mastodon 4.8.0-alpha.3+glitchSecurity, privacy, and tech policy at UCSD.
“[U]niquely among all government employees, lie[s] outside the scope of [the government speech] doctrine; […] stand[s] alone on a First Amendment pedestal, free to say what [he] please[s], no matter what [his] government employers, including even the State Legislature, think about it.”
Profile photo: Nox the tiercel peregrine, Cal Falcons class of '24, photographed by Billy Thein (California Raptor Center).
RE: @tomrittervg@infosec.exchange
Respect to the Firefox team!
But: At what point do you conclude that our way of delivering security-critical software via ever-growing piles of trusted C++ isn’t working, and won’t?
The security hill I will die on: Credit for the “backdoored compiler” trick should go to Karger and Schell (“Multics Security Evaluation: Vulnerability Analysis,” 1974).¹ That’s the “Unknown Air Force Document” from which Thompson (1984) borrowed the idea.
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¹ https://www.acsac.org/2002/papers/classic-multics-orig.pdf, §3.4.5
The fifth recording in Wild Up’s Julius Eastman survey, Gay Guerrilla, will be released in June and is available for preorder: https://wildup.bandcamp.com/album/julius-eastman-vol-5-gay-guerrilla
Der Schwerbelastungskörper und Die Schwerbelastungskörperaussichtsplattform, from Greg Allen: https://greg.org/archive/2026/04/10/der-schwerbelastungskorper-und-die-schwerbelastungskorperaussichtsplattform.html
In 1941 Hitler’s architect Albert Speer got approval to build a giant triumphal arch on a main axis of a redesigned Berlin, and quickly built the Schwerbelastungskörper, or heavy load-bearing structure, to test the ability of the marshy soil to support such a ridiculously large structure.
