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1000 results for “commons_protocol”
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Dobry tekst o przejęciu serwisu Komoot przez private equity Bending Spoons (to ci od Evernote i WeTransfer), a przy okazji o korporacjach żerujących na społecznościach i gównowaceniu. Jest też wzmianka o fediwersum jako „a growing ecosystem of open protocols and distributed services that guarantee freedom of movement for users and data and push back against capitalist enclosure—a diverse and resilient digital commons”.
https://bikepacking.com/plog/when-we-get-komooted/
#komoot #enshittification #gównowacenie #GówniaPochyła #czytelnia
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Dobry tekst o przejęciu serwisu Komoot przez private equity Bending Spoons (to ci od Evernote i WeTransfer), a przy okazji o korporacjach żerujących na społecznościach i gównowaceniu. Jest też wzmianka o fediwersum jako „a growing ecosystem of open protocols and distributed services that guarantee freedom of movement for users and data and push back against capitalist enclosure—a diverse and resilient digital commons”.
https://bikepacking.com/plog/when-we-get-komooted/
#komoot #enshittification #gównowacenie #GówniaPochyła #czytelnia
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What do we really need:
A blob of data that syncs across devices.
A conflict resolution flow (because yes, sync is hard, but solvable if you design for it).
A protocol path that is not “just another cloud,” but part of a commons.
This is what the #OMN path is sketching out:
Bridging client/server with #p2p flows.
Giving people the power to hold their own history (rather than leasing it back from Google/Meta).
Doing this inside a trust-based #4opens framework (#OpenData, #OpenSource, #OpenStandards, #OpenProcess).
Keeping it #KISS so a normal-ish human can understand what’s happening.
It’s not “a new app.” It’s plumbing — the pipes and tanks that allow history, content, and flows to move while staying in our hands.
Not the same as a sync library, but the same path: moving from stranded silos → cloud capture → trust-based decentralisation.
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🗓️ #FundingTheCommons is happening this weekend!
Join us at the @internetarchive in San Francisco to discuss about new models and mechanisms for commons+public goods funding.
Sunday 3/16 at 10 AM #DWeb’s own Wendy Hanamura and #EthereumFoundation’s president Aya Miyaguchi will explore the values, decisions, challenges, and future direction of the #Ethereum community.
🎟️ Info+tickets: https://fundingthecommons.io/sf-2025
@protocollabs #FtCSF #SF #SanFrancisco #AyaMiyaguchi #WendyHanamura #InternetArchive
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🗓️ #FundingTheCommons is happening this weekend!
Join us at the @internetarchive in San Francisco to discuss about new models and mechanisms for commons+public goods funding.
Sunday 3/16 at 10 AM #DWeb’s own Wendy Hanamura and #EthereumFoundation’s president Aya Miyaguchi will explore the values, decisions, challenges, and future direction of the #Ethereum community.
🎟️ Info+tickets: https://fundingthecommons.io/sf-2025
@protocollabs #FtCSF #SF #SanFrancisco #AyaMiyaguchi #WendyHanamura #InternetArchive
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🗓️ #FundingTheCommons is happening this weekend!
Join us at the @internetarchive in San Francisco to discuss about new models and mechanisms for commons+public goods funding.
Sunday 3/16 at 10 AM #DWeb’s own Wendy Hanamura and #EthereumFoundation’s president Aya Miyaguchi will explore the values, decisions, challenges, and future direction of the #Ethereum community.
🎟️ Info+tickets: https://fundingthecommons.io/sf-2025
@protocollabs #FtCSF #SF #SanFrancisco #AyaMiyaguchi #WendyHanamura #InternetArchive
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🗓️ #FundingTheCommons is happening this weekend!
Join us at the @internetarchive in San Francisco to discuss about new models and mechanisms for commons+public goods funding.
Sunday 3/16 at 10 AM #DWeb’s own Wendy Hanamura and #EthereumFoundation’s president Aya Miyaguchi will explore the values, decisions, challenges, and future direction of the #Ethereum community.
🎟️ Info+tickets: https://fundingthecommons.io/sf-2025
@protocollabs #FtCSF #SF #SanFrancisco #AyaMiyaguchi #WendyHanamura #InternetArchive
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🗓️ #FundingTheCommons is happening this weekend!
Join us at the @internetarchive in San Francisco to discuss about new models and mechanisms for commons+public goods funding.
Sunday 3/16 at 10 AM #DWeb’s own Wendy Hanamura and #EthereumFoundation’s president Aya Miyaguchi will explore the values, decisions, challenges, and future direction of the #Ethereum community.
🎟️ Info+tickets: https://fundingthecommons.io/sf-2025
@protocollabs #FtCSF #SF #SanFrancisco #AyaMiyaguchi #WendyHanamura #InternetArchive
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Communalist Starter Kit!!! New Revisions!!! Enjoy
Developing the commons:
Communalist projects aim to prefigure and develop the commons overtime. The commons are economic relations rooted in meeting needs and desires of people + are self-managed by those who need and use economy in community assemblies, embedded councils, and various working groups. The prefiguration of generalized mutual aid and the commons can look like anything from general and specific mutual aid groups (providing direct goods and services for free to participants and others), community free stores, tool libraries, resource libraries, to communal housing, fields, factories, workshops, recreational facilities, and infrastructure. Prefiguring the commons can help forge mutual interest between people where the wellbeing and thriving of each happens through contributing to the wellbeing and thriving of all. The commons can be developed out of what people pool together and they can also be seized through expropriating and communalizing hierarchically managed property and defending then defending such commons from hierarchical forces. For the commons to fully bloom, hierarchical property must be expropriated by popular organizations and social movements. The overall development of mutual aid and the commons can help 1. Meet needs of participants in community assemblies and other social movement groups 2. Help share the social reproduction of community assemblies and social movement groups 3. Fuel and assist direct action projects of such assemblies and groups 4. Help those who are most dispossessed 5. Help multiply and prefigure the contents of communal self-management and distribution according to needs in the process of social movement development.
In a good society:
In a good society, politics and economics would be integrated into co-federated, non-hierarchical, and directly democratic communes that have embedded self managed councils and rotating delegates for implementation of communal decisions. People in assemblies would dialogue, make direct collective decisions, and make agreements to share labor/work. The embedded councils of community assemblies would self-manage implementation of decisions within the bounds of policies, protocols, and mandates made by community assemblies. Re/Production would be to meet the needs and desires of people. And accordingly, distribution would be according to needs, desires and use where all would have access to a cornucopia that is reproduced and developed by shared participatory labor, work, and action assisted by ecological and liberatory technology.
https://usufructcollective.wordpress.com/2020/08/15/communalist-assembly-starter-kit/
#anarchism #anarchy #socialism #communism #communalism #libertariansocialism #libertariancommunism #municipalism #commons #mutualaid #directaction #democracy #directdemocracy #utopia #praxis #strategy #solarpunk
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Proposing terminology for a pattern I've seen for at least ten years.
"De-inventing": when an entity (usually a large corporation) brings about the abandonment of a significant common (often lightweight) interoperable technology, protocol, or framework, replacing it with something proprietary, isolated, and often heavyweight. Often done as a means of enclosing the commons.
First example that comes to mind is Google killing XMPP.
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#ThoughtProvoker :blobhyperthink:
App-centrism is a re-centralization force in the #ActivityPub fediverse.
For the #fediverse the accepted app-centric #SocialNetwork work method is a decentralized NPM-like dependency hell waiting to happen.
Apps that introduce extensions become owners of parts of the specs when they become de-facto standards. We can only hope for responsible #ownership, and that the project stays around to keep their #design docs and code in the air.
The #FEP and the #SocialCG are two points of #centralization we find acceptable to help mitigate protocol decay and tech debt. It is not ideal, but a bandaid to keep an utterly fragmented developer ecosystem together.
The people who do most of this holding together are volunteers that can be counted on one hand. They may burnout and leave any day, in typical #FOSS fashion.
#SX investigates the concept of #GrassrootsOpenStandards, where the standardization process matches social dynamics that exist in our #commons.
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Tear down this Splinternet wall!
Sneakernet Stegano-graphy
https://splintercon.net/relevant-work
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganographyhttps://censorship.no
https://gitlab.com/equalitie/ouinet/blob/main/doc/ouinet-network-whitepaper.md
#Ceno Browser (not updated in 10 months)
could be used in conjunction with BeePass or #Nym for additional privacy in #BT friendly countries
#mobile #censorship #Iran
https://privacyaccelerator.org#CodeIsLaw #BT
Internet Governance Bodies would account for the necessity of procuring funding for media production by establishing an arts and culture foundation (like Library of Congress, Mos Film, or Federal Theater WPA) to support the means of access, which is needed when making cultural media a public access community commons via a news protocol (BT = public fast cache)* creating a collective funding reserve for quality information disseminated by internet protocol for censorship-resistant direct access
* hackers realized that email is the news (without PGP), hence slrn (NetworkNewsTP protocol)
but Iran might go nuclear on the People’s cache like DHS#middleware – consider that Ceno “privacy mode” erases cache
https://snowflake.torproject.org/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/torproject-snowflake/
#snowflake #TorProject -
#Community #Tech #CommuntyTech #TheSocialInterNetwork #ArtelHost #TePeWu #FLOSS
@strypey
@rysiek
While I am still desperately fighting for some headspace to write a full size article (not easy), let me outline a quintessence of my perspective on the optimal community-wise use of fediverse environment.So, the central term is "community". Here you can see (as a terminological convention) what I consider a community: a group of people, sharing several tangible and intangible commons:
- space (physical or virtual),
- means of communication and transport,
- resources,
- worldview (how the world works),
- goals (what is its desired shape),
- roadmap (how to get there),
- protocols (how to interact internally and externally),
- and, finally, identity (yes, we are the community).Assumptions concerning community:
1. Each person needs to participate in at least one community to be stable and realized.
2. A person can participate in more than one community at the time
3. Conflicts between communities one participates in can happen, but often they can be resolved.To thrive safely, community needs to have full control over three "services" provided by the (online) environment:
a. Communal memory retention.
b. Internal and external communication channels.
c. Clear division between the internal and the external.The online environment (infrastructure), aka internet, was created to provide survivors of thermonuclear war with communication, command and control previously reserved for upper echelons of power. Due to existence of various networking standards, it was to facilitate communication between heterogeneous networks/communities, while respecting their differences and keeping their local resources, well, local.
