RAND Center for AI, Security, and Technology (CAST) @dwallach@discuss.systems

Joined July 2009
Roughly 20% of the Twitter accounts I follow are now on Mastadon. Many have announced that they're no longer posting on Twitter. I've decided I'm done posting here as well. So long and thanks for all the tweets.
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News! I’m now a program manager at DARPA (on leave from Rice) in the Information Innovation Office. I’m looking forward to doing some exciting work in and around cryptography and computer security. Houston will be my home base for at least a few months. darpa.mil/staff/dr-dan-walla…
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1) Hi, everyone. I wanted to share with you the scary recent experience I had with my original Twitter account, @Aaron_Derfel, which was hacked two days ago, and how I fear this raises serious concerns about the future of this social media platform.
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Dan Wallach retweeted
The @TwitterSpaces team no longer works at Twitter and is currently looking to get hired as team/package deal. These folks are top-notch large-scale social audio engineers and worth $$$ to any Twitter competitor. – at San Francisco, CA
Great work by Twitter Spaces team!
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Nasty thought: this could be used to generate one-off spam emails, which will be sufficiently different as to get through many spam filters.
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I don't talk much about being a 2nd-generation computer geek, but this book (and the effort it documents) launched my father's career. And every caution and caveat that Jessamyn offers is something that every potential startup engineer should consider.
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1/20 Dear friends, I need to draw your attention to something super bad and super important (and it doesn’t originate from Russia for once). Last week the EU has taken a shockingly stupid and damaging decision to close down national corporate registers of beneficial owners 🧵🧵🧵
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New GitHub search is 🔥🔥🔥
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Nerd gift recommendation: the compact Anker 747 charger has 3 USB-C ports plus one USB-A. What sets it apart is that the total output (150W) is available in any mix between the ports, so you can charge laptop, phone, etc from the same cables. Convenient. anker.com/products/a2340?var…
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A departing Twitter employee explains his exit. Massive attrition, unclear goals/mission, limited upside, sketchy loyalty test.
Why I left @twitter or rather why I did not sign up for “extremely hardcore” Twitter 2.0 🧵
Amazing thread of all the ways a site like Twitter, Facebook, whatever, might fail at scale and, correspondingly, why you need a large, talented org to manage it. Twitter is doomed.
I've seen a lot of people asking "why does everyone think Twitter is doomed?" As an SRE and sysadmin with 10+ years of industry experience, I wanted to write up a few scenarios that are real threats to the integrity of the bird site over the coming weeks.
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PSA: @Hertz San Diego totally failed. This is the "gold" pickup zone at 9pm. Zero cars. Queue with 15 people waiting for returns to get processed. At least that many "premium" sitting here unrented.
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🧵"Twitter 2.0" is trending. I'm a foremost expert on this and let me tell you what you should do: quit, take the 3 month severance with your friends, and build the 2.0 version yourself. Musk will give up and buy your company in a couple years.
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Dan Wallach retweeted
A buddy who's interested in end-to-end encryption (E2EE) but hasn't done one of these projects in the very messy place which is the real world happened to ask me this morning about pitfalls which might not be obvious. So here's a partial list in the hopes that it's helpful. 🧵
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PL nerdy humor at Elon's expense. Sublime.
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Engineering anthropology.
I have spent a large chunk of my life living and working in primitive tribal societies. Here is my report on what I found. Thread.
A few days ago, I clicked the button to ask for my Twitter account archive. No response yet. Anyone else had issues like this? Wouldn't surprise me if the relevant team swamped and/or no longer employed.
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Alternatively, is there some kind of a tool I can run on my desktop that will extract all my tweets, DMs and everything else?
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Update: My archive appeared this evening, and the reauthentication process (password + email PIN, even though I have real 2FA enabled) was even working correctly. I guess the microservices aren't dead yet.