Peter W🤓

Journalists! Why you should not bother wasting your/everyone’s time covering “Age Verification” on Linux: The “Tug of War” Theory of Open Source tl;dr: the “project” of open source age verification will inevitably implode — probably messily — and waste everyone’s time whilst also reifying narrative of “support”…

Journalists! Why you should not bother wasting your/everyone’s time covering “Age Verification” on Linux: The “Tug of War” Theory of Open Source
https://alecmuffett.com/article/148084
#AgeAttestation #AgeVerification #MarkZuckerberg #OpenSource #apple #google #ubuntu

The Feds Targeted Charlotte. Now a Local Democrat Who Helped ICE Faces Voters. - Bolts North Carolina lawmaker Carla Cunningham voted to mandate compliance with ICE, and derided immigrants on the House floor. The Democrat faces an intense March primary.

JUST IN: North Carolina's Dem lawmaker Carla Cunningham gave the GOP the decisive vote to pass a law forcing police to comply with ICE. She said "all cultures are not equal."

She just lost reelection BIG in the Dem primary to a progressive pastor & activist, Rodney Sadler. 70% to 22%!

Context:

Arithmetic Without Algorithms: Language Models Solve Math With a Bag of Heuristics Do large language models (LLMs) solve reasoning tasks by learning robust generalizable algorithms, or do they memorize training data? To investigate this question, we use arithmetic reasoning as a rep...

Great test for anyone learning mech interp is reading Nikankin et al's "Arithmetic Without Algorithms" which uses activation patching / circuits, probing, logit lens, describing max activating examples.. If you you follow along while reading, you'll realize you know a lot!

arxiv.org/abs/2410.21272

Personalization at Bluesky The past, present, and future of personalization of the Discover feed

I made a post about personalization at Bluesky.

open.substack.com/pub/recsysml...

yes, words do mean things

From silencing late-night hosts to raiding reporters’ homes, Trump's war on free speech is the authoritarian playbook the Founders warned us about.

Read my full breakdown here:
adamkinzinger.substack.com/p/tyrant-tra...

NC Early Voter race-ethnicity & party primary picked so far (early in-person voting continues to 3 PM Saturday): racial partisan divide very clear.

Generations: 'younger' voters are gaining some ground (now 15% of all ballots cast), while Boomers are dropping in overall %.

#ncpol

Age verification vendor Persona left frontend exposed, researchers say

To demonstrate the privacy implications, researchers took a closer look and found a publicly exposed Persona frontend on a US government-authorized server, with 2,456 accessible files. You read that right. According to researcher "Celeste" the exposed code, which has now been removed, sat at a US government-authorized endpoint that appears to have been isolated from its regular work environment. In those files, the researchers found details about the extensive surveillance Persona software performs on its users. Beyond checking their age, the software performs 269 distinct verification checks, runs facial recognition against watchlists and politically exposed persons, screens "adverse media" across 14 categories (including terrorism and espionage), and assigns risk and similarity scores. Persona collects —and can retain for up to three years —IP addresses, browser and device fingerprints, government ID numbers, phone numbers, names, faces, plus a battery of "selfie" analytics like suspicious-entity detection, pose repeat detection, and age inconsistency checks.

According to The Rage, Discord has stated it will not continue to use Persona for age verification. However, other platforms reported to use Persona include: • Roblox: Uses Persona's facial age estimation and ID verification as the core of its "age checks to chat" system. • OpenAl / ChatGPT: OpenAl's help center explains that if you need to verify being 18+, "Persona is a trusted third-party company we use to help verify age," and that Persona may ask for a live selfie and/or government ID. • Lime: The ride-sharing service deploys custom age verification flows with Persona to meet each region's unique requirements. We don't just report on threats - we help protect your social media Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. Protect your social media accounts by using Malwarebytes Identity Thett Protection.

Persona, the age verification company used by Roblox & Discord was hacked.

And despite the company & platforms claiming Persona utilised “zero knowledge” methodologies to verify age, they are gathering user data.

Palantir is one of Persona’s main investors.

www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/20...

A graphic with the same info in the post + a picture of people at DWeb Camp joining their hands.

✨ 𝗗𝗪𝗲𝗯 𝗨𝗻𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 + 𝗠𝗲𝗲𝘁𝘂𝗽 𝗶𝗻 𝗕𝗲𝗿𝗹𝗶𝗻 🛸

Sat 28 Feb we’ll meet at @c-base.org, Berlin with @brewster.kahle.org, @internetarchive.eu, and many new and long-time DWeb allies!

