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Moxie Marlinspike

@moxie

Nov 15, 2022

One unique thing about software as an engineering discipline is that it offers abstractions which allow ppl to start contributing in the field w/o having to understand the whole field.

To be great, though, imo understanding what’s under the abstractions is really important:

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These abstractions are the “black boxes” in your work.

Maybe you make HTTP requests all the time, or submit queries to a DB, or read and write to files, or make a syscall, or even type useState—but have never interrogated what’s happening under the abstraction when you do.

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These abstractions are great for most things, but are still “leaky” at some point — and understanding their underlying complexity is incredibly valuable for being a great software dev.

Here are some books I found valuable for learning about these abstractions early on:

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Moxie Marlinspike

@moxie

Dec 23, 2021

Since my last NFT was banned, I made another NFT and dApp. This time for autonomous art: autonomous.graphics

It's a collective work. Anyone can mint a token for it by making a visual contribution, and the price to mint is paid to all previous contributors.

Wow, that was fast. There are already three visual contributions!

Whoa, 44 contributions in an hour. Almost $12k USD has gone into making a collective art piece. Got pretty weird pretty quick, but fun to watch so far!

Read 4 tweets

Moxie Marlinspike

@moxie

Dec 23, 2021

It's amazing to me that after all this time, almost all media coverage of Telegram still refers to it as an "encrypted messenger."

Telegram has a lot of compelling features, but in terms of privacy and data collection, there is no worse choice. Here's how it actually works:

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Telegram stores all your contacts, groups, media, and every message you've ever sent or received in plaintext on their servers. The app on your phone is just a "view" onto their servers, where the data actually lives.

Almost everything you see in the app, Telegram also sees

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Here's a simple test: delete Telegram, install it on a brand new phone, and register with your number. You will immediately see all your conversation history, all of your contacts, all the media you've shared, all of your groups. How? It was all on their servers, in plaintext

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Read 9 tweets

Moxie Marlinspike

@moxie

Jul 9, 2020

I've had a bunch of discussions with people here about Signal PINs over the past day.

I don't usually spend this much time on Twitter, so parallel to the direct discussion, these are a few of the adjacent thoughts that have come up for me:

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1) I think it's increasingly important to consider how discussions around technology are perceived across the full spectrum of backgrounds (from technical to non-technical) for everyone interested in the topic of their own privacy/security -- which is basically everyone now!

Its interesting that some folks who see discussion around PINs conclude "switch to app X!" where X invisibly stores the same data in plaintext rather than e2e.

Signal's efforts are a discussion b/c we're designing not to store data in plaintext, while plaintext got no discussion

Read 14 tweets

Moxie Marlinspike

@moxie

May 2, 2020

Many trends in modern programming language design seem to focus on developers pressing fewer keys on the keyboard. To me, that's a strange priority.

For large systems where the industry spends most of its time, I think "readability" is much more important than "writability."
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For example, even simple features like "type inference" feel like misplaced priorities to me.

People say "it's annoying I have to write String foo = new String()," but realistically, you're more often writing "String foo = bar.getBaz()"

If that becomes "val foo = bar.getBaz()"

...what is "foo?"

"The compiler can figure it out!" they say. But what I care about is whether someone looking at the code can figure it out.

We're writing 3 fewer characters one time, at the cost of less information for the ~years people will have to read and understand it.

Read 5 tweets

Moxie Marlinspike

@moxie

Apr 10, 2020

First look at Apple/Google contact tracing framework:

1) Once a day, your device derives a new key ("daily tracing key").

2) It uses that to derive a new "proximity ID" every time your device's bluetooth address changes (15min), which is broadcast to nearby BT sensors.

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3) Your device keeps track of all "proximity IDs" it sees.

4) If someone tests positive, they choose to publish their (previously secretly) "daily tracing keys."

5) Your device frequently DLs all published daily tracing keys and KDFs to see if they match recorded proximity IDs.

So first obvious caveat is that this is "private" (or at least not worse than BTLE), *until* the moment you test positive.

At that point all of your BTLE mac addrs over the previous period become linkable. Why do they change to begin with? Because tracking is already a problem.

Read 10 tweets

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