Believes in better data with informed privacy for all. Day job @medconfidential amongst other things. he/him https://xitter.cf/t.co/WfQkg8XPoJ 🧘‍♂️ #FILDI

Cambridge
Joined September 2008
Thomas Clarkson winning a Cambridge essay prize for arguing against slavery ...then realising if his essay is right he needs to dedicate his life to fighting it ...then actually doing it ...is the most EA thing ever
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This explains why Texas separatists, with their totally coincidentally identical “Veteran, Christian, Father, MAGA” bios, have suddenly gone awfully quiet today, right alongside their Quebec counterparts, conspiracy whackos, and Polish anti-EU eurosceptics
With Yandex data centers under constant attack, I’m starting to worry that the White House will issue yet another demand to stop the strikes. After all, it would be a tragedy if Russia’s valuable bot traffic dried up just before the midterms.
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Sam retweeted
The internet used to be a place you would leave. I remember being a kid sitting in front of a desktop at 8pm after eating dinner, logging on to Facebook, and waiting for my friends. I would spend that time wondering what everyone was doing before they logged on. They were probably eating dinner or being forced to go somewhere with their parents. Eventually, I would see their name pop up with a green circle and think oh nice, they’re here. Facebook was a place we went together, Google was a place we went for answers, and YouTube was where we found something stupid to show eachother. Now I am the adult at the dinner table, with my phone buzzing every few minutes. Oh how things have changed.
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Replying to @kmad @matthew_pines
I think we might lose public key cryptography.
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A tell from the Manhattan Project was that scientists who had been publishing about nuclear fission suddenly stopped publishing. As Justin points out here, the lack of cryptographic results in OpenAI's mathematical breakthrough could itself be a tell. Evidence against it would be if they published a few improvements that aren't massive breakthroughs.
Today I call upon the blockchain industry to calmly begin planning for "bunker mode". My personal recommendation is to set in motion a controlled mass migration of assets to fresh addresses, i.e. addresses whose pubkeys remain hidden behind a hash. Holders, starting with large and sophisticated ones, should consider moving the bulk of their funds to addresses that have never signed a transaction. And when they do sign one, they should also move remaining funds to a new address (possibly generated from the same seed phrase). Don't rush. While I believe there is cause for action a rushed migration would do more harm than good. Don't panic either. Moving assets to protected addresses is a simple, preventative step which does not require new cryptography or new wallets. IMO it is now reasonable to brace for the possibility that ECDSA breaks before qday, in the worst case in months not years. By "break" I mean fast private key recovery (e.g. in one week) on available hardware (e.g. a large GPU cluster). Recent days have been humbling for human mathematical intuition. Long-held, unquestioned hypotheses have fallen. This includes the n log(n) bound for integer multiplication and the 3SUM conjecture. In hindsight, May's unexpected disproof of the Erdős unit distance conjecture was our warning shot. Yesterday's OpenAI drop made it clear that mathematical superintelligence is upon us. They say there are weeks where decades happen. We are about to live through weeks where centuries of mathematical progress happen. Could our magic 64-byte ECDSA signatures be too good to be true? Was it just security through obscurity all this time? Elliptic curves feel especially vulnerable to superintelligence. Curves carry rich structure, with room for fancy tricks like Schoof, Frobenius, pairings. (By contrast, hashes are designed to minimise algebraic structure.) Separately, as Ewin Tang can attest, an efficient quantum algorithm sometimes foreshadows an efficient classical one. We should be open to the possibility of a classical counterpart to Shor that breaks elliptic curves and RSA at once. Also noteworthy is the striking under-representation of cryptographic breakthroughs among the 722 mathematical results OpenAI published. I've witnessed first-hand the US government censoring academic quantum cryptanalysis results. Backroom interventionism is my base case. I urge large, sophisticated actors to lead by example. Project11's "risq list" (bitcoin-risq-list.projecteleven[.]com) is a great tracker of exposed BTC pubkeys. Binance, Bitbank, Robinhood, Bitfinex, and Tether have an opportunity to harden their cold storage. Next month I'll address institutions in London in a live Q&A (forum.ethereuminstitutional[.]org/london-2026). Again, please do not rush. Wallets holding under 50 BTC enjoy partial cover from "Satoshi's shield", i.e. his 20K exposed addresses that hold 50 BTC each. Load-bearing signers like oracles and L2 security councils should consider rotating ECDSA pubkeys with every signed message and/or multi-signing with a hash-based schemes like SPHINCS. Exiting bunker mode safely will require post-AI cryptography. My inclination is to go all-in on hash-based cryptography and avoid structured mathematical assumptions entirely, whether from curves, lattices, or isogenies. A single battle-tested hash (e.g. from the SHA or BLAKE families) yields plausible post-AI security. The Ethereum roadmap on strawmap[.]org fully embraces hash-based cryptography with end-to-end formal verification as a response to the quantum threat. Those timelines must now be revisited and accelerated in light of mathematical superintelligence. I'll be pushing for maximum defensive acceleration.