Join us to contribute shaping #DWebCamp 2026 🏕️

Free attendance, limited spots!

🎟️ All info + RSVP

We should legislate identity portability for email addresses.

We have it for phone numbers, where the technical challenge was much greater. We should have it for email, too.

This is a bad take. You can’t counter far right narratives on a platform that is designed to amplify only those narratives. Politicians should set the example.

And journalist should get off of it too.

Congratulations to Minnesota! A huge win for Meg Luger-Nikolai and badass resisters in the state.

this is the midtopian future

Move over, Apple: Meet the alternative app stores available in the EU and elsewhere | TechCrunch A list of some of the alternative app stores iPhone users in the EU can try today. 

Move over, Apple: Meet the alternative app stores available in the EU and elsewhere

Varad Mehta ‹ @varadmehta X.com John Roberts upholding Barack Obama's signature policy achievement but striking down Donald Trump's is the kind of thing that gets remembered. And not, I imagine, in any way that over the long term will be good for the Supreme Court.

I try to avoid petty insults. But anyone who equates a new federal statute duly enacted through bicameralism and present pursuant to Article I, Section 7 (Obamacare) with an executive order that unilaterally implements a president’s whims with no congressional input (IEEPA tariffs) is an idiot.

X Really Is Pulling Users to the Right Elites may not be as immune to this kind of algorithmic radicalization as they think.

“(ICE favorability is) almost break-even with people who get their news from Twitter. Compare that to other social media platforms like Reddit and TikTok, where over 70% of voters viewed the agency unfavorably.”

You are what you (choose to) eat

Aaron Rupar @atrupar X.com Trump notes his crowd is more enthused about bigotry than they are for tax cuts: "It's amazing how strongly people feel about that. I talk about cutting taxes, people go like that, I talk about transgender everybody goes crazy. Five years ago you didn't know what the hell it was" LIVE GREENSBORO, NC cc # 45 our Children. 5:45 PT LIVE BREAKING NEWS TRUMP SPEAKS IN NORTH CAROLINA 'UNABOMBER' TED KACZYNSKI, 81, FOUND DEAD IN PRISON. GO TO NEWS 5:49 PM • 6/10/23 • 14M Views

George Wallace in 1962: "I started off talking about schools and highways and prisons and taxes and I couldn't make them listen. Then I began talking about n**rs and they stomped the floor."

Donald Trump in 2023⬇️

DOGE Bro’s Grant Review Process Was Literally Just Asking ChatGPT ‘Is This DEI?’ Federal grants that had been approved after a full application and review process were terminated by some random inexperienced DOGE bros based on whether ChatGPT could explain—in under 120 characte…

A must read - www.techdirt.com/2026/02/19/d...

I’m a proponent of AI tech but this is the dumbest counter-argument. Kind of surprised that he would say this.
(Maybe I shouldn’t be?)

Gmail, Facebook, even Twitter all provide for bulk data export. The chances that bsky locks this down is basically zero.

If you’re angry that no one uses alternatives, then go yell at 1 billion users, not the devs who…<checks notes>.. are LITERALLY BUILDING ALTERNATIVES TO CENTRALIZED APPS.

ffs 🙄

There would be no faster way to destroy the value in the company, and no reasonable investor is going to ask them to do this in such a manner that people couldn’t exit.

And he’s almost certainly using an open-weight but not open-source model.

What is OAuth? Wherein I [try to] answer a seemingly straightforward question: "WTF is OAuth, anyhow?"

Over on dead-Twitter, @geoffreylitt.com asked the following question last week:

"I desperately need a Matt Levine style explanation of how OAuth works. What is the historical cascade of requirements that got us to this place?"

Here's my attempt at an answer: leaflet.pub/p/did:plc:3v...

Do you just want some dark budget for Claude tokens

The real social network is the content we reposted along the way

Conference-driven development is a tale as old as time

Congrats Eli!

S2PA and MUXL: Bringing Video to Content-Addressed Systems

Excited to announce our collaboration with @ipfs.tech and https://dasl.ing on two new standards for the next thousand years of decentralized social video: S2PA and MUXL!

Together they give us a standard for self-certifying and content-addressable media in the decentralized social ecosystem.

but should apps see our data? thinking small on the protocol

@habitat.network, we are so excited about ATProtocol not so we can get new social networks, but because of the primitives it provides for a world with user data agency. let's build that world.