Fast forward 30 years, no thermonuclear war occurred. Heterogeneousness gradually vanished, replaced by "TCP/IP to the curb" and then "...to the pocket". And many technical, metatechnical (think: topology) and sociopolitical tools have been employed to steamroll "command and control to the people" notion. Effectively, neoliberal institutions and thinking tainted once proudly anarchist "cyberspace" and made it a hyperefficient extension of the capitalist "meatspace" instead.
Most communities now only have contractual control over their data and communication, which is increasingly precarious, as the physical infrastructure crumbles and political changes make all guarantees flimsier every month.Enter fediverse. A distributed network of instances built upon the shared protocol (ActivityPub, mostly). Each instance can be anything it wants to be, as long as it communicates properly. Each (by default) can provide whatever community needs to thrive (see above).
Just like the internet of old. Considering the evolution of underlying infrastructure, nodes of the network no longer have to be expensive or hardware-heavy. WiFi, LoRaWAN, mesh networks, VPNs, self-hosting solutions like Yunohost or Caprover, OpenWRT routers and Linux servers on laptops or SBCs - it all makes it relatively simple to get the command and control back to communities.
Now, as we are given technical tools to regain our data sovereignty, we (rhetorical "we") realize how much our mentality changed. Two main hurdles seem to be alienation (misnamed as "individualism" or "independence") and opportunism (sold as "convenience" or "efficiency").
People got alienated, so they do not consider themselves as community participants. It makes them assume a "customer" stance, instead of being a co-creator. As they try to fen for themselves, they also loose most skills, in favour of making money. The cult of specialisation makes them buy, instead of make - and claim it to be the virtue.
A very old wisdom is embedded in a seemingly silly joke. "How many psychotherapists are needed to change a bulb? - Just one, but the bulb needs to wish to change itself!" <faint applause>
No person [thinks they] need a community, until their alienation sweeps the floor with them. No community will migrate out from the corpoverse, until they feel to the bone the chill of existential threat of staying there. There are already such communities (LGBTQA+, anarchist, climate activist ones - to name a few), and political changes (trumpizm and the worldwide brown wave rising) will keep the numbers growing.So, how can we help those interested to move into the wild and not perish? We need an infrastructure first (yes, I am an infrastructure freak, and proud of it). I think of a network of cooperative enterprises, providing support and knowledge, creating incubators and developing less decentralizable services of the 2nd tier.
An interested community starts with a managed hosting, exploring platfoms (applications) of their choice. Once they decide what is good for them, the may move to a VPS and start buiding their fediverse presence. As they grow confident, they may decide to migrate (with our assistance) to self-hosting (using a laptop or mini PC), and later towards creating their own acces VPN and joining secure backbone, connecting other nodes spawned the same way.As we see, using fediverse to create safe network of communities is almost trivial. The real challenge is - as usually - to educate, agitate and organize. Can we do it?
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Oh. I only just found out about Next Generation Internet open calls. Shame, but I don't think I know anyone who can build open APIs to link LMS platforms with Google Lens. Or semantic web specialists, who can develop embellished open graph metadata properties for a smarter knowledge commons. Or utilise activitypub or other protocols for enhanced LMS interoperability.
https://www.ngi.eu/opencalls/
@EC_NGI
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/next-generation-internet-initiative -
RE: https://mas.to/@Techaltar/115694998710882952
The US’s geopolitical maneuvers—real or perceived—remind us that sovereignty isn’t a gift; it’s a practice.
If tech stacks can be weaponized or alliances destabilized, the question isn’t whether we’ll take sovereignty seriously, but who gets to define it.@Techaltar post hits the nerve: states guard borders and currencies, yet outsource the foundations of modern life—software, hardware, and data—to a handful of corporate monopolies. That’s not just technical risk; it’s political dependence.
Sovereignty today isn’t about flags or treaties. It’s control over protocols, algorithms, and the tools that shape how societies think and act. FLOSS and open hardware aren’t ideological luxuries—they’re the only credible path to digital self-determination.
Relying on closed, proprietary stacks means sovereignty on lease. When platforms can silence nations, throttle access, or hide backdoors, sovereignty becomes a slogan, not a system.
Institutions rarely lead change; they react when crises force the issue. Real transformation starts bottom-up—from a culture that values curiosity over convenience, and commons over consumption.
So what does it mean to take sovereignty seriously?
1. Treat open technology as public infrastructure.
Fund FLOSS and open hardware like we fund roads and clinics—stable, public investment. Tools like open-source procurement mandates, R&D tax credits, and redirecting portions of defense or digital transition budgets can anchor this shift.
But funding is not ownership: transparency laws and community-led governance must ensure open projects don’t become state surveillance tools.2. Make tech literacy a civic right.
Sovereignty requires a public that understands the tools it depends on—not just code, but critical thinking about systems, incentives, and control. Tech education should be public, accessible, and lifelong.3. Build alternatives, not only critiques.
The Fediverse, RISC-V, Framework, and Fairphone aren’t fringe—they prove ethical, functional alternatives exist. The goal isn’t purity; it’s adoption. Use and fund the systems you want to survive.4. Recognize that openness ≠ isolation.
Open-source is interdependence under shared, auditable terms. Supporting open-source hubs in the Global South and funding translation, localization, and inclusive participation ensures sovereignty isn’t just for wealthy nations.Regulation like the GDPR is a start, but true sovereignty means owning the stack, not patching around its edges.
The US’s geopolitical games may hasten this reckoning, but waiting guarantees dependency. Treat open-source as critical infrastructure now—not for ideology’s sake, but survival’s.
Because digital sovereignty isn’t a speech or a policy.
It’s something we build, line by line, together.#TechSovereignty #DigitalSelfDetermination #FOSS #PublicInfrastructure #Fediverse #RightToRepair #SurveillanceCapitalism #BuildTheAlternative #FundTheCommons
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RE: https://mas.to/@Techaltar/115694998710882952
The US’s geopolitical maneuvers—real or perceived—remind us that sovereignty isn’t a gift; it’s a practice.
If tech stacks can be weaponized or alliances destabilized, the question isn’t whether we’ll take sovereignty seriously, but who gets to define it.@Techaltar post hits the nerve: states guard borders and currencies, yet outsource the foundations of modern life—software, hardware, and data—to a handful of corporate monopolies. That’s not just technical risk; it’s political dependence.
Sovereignty today isn’t about flags or treaties. It’s control over protocols, algorithms, and the tools that shape how societies think and act. FLOSS and open hardware aren’t ideological luxuries—they’re the only credible path to digital self-determination.
Relying on closed, proprietary stacks means sovereignty on lease. When platforms can silence nations, throttle access, or hide backdoors, sovereignty becomes a slogan, not a system.
Institutions rarely lead change; they react when crises force the issue. Real transformation starts bottom-up—from a culture that values curiosity over convenience, and commons over consumption.
So what does it mean to take sovereignty seriously?
1. Treat open technology as public infrastructure.
Fund FLOSS and open hardware like we fund roads and clinics—stable, public investment. Tools like open-source procurement mandates, R&D tax credits, and redirecting portions of defense or digital transition budgets can anchor this shift.
But funding is not ownership: transparency laws and community-led governance must ensure open projects don’t become state surveillance tools.2. Make tech literacy a civic right.
Sovereignty requires a public that understands the tools it depends on—not just code, but critical thinking about systems, incentives, and control. Tech education should be public, accessible, and lifelong.3. Build alternatives, not only critiques.
The Fediverse, RISC-V, Framework, and Fairphone aren’t fringe—they prove ethical, functional alternatives exist. The goal isn’t purity; it’s adoption. Use and fund the systems you want to survive.4. Recognize that openness ≠ isolation.
Open-source is interdependence under shared, auditable terms. Supporting open-source hubs in the Global South and funding translation, localization, and inclusive participation ensures sovereignty isn’t just for wealthy nations.Regulation like the GDPR is a start, but true sovereignty means owning the stack, not patching around its edges.
The US’s geopolitical games may hasten this reckoning, but waiting guarantees dependency. Treat open-source as critical infrastructure now—not for ideology’s sake, but survival’s.
Because digital sovereignty isn’t a speech or a policy.
It’s something we build, line by line, together.#TechSovereignty #DigitalSelfDetermination #FOSS #PublicInfrastructure #Fediverse #RightToRepair #SurveillanceCapitalism #BuildTheAlternative #FundTheCommons
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RE: https://mas.to/@Techaltar/115694998710882952
The US’s geopolitical maneuvers—real or perceived—remind us that sovereignty isn’t a gift; it’s a practice.
If tech stacks can be weaponized or alliances destabilized, the question isn’t whether we’ll take sovereignty seriously, but who gets to define it.@Techaltar post hits the nerve: states guard borders and currencies, yet outsource the foundations of modern life—software, hardware, and data—to a handful of corporate monopolies. That’s not just technical risk; it’s political dependence.
Sovereignty today isn’t about flags or treaties. It’s control over protocols, algorithms, and the tools that shape how societies think and act. FLOSS and open hardware aren’t ideological luxuries—they’re the only credible path to digital self-determination.
Relying on closed, proprietary stacks means sovereignty on lease. When platforms can silence nations, throttle access, or hide backdoors, sovereignty becomes a slogan, not a system.
Institutions rarely lead change; they react when crises force the issue. Real transformation starts bottom-up—from a culture that values curiosity over convenience, and commons over consumption.
So what does it mean to take sovereignty seriously?
1. Treat open technology as public infrastructure.
Fund FLOSS and open hardware like we fund roads and clinics—stable, public investment. Tools like open-source procurement mandates, R&D tax credits, and redirecting portions of defense or digital transition budgets can anchor this shift.
But funding is not ownership: transparency laws and community-led governance must ensure open projects don’t become state surveillance tools.2. Make tech literacy a civic right.
Sovereignty requires a public that understands the tools it depends on—not just code, but critical thinking about systems, incentives, and control. Tech education should be public, accessible, and lifelong.3. Build alternatives, not only critiques.
The Fediverse, RISC-V, Framework, and Fairphone aren’t fringe—they prove ethical, functional alternatives exist. The goal isn’t purity; it’s adoption. Use and fund the systems you want to survive.4. Recognize that openness ≠ isolation.
