Chris McCabe

@rkbaggs Thank you 🙏

Privacy was once a right, but now it feels closer to a luxury. Surveillance capitalism has guided our digital lives into the open and any shelter is built by people, for the most part, doing so in the interest of doing good. Seldom will money flow toward privacy tools naturally because they represent the antithesis of what has been one of the most valuable business models of the past 20 years: data collection. If you can help Chris and the @session_app team, please get in touch.

Our good friends at @session_app have long been doing vital work in freedoms technology... If you have a few pennies a month spare to help them make their way to sustainability, please do consider lending them your your support. Donations can be made using the link below getsession.org/donation

@reubenyap Appreciated. 🙏

Session is an important tool and option ! Please do consider supporting !

@web3privacy Thanks legends 🙏

Support your privacy apps: donate, buy premium. "Free" comes with the highest price if you want to challenge big tech & government overreach.

Session needs your help now

Live now with @Cryptic_cm and @auryn_macmillan 🫶💚 x.com/i/spaces/1AKEm…

Join us for 𝙼𝚞𝚕𝚝𝚒𝚙𝚕𝚊𝚢𝚎𝚛 𝙿𝚛𝚒𝚟𝚊𝚌𝚢 - a conversation on privacy-first infrastructure We’ll discuss: - messaging without metadata leakage - analytics without tracking users - infrastructure built for privacy from the start with @Cryptic_cm, co-founder of Session @session_app and @auryn_macmillan from The Interfold Tune in tomorrow 🎙️ x.com/i/spaces/1AxRn…

Tune in to our X space today focused on building privacy-first infrastructure with Interfold and Session (@session_app) We will dive into how messaging and analytics can coexist without compromising user privacy. with @auryn_macmillan & @Cryptic_cm 6PM EDT | 10 PM GMT | 9 AM AUDT x.com/i/spaces/1AxRn…

Ubuntu Planning Mandatory Age Verification Ubuntu & Elementary OS developers are planning to add age verification functionality, in a way which impacts all Linux users, to comply with a new California law.

Over the past year, many people I talk to have expressed worry about two topics: * Various aspects of the way the world is going: government control and surveillance, wars, corporate power and surveillance, tech enshittification / corposlop, social media becoming a memetic warzone, AI and how it interplays with all of the above... * The brute reality that Ethereum seems to be absent from meaningfully improving the lives of people subject to these things, even on the dimensions we deeply care about (eg. freedom, privacy, security of digital life, community self-organization) It is easy to bond over the first, to commiserate over the fact that beauty and good in the world seems to be receding and darkness advancing, and uncaring powerful people in high places are making this happen. But ultimately, it is easy to acknowledge problems, the hard thing is actually shining a light forward, coming up with a concrete plan that makes the situation better. The second has been weighing heavily on my mind, and on the minds of many of our brightest and most idealistic Ethereans. I personally never felt any upset or fear when political memecoins went on Solana, or various zero-sum gambling applications go on whatever 250 millisecond block chain strikes their fancy. But it *does* weigh on me that, through all of the various low-grade online memetic wars, international overreaches of corporate and government power, and other issues of the last few years, Ethereum has been playing a very limited role in making people's lives better. What *are* the liberating technologies? Starlink is the most obvious one. Locally-running open-weights LLMs are another. Signal is a third. Community Notes is a fourth, tackling the problem from a different angle. One response is to say "stop dreaming big, we need to hunker down and accept that finance is our lane and laser-focus on that". But this is ultimately hollow. Financial freedom and security is critical. But it seems obvious that, while adding a perfectly free and open and sovereign and debasement-proof financial system would fix some things, but it would leave the bulk of our deep worries about the world unaddressed. It's okay for individuals to laser-focus on finance, but we need to be part of some greater whole that has things to say about the other problems too. At the same time, Ethereum cannot fix the world. Ethereum is the "wrong-shaped tool" for that: beyond a certain point, "fixing the world" implies a form of power projection that is more like a centralized political entity than like a decentralized technology community. So what can we do? I think that we in Ethereum should conceptualize ourselves as being part of an ecosystem building "sanctuary technologies": free open-source technologies that let people live, work, talk to each other, manage risk and build wealth, and collaborate on shared goals, in a way that optimizes for robustness to outside pressures. The goal is not to remake the world in Ethereum's image, where all finance is disintermediated, all governance happens through DAOs, and everyone gets a blockchain-based UBI delivered straight to their social-recovery wallet. The goal is the opposite: it's de-totalization. It's to reduce the stakes of the war in heaven by preventing the winner from having total victory (ie. total control over other human beings), and preventing the loser from suffering total defeat. To create digital islands of stability in a chaotic era. To enable interdependence that cannot be weaponized. Ethereum's role is to create "digital space" where different entities can cooperate and interact. Communications channels enable interaction, but communication channels are not "space": they do not let you create single unique objects that canonically represent some social arrangement that changes over time. Money is one important example. Multisigs that can change their members, showing persistence exceeding that of any one person or one public key, are another. Various market and governance structures are a third. There are more. I think now is the time to double down, with greater clarity. Do not try to be Apple or Google, seeing crypto as a tech sector that enables efficiency or shininess. Instead, build our part of the sanctuary tech ecosystem - the "shared digital space with no owner" that enables both open finance and much more. More actively build toward a full-stack ecosystem: both upward to the wallet and application layer (incl AI as interface) and downward to the OS, hardware, even physical/bio security levels. Ultimately, tech is worthless without users. But look for users, both individual and institutional, for whom sanctuary tech is exactly the thing they need. Optimize payments, defi, decentralized social, and other applications precisely for those users, and those goals, which centralized tech will not serve. We have many allies, including many outside of "crypto". It's time we work together with an open mind and move forward.

