Max Dale

Hey everyone! I wanted to share that Dr. Kaki Ryan and I have put together a systems research reading group for UNC computer science majors — or really, anyone who just thinks computers are neat. Meetings are Mondays at 4 PM in FB141. Great turnout so far, but we’d love to have more people join us!

An overdue personal update: I'm excited to say that I'm officially a dual American/Canadian citizen!

Now might be a good time to see if your router is compatible with DD-WRT or similar. dd-wrt.com

The censored 60 Minutes' segment, Inside CECOT, is now available. Download from @ddosecrets.org: data.ddosecrets.org/Inside%20CEC... Download/stream from @archive.org: archive.org/details/insi... The original video was recorded by @jasonparis.bsky.social, and cleaned up by @emma.best

I wonder if Santa knows the locations of all 60,000+ surveillance cameras the Atlanta Police Department has access to? Maybe he can give that data to the public as a kind of collective Christmas gift?

RE: The Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill ICE Raids Nearly 3/4s of my cousin’s majority hispanic elementary school class didn’t show up today. Profoundly grim.

The legendary HOPE hacking conference has been banned from its venue at St. John's University over what the university seems to be calling an "anti-police agenda." Part of a broader crackdown on security research / hacking / open source: www.404media.co/hope-hacking...

Charlotte and Raleigh in North Carolina became the latest cities to see federal forces move in. Here’s a rundown of how President Trump has used ICE, and what’s going on in each place he's sent them.

Exciting stuff!

This is so frustrating. I admire and agree with the principled stance that the PSF is taking on this, but principles don’t pay the bills. If you benefit from Python at all, toss them a couple of dollars. www.python.org/psf/donations/

New: We have just sued ICE to demand it turns over a secretive spyware contract that it refuses to release: www.404media.co/were-suing-i...

🚨 Introducing our @tmlrorg.bsky.social paper “Unlearning Sensitive Information in Multimodal LLMs: Benchmark and Attack-Defense Evaluation” We present UnLOK-VQA, a benchmark to evaluate unlearning in vision-and-language models, where both images and text may encode sensitive or private information.

"Age verification" laws are actually "upload your ID or get your face scanned to access every website, ending anonymity and associating your identity with everything you do online" laws and if more people understood that they would not be down for this authoritarian nonsense

If your organization supports censorship bills like KOSA I don’t want to see your Trans Day of Visibility post

We may be ruled by stupid and evil people, but at least they're stupid in a way that includes being horrible at opsec.

This is inaccurate. There is no known vulnerability with Signal's core tech. The memo was discussing phishing attempts, which Signal has worked to mitigate. And it was hastily reported. It's important not to spread misinfo that can confuse people into moving away from meaningfully private comms.

I'm seeing a lot of misinformation re:Hegseth and @signal.org, and I think a lot of it needs to be put to rest. Signal is, and remains, secure if your opsec isn't abysmal. The weakest link in any security system is generally the person using it. That's what this is.

In light of some recent painful events in my family, I'd like to remind everybody of a major accomplishment of the Biden admin. before Trump tries to kill it. The government has offered the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline since 2022. Professional mental heath support, zero wait times. Please use it.

The coolest thing I’ve seen today is that a bunch of volunteer public health professionals and developers have restored the CDC website from before January 20th 2025. This differs from an archive in that they want to rebuild the links between pages and replicate the full website.

Catalan court says NSO Group executives can be charged in spyware investigation

"Vance skis in jeans" I would never show my face again, my god.

securitylab.amnesty.org/latest/2025/... Amnesty International’s Security Lab has a post about 3 vulnerabilities exploited by Cellebrite to extract data from locked Android devices. GrapheneOS blocked exploiting these vulnerabilities in multiple different ways. We also patched them much earlier.

Don't panic, but brace. This will not be the last that we hear of this. Build your habits. Encrypt everything end-to-end. Set messages to auto-delete. Get comfortable with TOR and/or Tails, if you can. Make them work for it.

Every website that handles your data should have a warrant canary. Full stop.

They need him to be a genius because they cannot handle what it means for them to be tricked by a fool.

I've mostly agreed with people that say that Google Tensor is plenty powerful for most, but it really does have its moments where the cracks show. Android Auto, Tidal, and an 8 GB file download are making my Pixel 9 CHUG. Really hoping Google moving to TSMC and non-Exynos cores fixes this.

If you don’t know anything about fingerprinting, I implore you to give it even some basic research. An incomplete list of some of the things they can use in profiling you: • Language • Screen resolution • Installed fonts • Minute variations in how your computer renders images/sound • Hardware config

Pt. 2/2 ⬇️

It is perfectly legal to know your rights and to educate others about them, too. EVERYONE in the United States, citizen or not, has rights. I will not allow this administration to intimidate us from helping you know about them. Here’s our shareable guide ⬇️: (pt. 1/2)

I cannot cosign this strongly enough. I’m vaccinated, and it took me out for a full week earlier this month. Felt like I was going to pass out at the pharmacy waiting for my Tamiflu. My roommate was hit so hard that he had to call paramedics. For yourself and others, please get your shot.

You don't "get" autism as an adult. You should have been diagnosed as a kid and given support then too.

Absolutely insane take.

Of course. As always, download Signal.