Open-source is interdependence under shared, auditable terms. Supporting open-source hubs in the Global South and funding translation, localization, and inclusive participation ensures sovereignty isn’t just for wealthy nations.Regulation like the GDPR is a start, but true sovereignty means owning the stack, not patching around its edges.
The US’s geopolitical games may hasten this reckoning, but waiting guarantees dependency. Treat open-source as critical infrastructure now—not for ideology’s sake, but survival’s.
Because digital sovereignty isn’t a speech or a policy.
It’s something we build, line by line, together.#TechSovereignty #DigitalSelfDetermination #FOSS #PublicInfrastructure #Fediverse #RightToRepair #SurveillanceCapitalism #BuildTheAlternative #FundTheCommons
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RE: https://mas.to/@Techaltar/115694998710882952
The US’s geopolitical maneuvers—real or perceived—remind us that sovereignty isn’t a gift; it’s a practice.
If tech stacks can be weaponized or alliances destabilized, the question isn’t whether we’ll take sovereignty seriously, but who gets to define it.@Techaltar post hits the nerve: states guard borders and currencies, yet outsource the foundations of modern life—software, hardware, and data—to a handful of corporate monopolies. That’s not just technical risk; it’s political dependence.
Sovereignty today isn’t about flags or treaties. It’s control over protocols, algorithms, and the tools that shape how societies think and act. FLOSS and open hardware aren’t ideological luxuries—they’re the only credible path to digital self-determination.
Relying on closed, proprietary stacks means sovereignty on lease. When platforms can silence nations, throttle access, or hide backdoors, sovereignty becomes a slogan, not a system.
Institutions rarely lead change; they react when crises force the issue. Real transformation starts bottom-up—from a culture that values curiosity over convenience, and commons over consumption.
So what does it mean to take sovereignty seriously?
1. Treat open technology as public infrastructure.
Fund FLOSS and open hardware like we fund roads and clinics—stable, public investment. Tools like open-source procurement mandates, R&D tax credits, and redirecting portions of defense or digital transition budgets can anchor this shift.
But funding is not ownership: transparency laws and community-led governance must ensure open projects don’t become state surveillance tools.2. Make tech literacy a civic right.
Sovereignty requires a public that understands the tools it depends on—not just code, but critical thinking about systems, incentives, and control. Tech education should be public, accessible, and lifelong.3. Build alternatives, not only critiques.
The Fediverse, RISC-V, Framework, and Fairphone aren’t fringe—they prove ethical, functional alternatives exist. The goal isn’t purity; it’s adoption. Use and fund the systems you want to survive.4. Recognize that openness ≠ isolation.
Open-source is interdependence under shared, auditable terms. Supporting open-source hubs in the Global South and funding translation, localization, and inclusive participation ensures sovereignty isn’t just for wealthy nations.Regulation like the GDPR is a start, but true sovereignty means owning the stack, not patching around its edges.
The US’s geopolitical games may hasten this reckoning, but waiting guarantees dependency. Treat open-source as critical infrastructure now—not for ideology’s sake, but survival’s.
Because digital sovereignty isn’t a speech or a policy.
It’s something we build, line by line, together.#TechSovereignty #DigitalSelfDetermination #FOSS #PublicInfrastructure #Fediverse #RightToRepair #SurveillanceCapitalism #BuildTheAlternative #FundTheCommons
-
RE: https://mas.to/@Techaltar/115694998710882952
The US’s geopolitical maneuvers—real or perceived—remind us that sovereignty isn’t a gift; it’s a practice.
If tech stacks can be weaponized or alliances destabilized, the question isn’t whether we’ll take sovereignty seriously, but who gets to define it.@Techaltar post hits the nerve: states guard borders and currencies, yet outsource the foundations of modern life—software, hardware, and data—to a handful of corporate monopolies. That’s not just technical risk; it’s political dependence.
Sovereignty today isn’t about flags or treaties. It’s control over protocols, algorithms, and the tools that shape how societies think and act. FLOSS and open hardware aren’t ideological luxuries—they’re the only credible path to digital self-determination.
Relying on closed, proprietary stacks means sovereignty on lease. When platforms can silence nations, throttle access, or hide backdoors, sovereignty becomes a slogan, not a system.
Institutions rarely lead change; they react when crises force the issue. Real transformation starts bottom-up—from a culture that values curiosity over convenience, and commons over consumption.
So what does it mean to take sovereignty seriously?
1. Treat open technology as public infrastructure.
Fund FLOSS and open hardware like we fund roads and clinics—stable, public investment. Tools like open-source procurement mandates, R&D tax credits, and redirecting portions of defense or digital transition budgets can anchor this shift.
But funding is not ownership: transparency laws and community-led governance must ensure open projects don’t become state surveillance tools.2. Make tech literacy a civic right.
Sovereignty requires a public that understands the tools it depends on—not just code, but critical thinking about systems, incentives, and control. Tech education should be public, accessible, and lifelong.3. Build alternatives, not only critiques.
The Fediverse, RISC-V, Framework, and Fairphone aren’t fringe—they prove ethical, functional alternatives exist. The goal isn’t purity; it’s adoption. Use and fund the systems you want to survive.4. Recognize that openness ≠ isolation.
Open-source is interdependence under shared, auditable terms. Supporting open-source hubs in the Global South and funding translation, localization, and inclusive participation ensures sovereignty isn’t just for wealthy nations.Regulation like the GDPR is a start, but true sovereignty means owning the stack, not patching around its edges.
The US’s geopolitical games may hasten this reckoning, but waiting guarantees dependency. Treat open-source as critical infrastructure now—not for ideology’s sake, but survival’s.
Because digital sovereignty isn’t a speech or a policy.
It’s something we build, line by line, together.#TechSovereignty #DigitalSelfDetermination #FOSS #PublicInfrastructure #Fediverse #RightToRepair #SurveillanceCapitalism #BuildTheAlternative #FundTheCommons
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#PromptInjection Through Poetry - #Schneier on Security
schneier.com/blog/archives/202…
In a new paper, “Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models,” researchers found that turning #LLM prompts into poetry resulted in jailbreaking the models: Abstract: We present evidence that adversarial poetry functions as a universal single-turn jailbreak technique for Large Language Models (LLMs). Across 25 frontier proprietary and open-weight models, curated poetic prompts yielded high attack-success rates (ASR), with some providers exceeding 90%. Mapping prompts to MLCommons and EU CoP risk taxonomies shows that poetic attacks transfer across CBRN, manipulation, cyber-offence, and loss-of-control domains. Converting 1,200 ML-Commons harmful prompts into verse via a standardized meta-prompt produced ASRs up to 18 times higher than their prose baselines. Outputs are evaluated using an ensemble of 3 open-weight LLM judges, whose binary safety assessments were validated on a stratified human-labeled subset. Poetic framing achieved an average jailbreak success rate of 62% for hand-crafted poems and approximately 43% for meta-prompt conversions (compared to non-poetic baselines), substantially outperforming non-poetic baselines and revealing a systematic vulnerability across model families and safety training approaches. These findings demonstrate that stylistic variation alone can circumvent contemporary safety mechanisms, suggesting fundamental limitations in current alignment methods and evaluation protocols...
😁 -
Application 2025-02-032 Open Governance Body #OGB received
The following submission was recorded by NLnet. Thanks for your application, we look forward to learning more about your proposed project.
Contactname
hamish campbell
phone
email
[email protected]
organisation name
OMN
country
UK
consent
You may keep my data on recordProject
code
2025-02-032
project name
Open Governance Body #OGB
fund
Commons_Fund
requested amount
€ 50000
websitehttps://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/openwebgovernancebodysynopsis
A project designed to create a trust-based, decentralized framework for governance within grassroots networks and communities. Rooted in the #4opens principles—open data, open source, open processes, and open standards—the #OGB seeks to mediate human-to-human collaboration by fostering trust, transparency, and simplicity (#KISS).
Its primary focus is addressing the #geekproblem by bridging technical and social flows, creating tools that empower people to organize effectively without falling into hierarchical or centralized traps. The #OGB builds on trust to sift through noise, allowing genuine contributions to rise, moving from complexity to simplicity and back to complexity organically.
The expected outcomes include:
Strengthened grassroots governance: Tools for decision-making and collaboration that are inclusive and scalable.
A thriving #openweb ecosystem: Platforms and networks that prioritize trust and social value over profit.
Mediation of mainstreaming and NGO influence: Keeping progressive activism focused on spiky, meaningful change rather than fluffy distractions.The #OGB aims to create sustainable digital commons that nurture resilience, diversity, and real-world impact.
experience
Yes, I’ve been involved in projects and communities aligned with the ethos and goals of the #OGB. My contributions span technical development, advocacy, and fostering open governance frameworks, all rooted in the principles of trust, transparency, and collaboration.
- Indymedia, I was an active contributor to the global Indymedia movement, which played a pivotal role in grassroots media and decentralized collaboration. My contributions focused on: Open publishing workflows to empower communities to share their stories. Advocating for the “trust at the edges” model to ensure decision-making remained grassroots-driven. Bridging technical and social challenges by helping develop and maintain tools that aligned with the movement’s values.
- OMN (Open Media Network), As one of the key proponents of the #OMN, I’ve worked to reboot grassroots media using trust-based networks and federated tools. My contributions include: Developing the concept of #4opens (open data, open source, open processes, open standards) to serve as a foundational framework. Advocating for federated tools like #ActivityPub and #RSS to enable media flows across decentralized networks. Organizing collaborative spaces to design tools that prioritize human-to-human trust rather than algorithms or centralized control.
- Fediverse Advocacy, Within the Fediverse, I’ve championed the importance of grassroots governance and resisting the co-option of these spaces by corporate or NGO interests. Contributions include: Participating in discussions to shape decentralized protocols like #ActivityPub. Pushing for #KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principles to ensure accessibility and scalability. Highlighting the dangers of #mainstreaming and proposing strategies to mediate its impact on the #openweb.
- Open Governance Experiments, I’ve collaborated on smaller experimental governance projects aimed at exploring new ways of mediating human collaboration. For example: Designing trust-based moderation systems to reduce #geekproblem domination in decision-making processes. Implementing open-process methodologies to ensure transparency in workflows. Mediating conflicts between technical and social contributors, fostering productive collaboration.
