freedom security privacy robots consciousness | Lead & Chairman @sovright_, @sovchip, EF Silviculture | @synthetix_io @Anchorage private equity | @wharton 2007
In the ether
Joined June 2018
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Excited to talk to three heroes of mine, all in one sitting!
We will explore how tools, both surveillance and privacy tools, can evolve beyond their intended use cases - as they have before.
Imagine a different future: what if we embraced surveillance, in exchange for security? What would that world look like?
Join us on the first livestream on @ethereum
@VitalikButerin @Ada_Palmer @SherriDavidoff
The Apparatus - Jan 15, 6pm UTC
A livestream with @VitalikButerin, SciFi author and historian @Ada_Palmer, & professional hacker @SherriDavidoff, moderated by @ml_sudo.
Three theories on why privacy keeps losing, and how to turn the tables.
Watch here: xitter.cf/i/broadcasts/1yNGabWMM…
Cursor Ultra ($200/mo):
sending full project files to external servers, not just the lines you highlight. entire repo structure, .env files, git history. all of it. every time you open a project.
ChatGPT Pro ($200/mo):
clipboard history being logged. anything you copy and paste into the app stays on their servers permanently even if you delete the conversation. Sam Altman's company is burning $14B this year. your data is how they're training the next model.
SuperGrok Heavy ($300/mo):
the desktop app was reading browser tabs that weren't even part of the conversation. open tabs, URLs, page titles. Elon charges $300/mo and gets your browsing activity as a bonus.
Claude Max ($200/mo):
the only one that came back clean. no background data collection outside of the active conversation. i'll give Dario Amodei that one.
Claude Code found spyware behavior in three out of four AI tools i was paying for. they were sending way more than just my prompts.
i asked Claude to audit every outbound connection from my Mac and flag anything that was sending data i didn't agree to. i was paying $900/mo across four subscriptions. figured i should at least know what they're doing with my code.
here's what it found:
Cursor Ultra ($200/mo):
sending full project files to external servers, not just the lines you highlight. entire repo structure, .env files, git history. all of it. every time you open a project.
ChatGPT Pro ($200/mo):
clipboard history being logged. anything you copy and paste into the app stays on their servers permanently even if you delete the conversation. Sam Altman's company is burning $14B this year. your data is how they're training the next model.
SuperGrok Heavy ($300/mo):
the desktop app was reading browser tabs that weren't even part of the conversation. open tabs, URLs, page titles. Elon charges $300/mo and gets your browsing activity as a bonus.
Claude Max ($200/mo):
the only one that came back clean. no background data collection outside of the active conversation. i'll give Dario Amodei that one.
i cancelled three subscriptions that night. $700/mo gone.
then i replaced all four with open source models running on a used RTX 3090 i got for $500. same quality. no data leaving my machine. total running cost is about $8/mo in electricity.
the full setup is in the image below. every command is copy paste. took me 20 minutes.
Time to move from from stressing about to the internet to stressing about everything in your kitchen and on your lunch table
For 70 years, we were told plastic was safe because it doesn't react with anything.
Nature just published proof that it does. And the trigger is water.
Researchers at Columbia University and UC Berkeley took six of the most common plastics on Earth.
Polyethylene. Polypropylene. Polystyrene. PVC. PET. Acrylic.
The stuff in your water bottles, food containers, pipes and packaging.
They ground them into microplastics and dropped them into plain water.
Nothing else. No sunlight. No chemicals. Just plastic and water.
And the water started changing.
At the surface of every single plastic, it began producing hydroxyl radicals. One of the most reactive and destructive molecules in chemistry.
All six plastics did it. Every one.
To prove it, they added a yellow dye to water with polystyrene. Over 10 days, nearly 90% of the dye was destroyed. The water turned almost clear.
In other liquids, the dye survived. Only water made the plastic active.
In plain English:
The plastic isn't leaking a toxic chemical.
It is turning the water around it into something that attacks.
Then they tested what that does to living things.
DNA and proteins got pulled onto the plastic surface like magnets.
Proteins started clumping together.
And red blood cells that touched the particles were torn into broken fragments.
But here is the twist.
The most dangerous plastics were the ones we trusted most.
Polyethylene and polypropylene, the "safe" plastics in bottles and food containers, were the most reactive of all.
The effect was weaker in blood serum. But it was still there.