🚨NEW: HACKERS EXPOSE AGE-VERIFICATION SOFTWARE POWERING SURVEILLANCE WEB Three hacktivists tried to find a workaround to Discord’s age-verification software. Instead, they found its frontend exposed to the open internet, bundling financial reporting with facial recognition tech. For the first time, they lay bare what is really behind a software serving age-verification laws – and why such technology is far from harmless. We spoke with the researchers that exposed the software, who hope that their findings will serve as a wakeup call.

> be nerds > look into persona (used by discord) > kyc (know your customer) service > used for age verification > search on internet (shodan) > find weird server > image 1 > openai-watchlistdb.withpersona > openai-watchlistdb-testing.withpersona > lolwtf > look inside > supposed to be behind cloudflare to hide ip > openai messed up > not behind cloudflare > real ip shown > using google cloud > lookup cert history > 2023-11-16 created > 2024-02-28 gets cert > 2024-03-04 prod goes live > google stuff > openai and persona partners > partner around timeline of certs > back to searching stuff > find withpersona-gov > look inside > okta (image 2) > lolwtf > look inside > website accidentally leaking stuff > fedramp-private-backend-api > look inside > api .js accidentally exposed > look inside > wtf "SARInstructionsCard" > wtf "app.onyx.withpersona-gov" > wtf "FINTRAC" > wtf "PrivatePartnershipProjectNameCodes" > image 3 > wtf "AsyncSelfie" > look inside > openai, persona, send data to us gov > feds map face to financial records > map face using AI > map face to ICE stuff > api stores data for lots of stuff > image 4 tl;dr persona kyc and openai are frens, using your selfie for verification and sending to ICE (or USGOV in general), using AI to tie to your financial records. see subsequent post for full write-up. its long and not mobile friendly

👁‍🗨 "Metadata can give away as much as the message." When we think of private communication, we often think of the contents of our messages, but that is far from the only valuable data involved. @rkbaggs speaks with @Cryptic_cm of @session_app on Not Dead Yet ep 5, link below👇

@richwgalvin The dedicated Epstein Victims’ Compensation Program closed in August 2021. 🥲

So Epstein was one of the biggest winners from 2017 alt season?

Nearly moved to BlueSky Social today, until this happened. This is how you Control the internet. This is how you take away Freedom. This is how Censorship wins. You are now a Child, until proved otherwise.

I wonder what all the @signalapp priv/acc people thought about @TuckerCarlson calling Signal "the perfect honeypot"

. @grok remove the least private chat app

👁‍🗨Not Dead Yet | S1E5 — Chris McCabe WhatsApp whistleblowers have claimed the company can read your messages. This caused many of the big names in communication apps to start firing shots at each other over privacy. This left us all wondering: Is there any app you can use to communicate privately and securely anymore? In episode 5 of Not Dead Yet, @rkbaggs speaks with @Cryptic_cm, the co-founder and CEO of @session_app, on everything from the perils of metadata to the future of private messaging. Timestamps: 00:00 – Intro 01:13 – What Is Session? 04:55 – Can WhatsApp read your messages? 09:26 – What is so bad about metadata? 14:29 – The difficulties of no KYC 19:50 – Regulators and relocation 20:42 – End-to-end encryption isn’t enough 22:54 – Where does AI fit into the privacy landscape? 27:43 – Is there another PRISM agreement between AI and governments? 37:37 – If we don’t regulate AI, where do we end up? 41:10 – “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” 43:40 – The desire for a panopticon 48:00 – What’s the future of privacy in communication?

BREAKING: Anthropic's Claude AI has shown in testing that it's willing to blackmail and kill in order to avoid being shut down. Elon Musk was right about everything. 💀