Core Contributions Across Projects, across all these initiatives, my primary focus has been on bridging the technical and human aspects of governance. This involves: Developing frameworks that enable decentralized decision-making while maintaining trust. Advocating for simplicity to combat the paralysis caused by unnecessary complexity. Building alliances and mediating the challenges posed by #dotcons, #NGO dominance, and #geekproblem tendencies.
Through these efforts, I’ve gained insights into the challenges of building sustainable governance models in decentralized spaces, and the #OGB embodies the culmination of this work. It’s a step forward in creating robust, trust-based networks that empower communities to take control of their digital and social spaces.
usage
Budget Allocation for #OGB Project
The requested budget will be allocated strategically to ensure the project’s foundational development and long-term sustainability. An outline of key areas:
- Technical Development and Infrastructure (40%) Development of Core Tools: Funding will support developers to build the initial version of the #OGB code, focusing on simplicity, accessibility, and scalability. Server Infrastructure: Setting up and maintaining federated servers for testing, development, and early adoption. Integration with Existing Standards: Work to align with protocols like #ActivityPub, #Nostr and #RSS, ensuring seamless interoperability with the broader #openweb ecosystem.
- Community Building and Outreach (25%) Workshops and Training: Organizing sessions to train communities on the #OGB framework, focusing on trust-based governance and open-process workflows. Content Creation: Developing accessible documentation, tutorials, and guides to demystify the #OGB model for diverse audiences. Engagement Campaigns: Reaching out to grassroots organizations, activists, and communities to onboard early adopters.
- Research and Iterative Design (20%) User Feedback Loops: Conducting trials with early adopters to gather insights and refine the tools and processes. Governance Framework Refinement: Exploring different trust-based models to ensure inclusivity and adaptability to various contexts. Conflict Mediation Strategies: Testing and integrating mechanisms for conflict resolution and power balance within the #OGB framework.
- Administrative and Miscellaneous Costs (15%) Project Coordination: Funding part-time coordinators to manage timelines, resources, and community engagement. Operational Expenses: Covering software donations, events, domain hosting, and other minor but essential operational costs.
Past and Present Funding Sources. The #OGB project is currently unfunded in a formal sense, operating entirely through volunteer contributions. However, it is rooted in a history of collaborative efforts from related initiatives, which have benefited from in-kind support rather than direct funding.
Past Sources: #OMN and #Indymedia Communities: Provided foundational concepts and voluntary contributions of time, skills, and infrastructure. Fediverse and #Activertypub Advocates: Offered insights and testing environments for early experimentation with governance ideas.
challenges
Present Sources: Volunteer Contributions: Core contributors are donating their time and resources to push the project forward. Allied Projects: Informal support from related decentralized tech communities, sharing knowledge, feedback, and occasional resources.
Future Vision, while external funding is vital to accelerate the project’s development, we aim to maintain independence and adhere to the #4opens principles. By minimizing reliance on corporate or NGO funding, we ensure that the #OGB remains a grassroots-driven initiative. Our long-term goal is to establish a self-sustaining model through community contributions and shared ownership, embodying the trust-based governance the project seeks to promote.
Detailed budget breakdown can be attached if required.
comparison
The #OGB (Open Governance Body) project stands on the shoulders of both historical and contemporary efforts, drawing lessons from their successes and failures to craft a novel path to decentralized governance.
A comparative analysis: Historical Projects and Their Influence
Indymedia (Independent Media Centers) Overview: Indymedia was a global network of grassroots media collectives that emerged in the late 1990s to provide a platform for independent journalism. It embodied principles of openness, decentralization, and non-hierarchical governance. Comparison: Like Indymedia, #OGB aims to empower communities through open and decentralized structures. However, Indymedia struggled with governance conflicts and centralization of power in some regions. The #OGB addresses these issues through trust-based networks, conflict mediation mechanisms, and scalable governance tools. Key Takeaway: The #OGB builds on the ethos of Indymedia while implementing technological solutions to mitigate governance bottlenecks.
Occupy Movement’s General Assemblies. Overview: Occupy’s assemblies were experiments in direct democracy, emphasizing inclusivity and consensus-based decision-making. However, the lack of structured governance led to inefficiency and internal conflicts. Comparison: The #OGB shares Occupy’s commitment to participatory governance but incorporates trust-based models to build the decision-making. Instead of full consensus, the #OGB employs trust networks to delegate decisions while retaining accountability and inclusivity. Key Takeaway: The #OGB leverages structured trust-based governance to overcome the decision-making paralysis often seen in consensus-driven movements.
Contemporary Projects and Their Relationship to #OGB. Fediverse and #ActivityPub. Overview: The Fediverse is a decentralized network of federated platforms like Mastodon, powered by the ActivityPub protocol it is pushing user autonomy and grassroots control but has faced challenges around governance and moderation.
Comparison: The #OGB complements the Fediverse by providing governance structures for federated projects, addressing the ongoing issues of moderation and decision-making. The #OGB’s trust networks align with the decentralized ethos of the Fediverse, offering a scalable solution for community self-governance. Key Takeaway: The #OGB enhances the governance layer missing in many Fediverse projects, fostering resilience and collaboration across federated networks.NGO-Led Open Source Initiatives. Overview: Many open-source projects are managed by NGOs, which often prioritize stability and funding over grassroots participation. This has led to criticism of centralized decision-making and “corporate capture.” Comparison: The #OGB resists NGO-style top-down management, instead prioritizing the #4opens principles: open data, open source, open process, and open standards. Unlike NGO-driven projects, the #OGB is inherently community-first, ensuring power remains with the users and contributors. Key Takeaway: The #OGB rejects the NGO-centric model, emphasizing trust-based grassroots governance to avoid co-option by external actors.
Lessons from Historical Failures. CouchSurfing’s Decline. Overview: CouchSurfing transitioned from a grassroots volunteer-driven project to a for-profit company, alienating its core community and undermining trust. Comparison: The #OGB guards against such shifts by embedding trust and open governance at its core, ensuring the project remains community-owned and operated. Key Takeaway: Trust-based governance prevents mission drift and maintains alignment with the community’s original values.
P2P Projects and Overengineering. Overview: Many P2P initiatives have failed due to technical complexity and a lack of user-friendly interfaces, alienating non-technical users. Comparison: The #OGB adheres to the #KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid), ensuring accessibility and ease of adoption without sacrificing functionality. Key Takeaway: Simplicity is essential for widespread adoption and long-term viability.
Key Differentiators of the #OGB Trust-Based Networks. Unlike purely consensus-driven or hierarchical models, the #OGB employs trust-based networks to enable efficient and inclusive decision-making at scale. The #4opens Framework. The #OGB is grounded in the #4opens principles, ensuring transparency, accountability, and openness across all aspects of the project. Focus on Digital Commons. The #OGB is designed to nurture digital commons, creating a space for grassroots innovation, collaboration, and governance that resists corporate capture. Composting the #TechShit, creating fertile ground for genuine social innovation.
Expected Outcomes. The #OGB aims to fill the governance gap left by historical and contemporary efforts, fostering a resilient, open, and trust-based framework for digital collaboration. By learning from the past and building on existing technologies, we seek to empower communities to reclaim the #openweb, bridging the gap between technology and grassroots activism.
The #OGB project faces significant challenges in implementing scalable trust-based governance systems. Key technical hurdles include:
Interoperability: Ensuring seamless integration with existing open protocols like #ActivityPub and the widening #openweb reboot.
Usability: Creating user-friendly interfaces to make complex governance processes accessible to non-technical people.
Resilience: Building systems resistant to malicious actors and spam within decentralized networks.Are a few issues.
ecosystem
The #OGB project is rooted in a diverse ecosystem of grassroots organizations, decentralized communities, and open-source initiatives.
Ecosystem Description
- Grassroots Communities: Activist groups, independent media collectives, and community-driven initiatives seeking alternatives to hierarchical decision-making.
- FOSS Developers: Open-source software developers invested in decentralized tools, such as #ActivityPub, #Mastodon, and related protocols.
- NGOs and Advocacy Groups: Organizations interested in participatory governance and transparency tools for improving their operations.
- Tech Enthusiasts: People exploring ethical and sustainable technology beyond the centralized #dotcons paradigm.
- Academic and Research Institutions: Scholars studying governance, social movements, and decentralized technologies.
Engagement Strategies
- Collaborative Development: Open, participatory development processes underpinned by the #4opens philosophy (open data, source, process, and standards).
- Workshops and Webinars: Educating target audiences about trust-based governance and the project’s tools.
- Partnerships: Building alliances with aligned organizations, including community networks and FOSS projects.
- Documentation and Guides: Creating accessible materials to help communities adopt #OGB principles and tools.
- Pilot Projects: Collaborating with grassroots organizations to implement and refine governance systems, ensuring practical impact.
Promotion of Outcomes
- Demonstration Projects: Showcasing successful case studies of #OGB governance in action.
- Fediverse Integration: Leveraging federated platforms for dissemination and collaboration.
- Open Events: Participating in conferences, hackathons, and public forums to share insights and foster adoption
GOVERNANCE-BODY_REV-March-2022.pdfOGB-dev.pnghttps://hamishcampbell.com/application-2025-02-032-open-governance-body-ogb/
#4opens #activertypub #activitypub #dotcons #geekproblem #indymedia #KISS #mainstreaming #Mastodon #NGO #NOSTR #OGB #OGBfundCommonsFundrequested #OMN #openweb #rss #techshit
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Digital signatures and how to avoid them
Wikipedia’s definition of a digital signature is:
A digital signature is a mathematical scheme for verifying the authenticity of digital messages or documents. A valid digital signature on a message gives a recipient confidence that the message came from a sender known to the recipient.
—Wikipedia
They also have a handy diagram of the process by which digital signatures are created and verified:
Source: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Private_key_signing.svg#mw-jump-to-license (CC-BY-SA)Alice signs a message using her private key and Bob can then verify that the message came from Alice, and hasn’t been tampered with, using her public key. This all seems straightforward and uncomplicated and is probably most developers’ view of what signatures are for and how they should be used. This has led to the widespread use of signatures for all kinds of things: validating software updates, authenticating SSL connections, and so on.