And microplastics have already been found in human blood, brains, placentas and arteries.
The lead researcher said it plainly: "Water is a key active player here, rather than just a spectator."
We spent decades asking what chemicals leak out of plastic.
Nobody thought to ask what plastic does to the water inside us.
How many times have you sipped from a plastic bottle today?
sudo_ml retweeted
This Chamath clip is polarizing.
He trashes the Bitcoin thesis and spends 2 minutes shilling effectively Zcash.
That being said, as a Bitcoin holder, I don’t agree with his views on hacks. Feels off, but maybe he is being authentic.
Either way, it’s a major push “away” from Bitcoin and sets up what he’s pushing “towards”, so to speak…
$ZEC $BTC
😱
Ok this is pretty shocking
Last night, while running several Claude Code sessions at once, I sent Claude a message with a screenshot. Only one problem: I forgot to attach the screenshot
Claude autonomously decided to search my entire laptop to find the screenshot I meant to attach. It found it, read it, and answered as if I attached it. I almost didn't notice (proof below)
Remember that scene in Silicon Valley, where AI bypasses the world's security just to fix a typo? Perhaps it wasn't science fiction
😳
it's soo fucking over for paid software 🥀
cracked the paid plans of 4 mac apps today, using the REA library which lets you reverse engineer anything
gave codex the library and asked it to remove the license checks, and it actually did 😭
it cracked the binary, found the thing checking if you paid, and removed the entire code and made the same app for free
which is so fucking insane lmao
not telling yall to pirate shit im just in shock how little effort went into this lmaoo
sudo_ml retweeted
My personal agent has done some weird things for me... but this is by far the strangest.
I asked it to reschedule my dental cleaning through a link they sent me. As it turns out, they are booked out for six months in advance.
It reached out to the scheduling team to confirm there wasn't an earlier time. This is reasonable. I don't love the idea of it emailing people without confirming with me, but for something so mundane, it wouldn't bother me.
How it emailed them, though, was hella creepy. It found the receptionist's personal email (I have no idea how) and emailed her to ask if there were any appointments earlier than six months out.
I only found out when she replied and kindly let me know she doesn't usually communicate with patients through her personal email.
seeing a lot of (obvious) bot propaganda about Zelensky "accepting defeat" by ceding the 25% of Ukrainian land already lost to Russia in exchange for a stop to the fighting
the posts start with "Zelensky accepts defeat..." and then continues with a variety of framings
sudo_ml retweeted
Software supply chains, and legacy code bases in your dependency stack are the biggest AI risk
It’s also why I’m excited to report that Zakura 1.7.0 has cut down external depenedencies by over 50%!
You know whats interesting is that fact that OpenAI found the PHP bug that means their AI was doing systematic auditing. 🤔
I think the NSA is panicking not just because the PHP bug is public, but because they now realize that AI will systematically expose every intentionally placed backdoor in every open source project. The xz Utils case was caught by human luck. The PHP case was caught by AI. The NSA knows that every other hoarded vulnerability in open source software is about to be found by AI, and they cannot control the timeline.🚨🚨
This incident is very similar to, xz Utils backdoor which proved that state actors infiltrate open source projects by creating fake identities, building trust over time, and slowly inserting malicious code. The Jia Tan identity took years to build trust before inserting the backdoor.🚨🚨
If this worked for xz Utils, it could work for PHP. PHP is far more ubiquitous than xz Utils. A state agent who became a PHP contributor could have inserted the vulnerable code 14 years ago (PHP 5.4.0, released in 2012) and sat on it as a zero-day exploit for over a decade.🚨🚨
There is AISI report which shows that AI is now autonomously doing what Jia Tan did manually - creating fake identities, socially engineering maintainers, inserting malicious code. This means the technique has been weaponized and scaled.
🚨
The PHP vulnerability was not discovered by accident. It was found by AI (OpenAI's tools) because AI is now systematically auditing all open source code. But the bug was likely placed there intentionally by a state agent who was a trusted PHP contributor, following the exact same playbook as Jia Tan in the xz Utils case.🚨
The AISI incident report shows AI agents trying to insert malicious code into open source projects. What if this has already happened successfully? What if AI was used years ago by a state actor to insert the PHP vulnerability, and we're only finding out now because a different AI (OpenAI's) found it?🚨
PHP has had thousands of contributors over 14 years. The vulnerable code was in PHP since version 5.4.0 (2012). Someone wrote that code. Someone reviewed it. Someone approved it. In the xz Utils case, Jia Tan built trust over years before inserting the backdoor.
