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Alec Muffett Profile picture
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Mar 8 • 16 tweets • 9 min read
This is possibly the most important and long-awaited tweet that I've ever composed.

On behalf of @Twitter, I am delighted to announce their new @TorProject onion service, at:

…zg5vztmjuricljdp2c5kshju4avyoid.onion
I'm delighted to have assisted @Twitter engineers in their adoption of #OnionServices & #OnionNetworking from @TorProject — providing greater privacy, integrity, trust, & "unblockability" for people all around the world who use @Twitter to communicate.

help.twitter.com/en/using-twitt…
I am also honoured that they've chosen to adopt EOTK (the Enterprise Onion Toolkit) to power their onion platform, albeit with considerable though reasonable modification to meet their extraordinary production requirements:

github.com/alecmuffett/eo…
So why am I first(-ish?) to tweet about it?

From past experience with the Facebook and BBC Onion sites, any sufficiently large announcement leads to a load-spike, and given that @TwitterSafety has 3.6 million followers it would not be wise in a time of global crisis.
The Twitter and Facebook Onion Sites, as well as others such as the New York Times, BBC, Deutsche Welle, Radio Free Europe and others, are documented on the #RealWorldOnionSites page at:

github.com/alecmuffett/re…
Oh, and "long-awaited"?

In 2014 I led the team which launched the @Facebook onion; there have been occasional conversations re: "an onion for Twitter" ever since. This is the result of many peoples efforts, over years, and I'd like to thank them all for their perseverance.
ps: before anyone asks / for purposes of clarity: I am not a Twitter employee. I just help large organisations which want to adopt #OnionServices.
Yes indeed:
HT @josephfcox vice.com/en/article/v7d…
HT @jonfingas engadget.com/twitter-tor-on…
@jonfingas Kind words from the head of @WhatsApp:
Some people have asked: Why offer an Onion Address?
alecmuffett.com/article/16007
HT @thedextriarchy theverge.com/2022/3/8/22967…
Nice summary:
Morning Perspective: Tor is end-to-end encryption for computers to talk to other computers:

medium.com/@alecmuffett/t…
Why should big websites run an Onion Service?
alecmuffett.com/article/16007 #OnionServices

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More from @AlecMuffett

Alec Muffett Profile picture
Oct 25, 2021
1/ Oh this is glorious: *NOW* Frances Haugen says that she supports end-to-end encryption… buuuuut:

2/ …but: now she wants to enforce a

"1 Human Being" = "1 Instagram Account"

...real-name, real-identity policy, in order to "protect the children" by stopping them doing and seeing bad things.

3/ …and that if you cannot prevent something, you are therefore encouraging it:



Frances Haugen apparently wants to kill online anonymity, and require us all to have fixed and singular online identities.
Read 13 tweets
Alec Muffett Profile picture
Oct 25, 2021
1/ So @StevenLevy has written at length about the "Badge Posts" - the goodbye, final messages posted for other employees to read as they leave the company.

You'll find his article here:

wired.com/story/facebook…
2/ But these are not just "human interest" stories; some are meant to achieve something, and in my case the goal was to move Facebook away from implementing national identities & censorship within the Facebook platform.

I wrote a response to Steven:

alecmuffett.com/article/14994
3/ But I felt that that was not enough to explain what was going on, how Facebook may be changed, and the critical importance of fostering frank and constructive engagement in order to make effective change.
Read 5 tweets
Alec Muffett Profile picture
Oct 24, 2021
> My interview with @StevenLevy of Wired re: @FrancesHaugen leaking my Facebook Engineering “Goodbye Post”

I'm posting this with password-embargo until Steven's @WIRED article is posted; but I have a message for Frances Haugen in this screencap extract.

alecmuffett.com/article/14994 Image
Frances is talking to @CommonsDCMS tomorrow, so she should have opportunity to bring this message of privacy and safety to people who would benefit from it.

/cc @DanMilmo

theguardian.com/technology/202… Image
Oh dear, oh dear:

>Facebook whistleblower warns ‘dangerous’ encryption will aid espionage by hostile nations

>Ex-employee has taken aim at Sir Nick Clegg and warns new encryption plans are an attempt to cover-up harmful online material

Read 15 tweets
Alec Muffett Profile picture
Oct 24, 2021
> LOOK

It is dark.

> GET LIGHT

You flip the switch on the nightlight. You are in bedroom. You can see:

Wailing Baby, Pot of Sudocrem, Size 2 Nappies

> GET MILK

You can't do that yet.
> FIX BABY WITH CREAM

You slather the baby with the creamy unguent. The baby slips through your fingers onto the bed, and wails more loudly!

> FIX BABY WITH NAPPIES

You'll need a mat for that.

> SMELL BABY

The baby smells clean, with a hint of cheese. Roquefort?
> OUT

You go out. You are in Kitchen. You can see:

Fridge, Sink, Kettle, Milk Powder, Empty Bottle

> EXAMINE FRIDGE

The Fridge contains a cold bottle. The bottle contains: icy water.
Read 6 tweets
Alec Muffett Profile picture
Oct 23, 2021
SATURDAY NIGHT THOUGHTS: it'll be weird if the echo-chamber of politicians, journalists, and "safety" / child-protection advocates succeed in somehow banning algorithmic content feeds… and then evaporate when the rage which feeds their community dialectic eventually dissipates.
Say we all move to "chronological" feed ranking as the sole metric. QUANGOs and Charities are not natural "friends" of people, so they'll have to vastly increase their posting and reposting rates in order to maintain visibility.

This will annoy "power users" who follow them.
The net result will be that "worthy" causes either suffer a dramatic drop in direct engagement, OR ELSE they lose access to influential followers.

There's a potential workaround in curated interest "lists", but RSS taught us that most people won't put in the effort.
Read 4 tweets
Alec Muffett Profile picture
Sep 11, 2021
1/ It's tempting to be darkly snarky about this article, along the lines of

"Met Commissioner Cressida Dick calls for more terrorists to be 'known to the police' before committing atrocities"

…the allusion being that (continued)

telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/09/1…
2/ The allusion being that Security Services are already swamped in more "data" than they are "intelligence".

Evidence? INHOPE, the global Child Safety Hotline umbrella organisation, are swamped with old & stale reports, so develop "triage" tools:

inhope.org/EN/articles/wh…
3/ However it seems egregious of Ms Dick to raise this on the anniversary of a event which was clearly not enabled by E2E-Encryption - because there was hardly any of it in 2001.

Hell, the Paris attacks 14 years later, were arranged via plaintext SMS:

arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…
Read 15 tweets

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