But cryptographers have a different way of looking at digital signatures that has some surprising aspects. This more advanced way of thinking about digital signatures can tell us a lot about what are appropriate, and inappropriate, use-cases.
Identification protocols
There are several ways to build secure signature schemes. Although you might immediately think of RSA, the scheme perhaps most beloved by cryptographers is Schnorr signatures. These form the basis of modern EdDSA signatures, and also (in heavily altered form) DSA/ECDSA.
The story of Schnorr signatures starts not with a signature scheme, but instead with an interactive identification protocol. An identification protocol is a way to prove who you are (the “prover”) to some verification service (the “verifier”). Think logging into a website. But note that the protocol is only concerned with proving who you are, not in establishing a secure session or anything like that.
There are a whole load of different ways to do this, like sending a username and password or something like WebAuthn/passkeys (an ironic mention that we’ll come back to later). One particularly elegant protocol is known as Schnorr’s protocol. It’s elegant because it is simple and only relies on basic security conjectures that are widely accepted, and it also has some nice properties that we’ll mention shortly.
The basic structure of the protocol involves three phases: Commit-Challenge-Response. If you are familiar with challenge-response authentication protocols this just adds an additional commitment message at the start.
Alice (for it is she!) wants to prove to Bob who she is. Alice already has a long-term private key, a, and Bob already has the corresponding public key, A. These keys are in a Diffie-Hellman-like finite field or elliptic curve group, so we can say A = g^a mod p where g is a generator and p is the prime modulus of the group. The protocol then works like this:
- Alice generates a random ephemeral key, r, and the corresponding public key R = g^r mod p. She sends R to Bob as the commitment.
- Bob stores R and generates a random challenge, c and sends that to Alice.
- Alice computes s = ac + r and sends that back to Bob as the response.
- Finally, Bob checks if g^s = A^c * R (mod p). If it is then Alice has successfully authenticated, otherwise it’s an imposter. The reason this works is that g^s = g^(ac + r) and A^c * R = (g^a)^c * g^r = g^(ac + r) too. Why it’s secure is another topic for another day.
Don’t worry if you don’t understand all this. I’ll probably do a blog post about Schnorr identification at some point, but there are plenty of explainers online if you want to understand it. For now, just accept that this is indeed a secure identification scheme. It has some nice properties too.
One is that it is a (honest-verifier) zero knowledge proof of knowledge (of the private key). That means that an observer watching Alice authenticate, and the verifier themselves, learn nothing at all about Alice’s private key from watching those runs, but the verifier is nonetheless convinced that Alice knows it.
This is because it is easy to create valid runs of the protocol for any private key by simply working backwards rather than forwards, starting with a response and calculating the challenge and commitment that fit that response. Anyone can do this without needing to know anything about the private key. That is, for any given challenge you can find a commitment for which it is easy to compute the correct response. (What they cannot do is correctly answer a random challenge after they’ve already sent a commitment). So they learn no information from observing a genuine interaction.
Fiat-Shamir
So what does this identification protocol have to do with digital signatures? The answer is that there is a process known as the Fiat-Shamir heuristic by which you can automatically transform certain interactive identification protocols into a non-interactive signature scheme. You can’t do this for every protocol, only ones that have a certain structure, but Schnorr identification meets the criteria. The resulting signature scheme is known, amazingly, as the Schnorr signature scheme.
You may be relieved to hear that the Fiat-Shamir transformation is incredibly simple. We basically just replace the challenge part of the protocol with a cryptographic hash function, computed over the message we want to sign and the commitment public key: c = H(R, m).
That’s it. The signature is then just the pair (R, s).
Note that Bob is now not needed in the process at all and Alice can compute this all herself. To validate the signature, Bob (or anyone else) recomputes c by hashing the message and R and then performs the verification step just as in the identification protocol.
Schnorr signatures built this way are secure (so long as you add some critical security checks!) and efficient. The EdDSA signature scheme is essentially just a modern incarnation of Schnorr with a few tweaks.
What does this tell us about appropriate uses of signatures
The way I’ve just presented Schnorr signatures and Fiat-Shamir is the way they are usually presented in cryptography textbooks. We start with an identification protocol, performed a simple transformation and ended with a secure signature scheme. Happy days! These textbooks then usually move on to all the ways you can use signatures and never mention identification protocols again. But the transformation isn’t an entirely positive process: a lot was lost in translation!
There are many useful aspects of interactive identification protocols that are lost by signature schemes:
- A protocol run is only meaningful for the two parties involved in the interaction (Alice and Bob). By contrast a signature is equally valid for everyone.
- A protocol run is specific to a given point in time. Alice’s response is to a specific challenge issued by Bob just prior. A signature can be verified at any time.
These points may sound like bonuses for signature schemes, but they are actually drawbacks in many cases. Signatures are often used for authentication, where we actually want things to be tied to a specific interaction. This lack of context in signatures is why standards like JWT have to add lots of explicit statements such as audience and issuer checks to ensure the JWT came from the expected source and arrived at the intended destination, and expiry information or unique identifiers (that have to be remembered) to prevent replay attacks. A significant proportion of JWT vulnerabilities in the wild are caused by developers forgetting to perform these checks.
WebAuthn is another example of this phenomenon. On paper it is a textbook case of an identification protocol. But because it is built on top of digital signatures it requires adding a whole load of “contextual bindings” for similar reasons to JWTs. Ironically, the most widely used WebAuthn signature algorithm, ECDSA, is itself a Schnorr-ish scheme.
TLS also uses signatures for what is essentially an identification protocol, and similarly has had a range of bugs due to insufficient context binding information being included in the signed data. (SSL also uses signatures for verifying certificates, which is IMO a perfectly good use of the technology. Certificates are exactly a case of where you want to convert an interactive protocol into a non-interactive one. But then again we also do an interactive protocol (DNS) in that case anyway :shrug:).
In short, an awful lot of uses of digital signatures are actually identification schemes of one form or another and would be better off using an actual identification scheme. But that doesn’t mean using something like Schnorr’s protocol! There are actually better alternatives that I’ll come back to at the end.
Special Soundness: fragility by design
Before I look at alternatives, I want to point out that pretty much all in-use signature schemes are extremely fragile in practice. The zero-knowledge security of Schnorr identification is based on it having a property called special soundness. Special soundness essentially says that if Alice accidentally reuses the same commitment (R) for two runs of the protocol, then any observer can recover her private key.
This sounds like an incredibly fragile notion to build into your security protocol! If I accidentally reuse this random value then I leak my entire private key??! And in fact it is: such nonce-reuse bugs are extremely common in deployed signature systems, and have led to compromise of lots of private keys (eg Playstation 3, various Bitcoin wallets etc).
But despite its fragility, this notion of special soundness is crucial to the security of many signature systems. They are truly a cursed technology!
To solve this problem, some implementations and newer standards like EdDSA use deterministic commitments, which are based on a hash of the private key and the message. This ensures that the commitment will only ever be the same if the message is identical: preventing the private key from being recovered. Unfortunately, such schemes turned out to be more susceptible to fault injection attacks (a much less scalable or general attack vector), and so now there are “hedged” schemes that inject a bit of randomness back into the hash. It’s cursed turtles all the way down.
If your answer to this is to go back to good old RSA signatures, don’t be fooled. There are plenty of ways to blow your foot off using old faithful, but that’s for another post.
Did you want non-repudiation with that?
Another way that signatures cause issues is that they are too powerful for the job they are used for. You just wanted to authenticate that an email came from a legitimate server, but now you are providing irrefutable proof of the provenance of leaked private communications. Oops!
Signatures are very much the hammer of cryptographic primitives. As well as authenticating a message, they also provide third-party verifiability and (part of) non-repudiation.
You don’t need to explicitly want anonymity or deniability to understand that these strong security properties can have damaging and unforeseen side-effects. Non-repudiation should never be the default in open systems.
I could go on. From the fact that there are basically zero acceptable post-quantum signature schemes (all way too large or too risky), to issues with non-canonical signatures and cofactors and on and on. The problems of signature schemes never seem to end.
What to use instead?
Ok, so if signatures are so bad, what can I use instead?
Firstly, if you can get away with using a simple shared secret scheme like HMAC, then do so. In contrast to public key crypto, HMAC is possibly the most robust crypto primitive ever invented. You’d have to go really far out of your way to screw up HMAC. (I mean, there are timing attacks and that time that Bouncy Castle confused bits and bytes and used 16-bit HMAC keys, so still do pay attention a little bit…)
If you need public key crypto, then… still use HMAC. Use an authenticated KEM with X25519 to generate a shared secret and use that with HMAC to authenticate your message. This is essentially public key authenticated encryption without the actual encryption. (Some people mistakenly refer to such schemes as designated verifier signatures, but they are not).
Signatures are good for software/firmware updates and pretty terrible for everything else.
#authenticatedEncryption #cryptography #misuseResistance #signatures
-
Wikipedia’s definition of a digital signature is:
A digital signature is a mathematical scheme for verifying the authenticity of digital messages or documents. A valid digital signature on a message gives a recipient confidence that the message came from a sender known to the recipient.
—Wikipedia
They also have a handy diagram of the process by which digital signatures are created and verified:
Source: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Private_key_signing.svg#mw-jump-to-license (CC-BY-SA)Alice signs a message using her private key and Bob can then verify that the message came from Alice, and hasn’t been tampered with, using her public key. This all seems straightforward and uncomplicated and is probably most developers’ view of what signatures are for and how they should be used. This has led to the widespread use of signatures for all kinds of things: validating software updates, authenticating SSL connections, and so on.
But cryptographers have a different way of looking at digital signatures that has some surprising aspects. This more advanced way of thinking about digital signatures can tell us a lot about what are appropriate, and inappropriate, use-cases.
Identification protocols
There are several ways to build secure signature schemes. Although you might immediately think of RSA, the scheme perhaps most beloved by cryptographers is Schnorr signatures. These form the basis of modern EdDSA signatures, and also (in heavily altered form) DSA/ECDSA.
The story of Schnorr signatures starts not with a signature scheme, but instead with an interactive identification protocol. An identification protocol is a way to prove who you are (the “prover”) to some verification service (the “verifier”). Think logging into a website. But note that the protocol is only concerned with proving who you are, not in establishing a secure session or anything like that.
