Dan Wallach

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-w…

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.

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.

@AlSweigart Fellow Houstonian, occasional mask wearer here: I wear masks, but it's increasingly socially awkward to do so. And nobody seems to be making policy changes based on these alarming wastewater data. Only redeeming factor: unseasonably warm weather, outdoor restaurant seating.

@mdwelsh Ultimately, you're going to be limited by what's actually available. The automotive supply chain is still a mess. Supposedly things are only now just barely turning a corner, with inventory appearing on dealer lots. supplychainbrain.com/blogs/1-think-…

Why do car websites suck so much? The only thing I want to see is a picture of the friggin' rear cargo space. I don't care about your glamour shots of people drinking coffee while looking out over a cliff. CAN MY DOG FIT IN THE BACK?? That is all.

@CZEdwards A few months ago, I had jury duty in Houston. Shared, enormous jury pool; hundreds arrive daily. Masks required. I wore an N95 and they required me to put a cheap surgical mask over it! Only one fellow voir dire participant w/ me had mask below his nose. Coughing noticeably.

Live tweeting jury duty. Quite the super-spreader event we have here. I see about 15 masks of 130 ish people. #juryDuty

@sebastiangood @ShriramKMurthi @entersudonym I'm on my 2nd generation of Nest Protect smoke detectors for exactly this reason. Nevermore a 3am beeping to track down. Just run the app and it tells you exactly where the problem is. Downside: seven year expiration. At exactly that time, they loudly insist you replace them.

@ShriramKMurthi @entersudonym Come on. How can you beat the UX of “stand underneath it with ears cocked and a screaming 3 year old looking at the LED and waiting for 30 seconds to see if it beeps and convincing yourself you heard the real article and not an echo”. Flawless UX 12/10, would kill myself again.

Bedroom area smoke alarm beeping since 5am. Changed batteries &c; no avail. Bought new one; got one w/ CO sensing, figuring at some point our CO monitor will go kaput, might as well. 1/2 hour installation later, 12 hrs into saga, still beeping. It was the CO monitor all along.

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.

Nasty thought: this could be used to generate one-off spam emails, which will be sufficiently different as to get through many spam filters.

@CrispinCowan0 @AnilSomayaji @Office @IEEEorg @perrymetzger @yoshi_kohno @jdp23 @jeremyinfosec @DrKevinFu @nikitab @sa3nder @wjrucklidge @FalconDarkstar @noplasticshower @dylanmc @CormacHerley @Adobe I think that serious authors use a bibliography management tool like Zotero (or Endnote, in the old days). I still do LaTeX for most things, and Google Docs for the rest.

@AnilSomayaji @Office @IEEEorg @danwallach @perrymetzger @yoshi_kohno @jdp23 @jeremyinfosec @DrKevinFu @nikitab @sa3nder @wjrucklidge @FalconDarkstar @noplasticshower @dylanmc @CormacHerley @Adobe Word is still doing awful things. It is particularly awful at dealing with multiple authors, where EVERYONE gets compressed down to a series of initials except the first author, and put out of order.

Hey #academic #computerscience folks, I'm writing a scholarly article for the first time in ages. I have long since switched from LaTeX/Bibtex to @Office. NONE of the bibliography styles in Word are the classical CS citation style, and the @IEEEorg is picky. HOW does one do this?

@CrispinCowan0 There are some fun moments. Like when Spectre/Meltdown came out, we had a multi-hour phone call to make sure we both understood it.

@danwallach Your father did THAT? Awesome!

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.

@jessamyn @casahighland Thank you for your service. 🫡

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 🧵🧵🧵

New GitHub search is 🔥🔥🔥

@perrymetzger @CrispinCowan0 @KelseyTuoc @ESYudkowsky This strikes me as whataboutism. Vaccines are an important part of public health. They work better in aggregate than they do individually. Also, we already do have mandatory vaccines in many cases (notably for kids in public schools in many states).

@CrispinCowan0 @danwallach @KelseyTuoc @ESYudkowsky Also, there have been too many situations over the past couple of centuries, from forced sterilization for eugenics to forced lobotomies, for me not to be leery about giving up the right to bodily self determination.

I think we might well end the flu and colds in the next few decades.

@perrymetzger @KelseyTuoc @ESYudkowsky There's the rub: of course we want the best vaccines and the highest fraction vaccinated, but we really need both to control community spread. Sure, I'm enormously relieved we have high tech vaccines. I would feel much safer if they were mandatory.

@danwallach @KelseyTuoc @ESYudkowsky We might not be able to get high vaccination rates anymore, so we may need to emphasize making vaccines more effective to benefit the people who are willing to take them even if many others refuse.

@perrymetzger @KelseyTuoc @ESYudkowsky This research is super impressive. You could also imagine a vaccine where you generate 20 variants of the COVID spike protein, not just the ones seen in the wild, to create a cluster of related antibodies. My concern is with antivax nonsense. Can we get high vax rates any more?

@KelseyTuoc @ESYudkowsky I will go out on a limb and say that we still lack enough understanding of why some diseases evade long term immunity to do that quickly. We may, however, seriously reduce the influenza death toll.

@NetworkDemonic But will NeuraLink get jacked?

I'm wondering whether the impending failure of Twitter will cascade to harm Tesla (almost certainly) & Space-X (more immune). I anticipate that other Musk ventures will such as Boring will collapse (pun intended.) There may be a lot of corporate pieces on the market soon.

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…