Center lit up in rainbow colors, as it is every year around the Kennedy Center Honors, symbolizing "a spectrum of many skills within the performing arts"
A screenshot of text from the article, reading as follows: Octopuses would also punch fish to keep the group moving. “If the group is very still and everyone is around the octopus, it starts punching, but if the group is moving along the habitat, this means they’re looking for prey, so the octopus is happy. It doesn’t punch anyone,” Sampson said.
The results of an online quiz showing that I know 30,399 English words, putting me in the top 0.01%
A screenshot from Arrested Development of Michael Bluth saying "I don't know what I expected", which is transliterated into cuneiform in the post.
Richard Barnes was the 35,774th user on Bluesky — a Certified Elder!
A screenshot of Google Maps showing the Arlington Cemetery metro stop and a road with the cemetery labeled “Arlington Cemetery”
A selfie showing Richard at the end of his long run, with Independence Ave and the very top of the Capitol dome in the background
A screenshot from the Decipher column quoting Riana: Will the company use dark patterns to get people to opt-in without fully understanding that they’re doing so? Will employers who want to surveil their employees’ every move - because let’s be honest, that’s the only real use case for this idea - get to turn this on for their employees? What about domestic abusers who could force their victims (such as a spouse or child) to turn this feature on? There is simply no good reason for this feature; nobody was asking for it, and the non-creepy use cases (such as finding a recipe you think you looked at once) are too minor to justify the creepy ones. It should be killed entirely.
A screenshot of the Wikipedia entry for the Pentium FDIV bug. The text "1 in 9 billion" is highlighted, reflecting the extraordinarily low error rate that was considered unacceptable in 1994.
The title and abstract of a paper from the arXiv. The title is "Transformers Can Do Arithmetic with the Right Embeddings". In the abstract, the following text is highlighted "we can reach state-of-the-art performance, achieving up to 99% accuracy on 100 digit addition problems"
A scene from the classic 1993 video game Myst, including some very conical trees, a stone observatory that houses one of the game’s puzzles, and a wooden path between them.
Wall art that says “we can only go up from here”
Crèpe roulée autour d’une banane rôtie, sur plat blanc.
A dark brown snail with a beautiful striped shell exploring a moist brick walkway
A small green gecko with yellow flecks hiding in between two boards of a bench
Album cover of the classic SUPERBASS by Giraffes? Giraffes!
Scene from Dr Strangelove, “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here. This is the war room!”
A short-eared owl, Hawaiian name “pueo”, perched on a chain-link fence
A light blue sky with a few small fluffy clouds over a muddy Potomac river, swollen from this week’s thunderstorms. Lush trees along the banks and a few boats on the river.