There are a whole load of different ways to do this, like sending a username and password or something like WebAuthn/passkeys (an ironic mention that we’ll come back to later). One particularly elegant protocol is known as Schnorr’s protocol. It’s elegant because it is simple and only relies on basic security conjectures that are widely accepted, and it also has some nice properties that we’ll mention shortly.
The basic structure of the protocol involves three phases: Commit-Challenge-Response. If you are familiar with challenge-response authentication protocols this just adds an additional commitment message at the start.
Alice (for it is she!) wants to prove to Bob who she is. Alice already has a long-term private key, a, and Bob already has the corresponding public key, A. These keys are in a Diffie-Hellman-like finite field or elliptic curve group, so we can say A = g^a mod p where g is a generator and p is the prime modulus of the group. The protocol then works like this:
- Alice generates a random ephemeral key, r, and the corresponding public key R = g^r mod p. She sends R to Bob as the commitment.
- Bob stores R and generates a random challenge, c and sends that to Alice.
- Alice computes s = ac + r and sends that back to Bob as the response.
- Finally, Bob checks if g^s = A^c * R (mod p). If it is then Alice has successfully authenticated, otherwise it’s an imposter. The reason this works is that g^s = g^(ac + r) and A^c * R = (g^a)^c * g^r = g^(ac + r) too. Why it’s secure is another topic for another day.
Don’t worry if you don’t understand all this. I’ll probably do a blog post about Schnorr identification at some point, but there are plenty of explainers online if you want to understand it. For now, just accept that this is indeed a secure identification scheme. It has some nice properties too.
One is that it is a (honest-verifier) zero knowledge proof of knowledge (of the private key). That means that an observer watching Alice authenticate, and the verifier themselves, learn nothing at all about Alice’s private key from watching those runs, but the verifier is nonetheless convinced that Alice knows it.
This is because it is easy to create valid runs of the protocol for any private key by simply working backwards rather than forwards, starting with a response and calculating the challenge and commitment that fit that response. Anyone can do this without needing to know anything about the private key. That is, for any given challenge you can find a commitment for which it is easy to compute the correct response. (What they cannot do is correctly answer a random challenge after they’ve already sent a commitment). So they learn no information from observing a genuine interaction.
Fiat-Shamir
So what does this identification protocol have to do with digital signatures? The answer is that there is a process known as the Fiat-Shamir heuristic by which you can automatically transform certain interactive identification protocols into a non-interactive signature scheme. You can’t do this for every protocol, only ones that have a certain structure, but Schnorr identification meets the criteria. The resulting signature scheme is known, amazingly, as the Schnorr signature scheme.
You may be relieved to hear that the Fiat-Shamir transformation is incredibly simple. We basically just replace the challenge part of the protocol with a cryptographic hash function, computed over the message we want to sign and the commitment public key: c = H(R, m).
That’s it. The signature is then just the pair (R, s).
Note that Bob is now not needed in the process at all and Alice can compute this all herself. To validate the signature, Bob (or anyone else) recomputes c by hashing the message and R and then performs the verification step just as in the identification protocol.
Schnorr signatures built this way are secure (so long as you add some critical security checks!) and efficient. The EdDSA signature scheme is essentially just a modern incarnation of Schnorr with a few tweaks.
What does this tell us about appropriate uses of signatures
The way I’ve just presented Schnorr signatures and Fiat-Shamir is the way they are usually presented in cryptography textbooks. We start with an identification protocol, performed a simple transformation and ended with a secure signature scheme. Happy days! These textbooks then usually move on to all the ways you can use signatures and never mention identification protocols again. But the transformation isn’t an entirely positive process: a lot was lost in translation!
There are many useful aspects of interactive identification protocols that are lost by signature schemes:
- A protocol run is only meaningful for the two parties involved in the interaction (Alice and Bob). By contrast a signature is equally valid for everyone.
- A protocol run is specific to a given point in time. Alice’s response is to a specific challenge issued by Bob just prior. A signature can be verified at any time.
These points may sound like bonuses for signature schemes, but they are actually drawbacks in many cases. Signatures are often used for authentication, where we actually want things to be tied to a specific interaction. This lack of context in signatures is why standards like JWT have to add lots of explicit statements such as audience and issuer checks to ensure the JWT came from the expected source and arrived at the intended destination, and expiry information or unique identifiers (that have to be remembered) to prevent replay attacks. A significant proportion of JWT vulnerabilities in the wild are caused by developers forgetting to perform these checks.
WebAuthn is another example of this phenomenon. On paper it is a textbook case of an identification protocol. But because it is built on top of digital signatures it requires adding a whole load of “contextual bindings” for similar reasons to JWTs. Ironically, the most widely used WebAuthn signature algorithm, ECDSA, is itself a Schnorr-ish scheme.
TLS also uses signatures for what is essentially an identification protocol, and similarly has had a range of bugs due to insufficient context binding information being included in the signed data. (SSL also uses signatures for verifying certificates, which is IMO a perfectly good use of the technology. Certificates are exactly a case of where you want to convert an interactive protocol into a non-interactive one. But then again we also do an interactive protocol (DNS) in that case anyway :shrug:).
In short, an awful lot of uses of digital signatures are actually identification schemes of one form or another and would be better off using an actual identification scheme. But that doesn’t mean using something like Schnorr’s protocol! There are actually better alternatives that I’ll come back to at the end.
Special Soundness: fragility by design
Before I look at alternatives, I want to point out that pretty much all in-use signature schemes are extremely fragile in practice. The zero-knowledge security of Schnorr identification is based on it having a property called special soundness. Special soundness essentially says that if Alice accidentally reuses the same commitment (R) for two runs of the protocol, then any observer can recover her private key.
This sounds like an incredibly fragile notion to build into your security protocol! If I accidentally reuse this random value then I leak my entire private key??! And in fact it is: such nonce-reuse bugs are extremely common in deployed signature systems, and have led to compromise of lots of private keys (eg Playstation 3, various Bitcoin wallets etc).
But despite its fragility, this notion of special soundness is crucial to the security of many signature systems. They are truly a cursed technology!
To solve this problem, some implementations and newer standards like EdDSA use deterministic commitments, which are based on a hash of the private key and the message. This ensures that the commitment will only ever be the same if the message is identical: preventing the private key from being recovered. Unfortunately, such schemes turned out to be more susceptible to fault injection attacks (a much less scalable or general attack vector), and so now there are “hedged” schemes that inject a bit of randomness back into the hash. It’s cursed turtles all the way down.
If your answer to this is to go back to good old RSA signatures, don’t be fooled. There are plenty of ways to blow your foot off using old faithful, but that’s for another post.
Did you want non-repudiation with that?
Another way that signatures cause issues is that they are too powerful for the job they are used for. You just wanted to authenticate that an email came from a legitimate server, but now you are providing irrefutable proof of the provenance of leaked private communications. Oops!
Signatures are very much the hammer of cryptographic primitives. As well as authenticating a message, they also provide third-party verifiability and (part of) non-repudiation.
You don’t need to explicitly want anonymity or deniability to understand that these strong security properties can have damaging and unforeseen side-effects. Non-repudiation should never be the default in open systems.
I could go on. From the fact that there are basically zero acceptable post-quantum signature schemes (all way too large or too risky), to issues with non-canonical signatures and cofactors and on and on. The problems of signature schemes never seem to end.
What to use instead?
Ok, so if signatures are so bad, what can I use instead?
Firstly, if you can get away with using a simple shared secret scheme like HMAC, then do so. In contrast to public key crypto, HMAC is possibly the most robust crypto primitive ever invented. You’d have to go really far out of your way to screw up HMAC. (I mean, there are timing attacks and that time that Bouncy Castle confused bits and bytes and used 16-bit HMAC keys, so still do pay attention a little bit…)
If you need public key crypto, then… still use HMAC. Use an authenticated KEM with X25519 to generate a shared secret and use that with HMAC to authenticate your message. This is essentially public key authenticated encryption without the actual encryption. (Some people mistakenly refer to such schemes as designated verifier signatures, but they are not).
Signatures are good for software/firmware updates and pretty terrible for everything else.
https://neilmadden.blog/2024/09/18/digital-signatures-and-how-to-avoid-them/
#authenticatedEncryption #cryptography #misuseResistance #signatures
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Digital signatures and how to avoid them
Wikipedia’s definition of a digital signature is:
A digital signature is a mathematical scheme for verifying the authenticity of digital messages or documents. A valid digital signature on a message gives a recipient confidence that the message came from a sender known to the recipient.
—Wikipedia
They also have a handy diagram of the process by which digital signatures are created and verified:
Source: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Private_key_signing.svg#mw-jump-to-license (CC-BY-SA)Alice signs a message using her private key and Bob can then verify that the message came from Alice, and hasn’t been tampered with, using her public key. This all seems straightforward and uncomplicated and is probably most developers’ view of what signatures are for and how they should be used. This has led to the widespread use of signatures for all kinds of things: validating software updates, authenticating SSL connections, and so on.
But cryptographers have a different way of looking at digital signatures that has some surprising aspects. This more advanced way of thinking about digital signatures can tell us a lot about what are appropriate, and inappropriate, use-cases.
Identification protocols
There are several ways to build secure signature schemes. Although you might immediately think of RSA, the scheme perhaps most beloved by cryptographers is Schnorr signatures. These form the basis of modern EdDSA signatures, and also (in heavily altered form) DSA/ECDSA.
The story of Schnorr signatures starts not with a signature scheme, but instead with an interactive identification protocol. An identification protocol is a way to prove who you are (the “prover”) to some verification service (the “verifier”). Think logging into a website. But note that the protocol is only concerned with proving who you are, not in establishing a secure session or anything like that.
There are a whole load of different ways to do this, like sending a username and password or something like WebAuthn/passkeys (an ironic mention that we’ll come back to later). One particularly elegant protocol is known as Schnorr’s protocol. It’s elegant because it is simple and only relies on basic security conjectures that are widely accepted, and it also has some nice properties that we’ll mention shortly.
The basic structure of the protocol involves three phases: Commit-Challenge-Response. If you are familiar with challenge-response authentication protocols this just adds an additional commitment message at the start.