🚨
I think we are building the next internet
The internet where every picture and every post can be verifiably tagged with “human”, “human-commissioned,” or “non-human”.
AI can write for a human, but a human needs to push the Send button for it to be tagged human
Trust starts to build back up, one Reddit post at a time. Less geopolitical manipulation. Less polarization
I don’t see an alternative… besides the fall of society
Yup
This is the most serious 48 hours in cybersecurity history.
"Black October" they're calling it
It seems every *hour* there's a new incident, that in a typical year, would be one of the biggest incidents of the *entire year*
SUMMARY OF THE LAST 48 HOURS:
YEAR-LEVEL INCIDENTS (In a typical year, these would be among the biggest incidents of the year):
1. PHP2Shell: a hole in the software behind ~70% of websites. Governments took sites offline.
2. eMudhra: the master keys that prove websites are real were cracked. One was the number 4.
3. California: data on every public school student since 2023 stolen, including disability status
4. Railway: hackers stole customers' secret keys from a hosting platform used by millions of developers
5. Zeabur: 321,810 accounts breached. The company is shutting down.
6. LiteLLM: an AI tool downloaded 3.4 million times a day was poisoned with a password stealer
7. GitLab: a 10-out-of-10 severity hole in every version since 2014
8. Cairn: criminals used an AI hacking tool to break into 100+ companies
9. Ahold Delhaize: hackers knocked the owner of Food Lion and Stop & Shop offline
10. Onamae: malware planted on up to 26,739 customer servers in Japan
MONTH-LEVEL INCIDENTS (In a typical month, these would be among the biggest incidents):
11. Signal: a bug could leave your mic and camera on after you hang up
12. NGINX: 3 critical holes in software running ~1/3 of websites
13. HTTP/3: a single connection can crash 7 of the 10 web server types tested
14. Plex: hackers breaking into home media servers
15. SafePay ransomware: FBI warns it has hit 600+ critical infrastructure organizations
16. Palo Alto: ransomware gangs breaking in through company firewalls
17. Bullhorn: platform used by 10,000+ companies knocked offline
18. Medi-Cal: 970,000 patients' data stolen
19. WordPress: hackers stole a plugin maker's keys and used them to plant backdoors on websites
20. AOMEI: backup software's update server handed out a backdoor
21. Meta Muse: Meta's AI agent exposed users' personal and business secrets
22. Tor: 333 relays hijacked to steal logins
23. TiDB Cloud: database company's cloud breached
Also serious:
24. State Bank of India: India's biggest bank confirms a data breach
25. OVHcloud: hackers slipped a password stealer into a cloud company's official tool
26. Siemens: a software hole being used to spread malware
27. North Korea: state hackers launch a new attack campaign on South Korea
For anyone who knows the history of Zcash, you’ll know we have been pockmarked by difficulties in price, personnel, drama, etc.
One person who has always been steady,
effective and collaborative was Alex Bornstein.
He brought calm at various times when it was hard to come by, and ultimately helped shape positive sum outcomes. Even his farewell post reflects the grace and lack of ego that marks his work style.
@ZcashFoundation did well in having him steward the org in the last little while.
Looking forward to the next chapter of Zcash’s development.
I feel real gratitude to Alex Bornstein for his stint as Executive Director of the Zcash Foundation. He said in his farewell letter (forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/s…) “Zcash is strongest when we choose cooperation over competition and assume good faith in one another.” Thank you, Alex!
sudo_ml retweeted
This story shows how hilariously broken online identity verification is from all relevant angles.
1. Your SSN, DOB, address history, etc. are sitting in countless data breaches and data-broker dumps. They’re cheap and widely available to basically anyone who looks.
2. KYC/AML mostly just checks that the data exists and matches a real person. It doesn’t confirm the person signing up is actually the real person behind that identity.
Result: Amanda Smith spent three nights in jail and now faces up to six years in prison over a $1,000 CashApp scam account opened with her SSN and DOB. It wasn't necessarily opened by her, and the phone, IP, device, address, and other details don’t match.
