BREAKING: NordVPN is working with the FBI.

He's back @JulianAssange

More people should know about the Interfold. It's basically what I've been yelling at people to build with the MACI ideas ( ethresear.ch/t/minimal-anti-… ) for almost a decade, and now it exists, in a generalized form. The idea is: a privacy protocol optimized for things like voting (and other use cases eg. secret-ballot auctions). The mechanism generates a threshold encryption key, and people send in their votes onchain, using a ZKP to prove eligibility. An arbitrary computation on the votes gets run inside FHE, and then threshold-decrypted. From what I can tell (the docs are good docs.theinterfold.com/CRISP/… ), it gets pretty optimal security guarantees: * Voter anonymity can be made unconditional if eligibility is proven with ZK-SNARKs * Censorship resistance is guaranteed by ethereum (votes can be posted directly onchain, and there's a proof that all posted votes are taking into account) * The correctness of the outputted result can be ensured via ZK over FHE * Liveness and coercion resistance depend on M-of-N honesty; unavoidable given present-day technology The main limitation is that today "ZK over FHE" is only properly available for additive vote tallying, as it's too expensive for computations that involve multiplication or other more complicated manipulation at the moment. There's work in progress on slashing-based / optimistic computation for such situations. (And of course ideally in the long term we'd figure out obfuscation so you can get rid of the M-of-N committees😃)

700k loss seems nothing nowadays, not I've become rich, but compare to the rest hack events, the amount becomes relatively smaller. however chainflip blaming their memo verification bug on "sophisticated ai models" is comedy gold. you let an attacker attach an unverified memo to an already-signed tron tx, your system treated it as a failed swap, and you refunded the same deposit twice. that isn't skynet outsmarting you. that is basic input sanitation failure and romanticizing the attacker to hide an embarrassing engineering bug which fails to sanitize unverified transaction inputs. chainflip's state machine treated an appended memo as a brand new swap and blindly sent refunds. you don't need lazarus group for this, just an intern running basic edge cases. staking on `DeFi` has become the most dangerous operations in 2026.

Encryption is for everyone.

Holding ethereum:0xe172e9b6cfbeeb5593bdce3f077356fdb33af904 is one thing. Running the network is another. 𒆙 Run a ciphernode this weekend. More for operators next week. ↓

With participants like - hacktivists (@FreedomofPress, @TMIYChao, @redshiftzero, @jarradhope_), - cryptographers (@jaromil, @aisconnolly x @TACEO_IO), -civil society advocates (@helveticade, @alexis_roussel) - infrastructure experts (@juanbenet, @SCBuergel, @vpavlin), - came together alongside voices from electronic voting (@jordipainan x @vocdoni) , - vpn & mixnets (@_wjth x @nym), -encrypted messaging (@tessalaprofessa x @germnetwork, @Cryptic_cm x @session_app) - browsers (@PryvitKyle x @brave, ajs x @torproject) - devs, researchers (@kassandraETH), - lawyers (@MarinaMarkezic) - file sharing innovators (Robin Berjon, @mishmosh x @IPFS, @Filecoin), and many more freedom tech advocates joined the conversation. We all set to focus on five categories: – secure communications – decentralized identity – confidential compute – censorship -resistant infra Those were spread among workshop sessions during 3 days with everyone participating and working.

Short interview with @Cryptic_cm from 2026 piped.video/watch?v=9l32nr2M…

Phone numbers were never meant to be identity infrastructure.

🚨🚨🚨BREAKING: ASIO no. 2 is being rushed through parliament this week. This is the bill that allows warrantless questioning by ASIO, without a lawyer, and you can't tell a soul without being sent to prison. Share this widely and make some noise.

FOLD Auction 2 is deliberately limited in scope: 2% of supply, the same floor as Auction 1, and 50% of proceeds dedicated to long-term onchain liquidity support. How it fits into Aug 19 FOLD transferability blog.theinterfold.com/fold-a…

We’re evolving the FLIP token model. Today: Protocol revenue goes toward buying FLIP on the open market and then burning it forever. Next: Revenue will still purchase $FLIP from the market, but instead of sending it to the burn address, those tokens will be paid out to stakers as extra rewards. chainflip.io/blog/flip-token…

The tools for freedom already exist. The work now is putting them in everyone's hands.