Alice (for it is she!) wants to prove to Bob who she is. Alice already has a long-term private key, a, and Bob already has the corresponding public key, A. These keys are in a Diffie-Hellman-like finite field or elliptic curve group, so we can say A = g^a mod p where g is a generator and p is the prime modulus of the group. The protocol then works like this:
- Alice generates a random ephemeral key, r, and the corresponding public key R = g^r mod p. She sends R to Bob as the commitment.
- Bob stores R and generates a random challenge, c and sends that to Alice.
- Alice computes s = ac + r and sends that back to Bob as the response.
- Finally, Bob checks if g^s = A^c * R (mod p). If it is then Alice has successfully authenticated, otherwise it’s an imposter. The reason this works is that g^s = g^(ac + r) and A^c * R = (g^a)^c * g^r = g^(ac + r) too. Why it’s secure is another topic for another day.
Don’t worry if you don’t understand all this. I’ll probably do a blog post about Schnorr identification at some point, but there are plenty of explainers online if you want to understand it. For now, just accept that this is indeed a secure identification scheme. It has some nice properties too.
One is that it is a (honest-verifier) zero knowledge proof of knowledge (of the private key). That means that an observer watching Alice authenticate, and the verifier themselves, learn nothing at all about Alice’s private key from watching those runs, but the verifier is nonetheless convinced that Alice knows it.
This is because it is easy to create valid runs of the protocol for any private key by simply working backwards rather than forwards, starting with a response and calculating the challenge and commitment that fit that response. Anyone can do this without needing to know anything about the private key. That is, for any given challenge you can find a commitment for which it is easy to compute the correct response. (What they cannot do is correctly answer a random challenge after they’ve already sent a commitment). So they learn no information from observing a genuine interaction.
Fiat-Shamir
So what does this identification protocol have to do with digital signatures? The answer is that there is a process known as the Fiat-Shamir heuristic by which you can automatically transform certain interactive identification protocols into a non-interactive signature scheme. You can’t do this for every protocol, only ones that have a certain structure, but Schnorr identification meets the criteria. The resulting signature scheme is known, amazingly, as the Schnorr signature scheme.
You may be relieved to hear that the Fiat-Shamir transformation is incredibly simple. We basically just replace the challenge part of the protocol with a cryptographic hash function, computed over the message we want to sign and the commitment public key: c = H(R, m).
That’s it. The signature is then just the pair (R, s).
Note that Bob is now not needed in the process at all and Alice can compute this all herself. To validate the signature, Bob (or anyone else) recomputes c by hashing the message and R and then performs the verification step just as in the identification protocol.
Schnorr signatures built this way are secure (so long as you add some critical security checks!) and efficient. The EdDSA signature scheme is essentially just a modern incarnation of Schnorr with a few tweaks.
What does this tell us about appropriate uses of signatures
The way I’ve just presented Schnorr signatures and Fiat-Shamir is the way they are usually presented in cryptography textbooks. We start with an identification protocol, performed a simple transformation and ended with a secure signature scheme. Happy days! These textbooks then usually move on to all the ways you can use signatures and never mention identification protocols again. But the transformation isn’t an entirely positive process: a lot was lost in translation!
There are many useful aspects of interactive identification protocols that are lost by signature schemes:
- A protocol run is only meaningful for the two parties involved in the interaction (Alice and Bob). By contrast a signature is equally valid for everyone.
- A protocol run is specific to a given point in time. Alice’s response is to a specific challenge issued by Bob just prior. A signature can be verified at any time.
These points may sound like bonuses for signature schemes, but they are actually drawbacks in many cases. Signatures are often used for authentication, where we actually want things to be tied to a specific interaction. This lack of context in signatures is why standards like JWT have to add lots of explicit statements such as audience and issuer checks to ensure the JWT came from the expected source and arrived at the intended destination, and expiry information or unique identifiers (that have to be remembered) to prevent replay attacks. A significant proportion of JWT vulnerabilities in the wild are caused by developers forgetting to perform these checks.
WebAuthn is another example of this phenomenon. On paper it is a textbook case of an identification protocol. But because it is built on top of digital signatures it requires adding a whole load of “contextual bindings” for similar reasons to JWTs. Ironically, the most widely used WebAuthn signature algorithm, ECDSA, is itself a Schnorr-ish scheme.
TLS also uses signatures for what is essentially an identification protocol, and similarly has had a range of bugs due to insufficient context binding information being included in the signed data. (SSL also uses signatures for verifying certificates, which is IMO a perfectly good use of the technology. Certificates are exactly a case of where you want to convert an interactive protocol into a non-interactive one. But then again we also do an interactive protocol (DNS) in that case anyway :shrug:).
In short, an awful lot of uses of digital signatures are actually identification schemes of one form or another and would be better off using an actual identification scheme. But that doesn’t mean using something like Schnorr’s protocol! There are actually better alternatives that I’ll come back to at the end.
Special Soundness: fragility by design
Before I look at alternatives, I want to point out that pretty much all in-use signature schemes are extremely fragile in practice. The zero-knowledge security of Schnorr identification is based on it having a property called special soundness. Special soundness essentially says that if Alice accidentally reuses the same commitment (R) for two runs of the protocol, then any observer can recover her private key.
This sounds like an incredibly fragile notion to build into your security protocol! If I accidentally reuse this random value then I leak my entire private key??! And in fact it is: such nonce-reuse bugs are extremely common in deployed signature systems, and have led to compromise of lots of private keys (eg Playstation 3, various Bitcoin wallets etc).
But despite its fragility, this notion of special soundness is crucial to the security of many signature systems. They are truly a cursed technology!
To solve this problem, some implementations and newer standards like EdDSA use deterministic commitments, which are based on a hash of the private key and the message. This ensures that the commitment will only ever be the same if the message is identical: preventing the private key from being recovered. Unfortunately, such schemes turned out to be more susceptible to fault injection attacks (a much less scalable or general attack vector), and so now there are “hedged” schemes that inject a bit of randomness back into the hash. It’s cursed turtles all the way down.
If your answer to this is to go back to good old RSA signatures, don’t be fooled. There are plenty of ways to blow your foot off using old faithful, but that’s for another post.
Did you want non-repudiation with that?
Another way that signatures cause issues is that they are too powerful for the job they are used for. You just wanted to authenticate that an email came from a legitimate server, but now you are providing irrefutable proof of the provenance of leaked private communications. Oops!
Signatures are very much the hammer of cryptographic primitives. As well as authenticating a message, they also provide third-party verifiability and (part of) non-repudiation.
You don’t need to explicitly want anonymity or deniability to understand that these strong security properties can have damaging and unforeseen side-effects. Non-repudiation should never be the default in open systems.
I could go on. From the fact that there are basically zero acceptable post-quantum signature schemes (all way too large or too risky), to issues with non-canonical signatures and cofactors and on and on. The problems of signature schemes never seem to end.
What to use instead?
Ok, so if signatures are so bad, what can I use instead?
Firstly, if you can get away with using a simple shared secret scheme like HMAC, then do so. In contrast to public key crypto, HMAC is possibly the most robust crypto primitive ever invented. You’d have to go really far out of your way to screw up HMAC. (I mean, there are timing attacks and that time that Bouncy Castle confused bits and bytes and used 16-bit HMAC keys, so still do pay attention a little bit…)
If you need public key crypto, then… still use HMAC. Use an authenticated KEM with X25519 to generate a shared secret and use that with HMAC to authenticate your message. This is essentially public key authenticated encryption without the actual encryption. (Some people mistakenly refer to such schemes as designated verifier signatures, but they are not).
Signatures are good for software/firmware updates and pretty terrible for everything else.
#authenticatedEncryption #cryptography #misuseResistance #signatures
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https://hamishcampbell.com/we-face-a-digital-cliff-the-open-internet-may-be-over/
Back then, we were teetering on the edge of a digital cliff, with the open internet hanging in the balance. There were two insightful perspectives capturing the crossroads we are at: Phil Windley argued that the open internet was a historical fluke, while Dave Winer suggests that what we were seeing was merely the ebb before the next wave of the #openweb arrived.
The Enclosure of the Digital Commons, #PhilWindley perspective, is a sobering one. Though he has updated his post, he used to see the internet early open nature as an anomaly—an accident of history. In this view, the open internet as we knew it is essentially finished. That once-thriving commons have been systematically enclosed by corporate silos—the #dotcons like Facebook, Google, and Amazon—that now dominate the digital landscape. What remains outside these silos is, according to this perspective, withering and dying. The vision of a decentralized, user-controlled internet has been overwhelmed by the centralized, profit-driven motives of these tech giants.
His argument is that decentralization is hard, perhaps too hard for most people to handle. This reality, combined with the fact that these silos provide convenience, user-friendliness, and perceived safety, has led people to choose them over the messy and challenging world of a truly openweb. People have traded freedom for convenience, security for walled gardens, and the vibrant chaos of the commons for the curated safety of #dotcons. The digital commons have been enclosed, and it was a bleak view.
On the other side, Dave Winer offered a more hopeful perspective. He believes that the history of the internet and the web comes in waves—periods of openness followed by enclosure, which then recede to allow for another wave of openness. In his view, Phil Windley’s observation might not be wrong, but it’s not the end of the story. Rather, it’s the ebb of the tide before a new wave of the #openweb surges forward. The potential for decentralized, and open paths is always there, and it’s a mistake to assume that the current moment is the end of the line.
#DaveWiner argument rests on the idea that the desire for openness and freedom is cyclical. When centralized systems become oppressive, restrictive, or exploitative, there will be a counter-movement that pushes back. The nature of technology, innovation, and humanistic creativity ensures that “native” paths, and protocols will emerge to challenge the status quo.
There is a logic to the digitization of everything. The internet and #openweb built on top of it, is a living example of what happens when this logic is let loose: a tsunami that crashes over every part of our cultures, breaking old structures and opening up possibilities. The storm is not over. Just as the early web opened up commons that were later enclosed, the current wave of enclosure is broken by a new wave of #4open decentralization paths.
What Has Changed in the Last Decade? Looking back at what I wrote nearly ten years ago, the fundamental dynamics haven’t changed. The dotcons have only grown more powerful and more entrenched, but at the same time, the counter-forces have also begun to stir vigorously. Movements like the #Fediverse, based on #ActivityPub, #Nostor and to a lesser extent #Bluesky have grown into real usable decentralized social paths, together with this, we are dipping our toes back into peer-to-peer technologies, this wave is evidence that the storm of digitization is still alive.