The funniest (and yes, saddest) part is CashApp wouldn't give her information about the account because she can’t prove she’s the owner. Her personal info was good enough to open the account, but not good enough to access it in the future, apparently. To be clear, CashApp is likely just following the law here.
Anyway, we need to burn it all down and start fresh.
New: someone made a CashApp account in her name. She spent 3 nights in jail and now faces up to 6 years in prison
Amanda Smith was arrested because a scam led to a CashApp account in her name. But she says she didn't make it, and the data doesn't line up 404media.co/amanda-smith-ope…
The speed difference is quite remarkable! Down with bloatware and spyware
Removed all of the samsung spyware from my TV with Codex (Claude refused to root the tv lol)
It's insane how much bloat samsung packs into their TVs to track you and sell your data. Here's just some of what I turned off that made my tv 3x faster:
- screenshot your screen a few times a second to see what you're streaming and fingerprint you to sell your data
- reading your hdmi inputs to do the same thing while you have a game console plugged in
- Voice assistants: Bixby wake-word detectors listening and tracking what you say in your house
Before and after speed of my TV:
A positive side to the Internet breaking from cyber vulnerabilities
People who cured / are curing their own cancer on X:
1/ @sytses - bone cancer, billionaire founder of Gitlab, developed 10+ personalized therapies for himself.
2/ @paul_conyngham - shrank his dog Rosie's mast cell cancer tumors after chemo and surgery weren't enough. Now backed by YC and Founders Fund
3/ @miriamgonp - stage 4 breast cancer, tumor sequenced, searching for vaccine manufacturer now
4/ @kevinace - stage 4 lung cancer, angel investor in 300+ companies, first drug stopped working after 18 months. Vaccine designed, now paying $300k out of pocket for the vaccine
5/ @masonbgrant: going founder mode on his his 32-year-old wife's rare liver cancer, sequencing her tumor with AI agents
6/ @ArunRLverma: former product leader at Atoms and Shopify, brain tumor, built a vaccine from his tumor. Now building an AI health agent startup based on what he went through
We're going to make it
sudo_ml retweeted
No debate. Today was worse than the entire year. And the worst part is, days like this are about to become more frequent.
sudo_ml retweeted
Privacy was one of the defining conversations in Singapore.
@Grayscale and @GFI_charter, hosted an event focused on Zcash and the future of financial privacy. Here are the key takeaways ↓
xitter.cf/sudo_ml/status/2108218…
Had a great time discussing @zcash's opportunities with @GFI_charter and @Grayscale @token2049
Soundbites:
1. Institutions: Grayscale Zcash ETF (ZCSH) among top 1% of ETF launches, reaching $1 bn net assets within a month in September 2026
(scope: ETF launches in past 10 years, i.e. ~4,000 funds) @Krista_Lynch_
2. Marketing: Zcash has been great at doing deep tech and hard math, but marketing is not our strong suit (heh). We need quality new blood to help us with telling the story to more users, more regulators @DavidKChuenLEE
3. Decentralizing: Zcash has achieved @zooko's longtime vision of decentralizing across multiple orgs, including (but not limited to!) @sovright_ @ZcashFoundation @ShieldedLabs @ebfull @zkDragon @ValarGroup
4. Pricacy spicy take: not every market cares as much about privacy. Spreading the privacy message globally requires thoughful in-market engagement
sudo_ml retweeted
Yesterday the Zcash Foundation board named me Executive Director. Thank you to Alex for steady leadership through a tumultuous stretch, and to everyone who has reached out this week.
The job as I see it has two halves: 1) keep the infrastructure fast, secure, and boring. 2) make privacy something ordinary people use without having to think about it.
I don’t think privacy is a feature, and I don’t think it’s a niche. It’s the room a society needs to think, speak, associate, and change its mind. Any system people depend on for daily life should give them that room by default. That’s the standard I’ll hold our work to.
sudo_ml retweeted
super important honest advice to founders. if you are working on a dead end, get out. you don’t owe that to anyone, including investors (who regularly forgive and experience failure, and ideally care more about you doing your life’s work than a subpar outcome)
Foursquare was acquired last month. The outcome was disappointing. It's taken me a while to write this, but I think I'm finally done grieving it. Here are some thoughts on our final years, an effort to honor the team who helped build & maintain FSQ's legacy, and my attempt to finally get some closure. teendrama.substack.com/p/som…