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'Retrospective audits' into patient record access underway at Clatterbridge Cancer Centre Oct board papers
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EXC: British govt is searching for a UK alternative to Palantir, as the PM’s “buy British” push triggers hunt for homegrown replacement for the controversial US software group in NHS and MoD Ministers have identified a handful of UK technology companies they hope might be candidates to take over the health service’s Federated Data Platform, as they consider applying a break clause in Palantir’s contract in March next year, people familiar with the matter told the FT A defence minister has also told parliament that the govt is sounding out alternative suppliers for its MoD contract w/ @Smyth_Chris & @Laura_K_Hughes ft.com/content/9a6e17fe-55e4…
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😂
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What did we learn this week? 1. Starmer project was consequential. Forced the Q ‘what’s Labour for?’. strategic intent behind AB’s project is unashamedly Labour, left-wing & intellectually self confident. Public control. On the side of wc people. An alternative to British Right.
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This is the tragedy of the commons, online security edition. It makes sense for each of these companies individually to make their sites hyper-secure, but becomes intolerable to the consumer. I think it is known as Anderson's rule, named after the late Ross Anderson, which is that any system must either be vulnerable to hacking or intolerable to use.
I've been paying some bills. I am absolutely certain that with passwords, codes and approval codes included each one takes longer than it did 30 years ago.. when we just wrote some cheques.. and dropped them in the post box on the way to the shop.
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There is a real danger that NHSE fumbling this messaging with no detailed guidance including worked through training material will cause further pain
Because in the next inquiry a judge will say that the response would have been different if everyone could have accessed the necessary data. Management of access to info at the right time is one of the most complex issues we have in emergency response right now
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what3words has seen its revenue halve in the last year. It has gone from £2.1m in 2024 to £1.1m in 2025. At its height the company was valued in the hundreds of millions. I have always believed this company to be a stain on the UK tech ecosystem, and essentially a ponzi scheme defrauding investors. The senior leaders were paying themselves £300k and paying for extravagant work trips around the world. All the while the company never managed to bring in any meaningful revenue. Earlier this year it ran a secondary sale at a £50m valuation. In the crowdfund deck it did not disclose financials results ANY WHERE. It has literally burnt through hundreds of millions of dollars across over 10 years. Running a secondary sale while revenue was dropping without telling ANY investors is SHOCKING.
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£24,000 to replace free YouTube meeting videos The Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority moved its meetings to a paid Public-i service under a direct award signed off by one officer. There was no Equality Impact Assessment, captions are switched off, recordings are kept for 12 months and transcripts are only available on request. CambsNews has the details. cambsnews.co.uk/news/cambrid…
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Another day another DWP data issue: Lots of Mums being turned down for FSM even though they are on UC. Managed to fix more than 20 'parent not found' today by using their maiden name for the check rather than married name, even though their UC claim is in their married name. @ajjolley FYI
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Great to do this for @TheEconomist with @alokjha & @RoryJGalloway. Right now. With the world getting more volatile, uncertain and complex, where you need to be is on the edge of chaos.
“We all have this fantasy that one day our lives will run in a steady way... But the truth is that there’s a little chaos in all of our lives,” @Kevin_Fong joins “Babbage” to explore the nature of chaos and crisis economist.com/podcasts/2026/…
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It takes LONGER NOW than it did 60 YEARS AGO… Oxford United play Cambridge United today.  65 miles apart.  Fans travelling by train face a journey of THREE HOURS. A direct line EXISTED until 1966.  It took less than two hours.  We’ve gone BACKWARDS. No more excuses. No more delays. BUILD East West Rail. 🚝
December 2024: The Oxford to Milton Keynes railway line is completed.  September 2026: ZERO passengers.  Freight trains use it daily.  Winslow built a £5m station that has NEVER opened.  The reason?  A dispute over who opens the doors.  SETTLE it. OPEN it.
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Take a moment to ponder how depraved this is.
UK Lawyers for Israel calls to proscribe Doctors Without Borders as terror group
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Exclusive: Sky News can reveal victims, survivors and witnesses of the Southport stabbing attack had their records inappropriately breached by Ministry of Justice staff. Sky News understands in some cases the information accessed included sensitive and personal data.
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> be Alyssa Rosenzweig > look at Apple's M1 GPU and see a black box > Apple provides almost no public hardware documentation > decide to figure out how the GPU works anyway > start reverse-engineering Apple's GPU interfaces in 2021 > use macOS itself as the closest thing to documentation > get a triangle rendering on the M1 within weeks > realize the impossible-looking problem might actually be solvable > join forces with the Asahi Linux community > build an open-source graphics stack from scratch > keep reverse-engineering hardware Apple never documented publicly > eventually reach conformant OpenGL 4.6 and Vulkan 1.4 > make Apple's M1 and M2 GPUs work properly under Linux > turn a completely closed GPU into an open platform > prove that undocumented hardware can still be understood > become one of the leading voices in open-source graphics
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