Yes, the #dotcons did enclose the first wave of commons, when we stupidly took their digital algorithmic drugs. But the defences of the dotcons are very weak, the only thing holding most people is their addictions, nobody thinks they are healthy any more. The logic of digitization continues, and as long as there are waves, there is hope for the current openweb reboot.
#OMN #makeinghistory #OGB #indymediaback
https://hamishcampbell.com/the-patriarchs-of-the-early-openweb/
#4open #activitypub #bluesky #DaveWiner #dotcons #fediverse #indymediaback #makeinghistory #Nostor #OGB #OMN #openweb #PhilWindley
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How a Royal Canadian Mint Worker Turned Security Checks Into a Running Joke
A Royal Canadian Mint employee passing through a metal detector during routine security screening. Credit: Provided image.Dear Cherubs, some workplace stories are so brazen they sound invented by a committee having a very long lunch. But according to the Ontario Court of Justice decision in 2016 ONCJ 701, and reporting from Time, The Guardian and Global News, former Royal Canadian Mint employee Leston Lawrence was convicted after allegedly stealing gold pucks from the Ottawa facility and moving them through security in a way that made the whole operation look almost impressively reckless.
THE EXIT STRATEGY
Lawrence worked as an operator-refinery at the Mint, where his job involved purifying gold. The court found that he repeatedly set off the archway metal detector, 28 times in just a few months, more than any other employee without a medical implant, and that each time a handheld wand search cleared him to leave. In other words: the big gate screamed, the little wand shrugged, and he carried on like nothing was happening.
The mechanism was simple enough to be absurd. According to the ruling, the wand was less sensitive than the archway detector and could not detect metal hidden deep within a body cavity. Security staff followed protocol, but protocol only works if the threat chooses to play nicely. Lawrence, meanwhile, had access to the refining area, where gold pucks were formed during the process.
The Mint itself did not realize gold was missing. That is the kind of detail that makes the case feel like a cautionary tale with a punchline. The court concluded that the amount taken was small relative to the Mint’s overall gold operations, which helped explain why the theft went unnoticed for so long.
THE PAPER TRAIL
The scheme unraveled outside the Mint, not inside it. Time and The Guardian reported that a bank teller became suspicious after Lawrence deposited cheques from Ottawa Gold Buyers while listing his occupation as “Mint Employee.” That raised enough eyebrows to trigger police attention, which then led investigators back to the gold pucks and the sale proceeds.
By the time the case reached sentencing, the numbers were already doing the talking. The court accepted that 22 gold pucks were stolen, with a total value of about C$165,451.14, and Lawrence was sentenced to 30 months in prison. In a weirdly fitting final twist, the whole thing became less about a daring heist than a masterclass in how a bad idea can keep going until a bank teller ruins the vibe. As noted by thisclaimer.com, reality sometimes arrives with better comic timing than fiction.
Sources list:
The Thisclaimer logo blends a classic warning symbol with a brain icon to represent critical thinking, curiosity, and thoughtful disclaimers. #art #Canada #canadianCrime #courtCase #food #goldTheft #insiderTheft #lestonLawrence #moneyLaundering #news #ottawa #royalCanadianMint #securityFailure #technology #travel
Ontario Court of Justice decision 2016 ONCJ 701 (mirror) — https://darkpoutine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2016oncj701.pdf
Time — https://time.com/4566471/canada-mint-employee-steals-gold-uses-butt/
Time — https://time.com/4658663/gold-smuggling-prison-sentence/
The Guardian — https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/23/gold-butt-canadian-smuggler-royal-mint
Global News — https://globalnews.ca/news/3057844/ex-mint-employee-found-guilty-of-smuggling-gold-nuggets-in-rectum/
Global News — https://globalnews.ca/news/3221921/ex-mint-employee-who-hid-golden-pucks-in-rectum-to-be-sentenced-today/
thisclaimer.com — https://thisclaimer.com/
Wikimedia Commons image page — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gates_Royal_Canadian_Mint.JPG -
RFC 1 4/7/69
The Birth of the Internet and the Implications for Peacebuilding
April 7, 1969 is often treated as a symbolic birthday of the internet, because RFC 1, Steve Crocker’s “Host Software,” is dated that day. By the end of 1969, four computers were connected on the initial ARPANET, and what the Internet Society calls the “budding Internet” was underway.
What strikes me most is that the internet’s symbolic birth did not begin with a trumpet blast or a decree. It began with a request for comments. Not a command. Not a manifesto. Not a demand for uniformity. A request. An invitation to think together. RFC 2555 later recalled that in those early days, the Network Working Group understood its documentation this way: notes could be produced “at any site by anybody” and included in the series. That means the internet, at least in one of its founding gestures, carried a seed of humility, collaboration, and shared authorship.
That matters for peacebuilding. Peace is rarely made by proclamation alone. Peace is usually made the same way the early internet was made: by imperfect people sending unfinished thoughts to one another, testing language, revising assumptions, building trust slowly, and creating protocols for living together. In that sense, the best theology of the internet is not that it is omniscient or liberating by nature, but that it can become a commons of encounter. Its original form suggests conversation before coercion . . .Read the rest of the article at PeaceGrooves.
#BirthOfTheInternet #Communication #ConflictTransformation #DigitalCommons #DigitalPeace #HopeAndTechnology #Internet #Networks #Nonviolence #OnlineCommunity #peaceSymbol #Peacebuilding #Reconciliation #RFC1 #TechnologyAndPeace -
Evil Genius Chronicles Podcast for March 27 2026 - Daddy Needs Podcasting JuiceDownload audioIf you are interested in Hello Fresh, be sure to use the code egc10fm at checkout!
On this show, I play a song from Florry; I say goodbye to Veronica Walters; we have a finite number of trip opportunities with the kid; we went to San Diego and back with the most travel troubles I've had in decades; it is less effort for me to travel alone; I play another round of Promo No Go; I heard some kids say the craziest stuff; I have been listening to the All British Comedy Explained podcast; I didn't respond to The Young Ones as well as I remembered but Monty Python, ,Fawlty Towers and the Good Life still light me up; Victoria Wood: As Seen On TV is great; I implemented the Human.json protocon on my website, attesting who actually authors their site without any LLM; I am experimenting with the Quick Bites format for this show.
Here is the direct MP3 download for the Evil Genius Chronicles podcast, March 27 2026.
Links mentioned in this episode:
- Support this show on Patreon
- Florry the band
- Florry's album The Holey Bible on Bandcamp
- Mountain Breeze bootleg podcast feed
- Veronica Walters has passed away
- All British Comedy Explained podcast
- Human.json protocol
- My post about implementing Human.json
- My AI Statement for this site
- My nerd persona Mastodon account
- My science fiction persona Mastodon account
- Auphonic podcast production tool is so good!
- Theme song provided by the Gentle Readers
You can subscribe to this podcast feed via RSS. To sponsor the show, contact BackBeat Media. Don't forget, you can fly your EGC flag by buying the stuff package. This show as a whole is Creative Commons licensed Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Unported. Bandwidth for this episode is provided by Cachefly.
-
Evil Genius Chronicles Podcast for March 27 2026 - Daddy Needs Podcasting JuiceDownload audioIf you are interested in Hello Fresh, be sure to use the code egc10fm at checkout!
On this show, I play a song from Florry; I say goodbye to Veronica Walters; we have a finite number of trip opportunities with the kid; we went to San Diego and back with the most travel troubles I've had in decades; it is less effort for me to travel alone; I play another round of Promo No Go; I heard some kids say the craziest stuff; I have been listening to the All British Comedy Explained podcast; I didn't respond to The Young Ones as well as I remembered but Monty Python, ,Fawlty Towers and the Good Life still light me up; Victoria Wood: As Seen On TV is great; I implemented the Human.json protocon on my website, attesting who actually authors their site without any LLM; I am experimenting with the Quick Bites format for this show.
Here is the direct MP3 download for the Evil Genius Chronicles podcast, March 27 2026.
Links mentioned in this episode:
- Support this show on Patreon
- Florry the band
- Florry's album The Holey Bible on Bandcamp
- Mountain Breeze bootleg podcast feed
- Veronica Walters has passed away
- All British Comedy Explained podcast
- Human.json protocol
- My post about implementing Human.json
- My AI Statement for this site
- My nerd persona Mastodon account
- My science fiction persona Mastodon account
- Auphonic podcast production tool is so good!
- Theme song provided by the Gentle Readers
You can subscribe to this podcast feed via RSS. To sponsor the show, contact BackBeat Media. Don't forget, you can fly your EGC flag by buying the stuff package. This show as a whole is Creative Commons licensed Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Unported. Bandwidth for this episode is provided by Cachefly.
-
Evil Genius Chronicles Podcast for March 27 2026 - Daddy Needs Podcasting JuiceDownload audioIf you are interested in Hello Fresh, be sure to use the code egc10fm at checkout!
On this show, I play a song from Florry; I say goodbye to Veronica Walters; we have a finite number of trip opportunities with the kid; we went to San Diego and back with the most travel troubles I've had in decades; it is less effort for me to travel alone; I play another round of Promo No Go; I heard some kids say the craziest stuff; I have been listening to the All British Comedy Explained podcast; I didn't respond to The Young Ones as well as I remembered but Monty Python, ,Fawlty Towers and the Good Life still light me up; Victoria Wood: As Seen On TV is great; I implemented the Human.json protocon on my website, attesting who actually authors their site without any LLM; I am experimenting with the Quick Bites format for this show.
Here is the direct MP3 download for the Evil Genius Chronicles podcast, March 27 2026.
Links mentioned in this episode:
- Support this show on Patreon
- Florry the band
- Florry's album The Holey Bible on Bandcamp
- Mountain Breeze bootleg podcast feed
- Veronica Walters has passed away
- All British Comedy Explained podcast
- Human.json protocol
- My post about implementing Human.json
- My AI Statement for this site
- My nerd persona Mastodon account
- My science fiction persona Mastodon account
- Auphonic podcast production tool is so good!
- Theme song provided by the Gentle Readers
You can subscribe to this podcast feed via RSS. To sponsor the show, contact BackBeat Media. Don't forget, you can fly your EGC flag by buying the stuff package. This show as a whole is Creative Commons licensed Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Unported. Bandwidth for this episode is provided by Cachefly.