Very welcome recent news from Signal: they are working on letting you register an account without a phone number. aboutsignal.com/news/signal-… That said, an important counterpoint about what this would and would not accomplish. The good #1: reducing dependence on phone numbers. Even aside from privacy benefits, reducing dependency on a highly oligopolistic system of chokepoints is good in itself. The good #2: phone numbers are for many people not a good "root" of identity from an access control perspective. Phone numbers get sim swapped all the time. The good #3: allowing phone-number-free accounts will make it harder for them in the future to discriminate against people by country - and so make it harder for governments to pressure them to block their own citizens. Now, on privacy. Significantly better than status quo, so yes it is good #4, but... In practice, in 2026, I believe that pseudonymity (a long-term persistent account that is not tied to your primary identity) is a dead concept. There are just too many channels by which we accidentally slowly leak data about who we are - timing of messages, the pattern of who we send messages to with what frequency, size, etc. And too many highly effective AI-based means (both using LLMs per-user, and LLMs helping every person and agency under the sun use math that we had all along) to uncover and piece together those hints. As a trivial example, whatever server you interact with learns your IP address, but even if you hide *that* with a VPN or Tor, there are many other identity leakage vectors. And so the only defensible form of privacy is *message-by-message unlinkability* - no one except sender and receiver knows the (sender, receiver) pair, ideally even not knowing who the sender or the receiver are. A natural taxonomy of privacy is the following 2x2: * Sitting duck: adversary knows "X did Y" * Confidentiality: adversary knows "X did ???" [E2E encryption provides this] * Anonymity: adversary knows "??? did Y" [aka message-by-message unlinkability] * Ideal: adversary knows "??? did ???" Signal has already had confidentiality for a long time. (Note: in other contexts, "confidentiality" sometimes means "someone knows X did Y, and we trust that someone to not reveal it", ie. not true privacy. Here, by confidentiality we mean hiding contents from third parties) This adds pseudonymity: in the above schema, adversary knows "0x8b512c... did Y", where they don't initially know who 0x8b512c... is, but may figure that out over time. The ideal is getting to message-by-message unlinkability. Actually accomplishing that gets into territory that is currently being explored by mixnet projects as well as newer messengers, eg. @session_app and @SimpleXChat. Once we get deeper into this territory, I suspect the primary frontier will be spam and DoS protection. Right now, much of the internet blocks all Tor exit nodes - not because they personally hate privacy, but because that's where DoS attacks come from. So we need ways for people to prove their non-spammer status while maintaining message-by-message unlinkability. See here github.com/dmarzzz/reputatio… for one direction (which complements ethresear.ch/t/zk-api-usage-… nicely). So I hope that we appreciate the victory that is mainstreaming of end-to-end encryption, that we actually get Signal accounts without phone number dependency (it's a great thing even if it had zero privacy consequences), and then that we keep moving forward and pushing the frontier of data leakage minimization.

Metadata collection is never benign.

Age verification is backdoor mass surveillance. Age verification is backdoor mass surveillance. Age verification is backdoor mass surveillance. Age verification is backdoor mass surveillance. Age verification is backdoor mass surveillance. Age verification is backdoor mass surveillance. Age verification is backdoor mass surveillance. Age verification is backdoor mass surveillance. Age verification is backdoor mass surveillance. Age verification is backdoor mass surveillance.

Top Chainflip aggregators over the last 30 days: 1. @Rango: $25.7M 2. @SwapKitPowered: $21M 3. @ChainflipBaaS: $6.5M 4. @symbiosis_fi: $4M 5. @lifiprotocol: $3.2M Aggregator data is live on Burnonomics: burnonomics.com/#glance

The latest development progress at Session, from Pro Beta to Protocol v2. It's great to be back. getsession.org/blog/session-…

Alice, Bob, and Charlie have trust issues. TEEs ask them to trust hardware with decrypted data. But E3s keep inputs encrypted through computation and decrypt only the permitted output. Now Alice, Bob, and Charlie can coordinate w/o trusting one another — or trusted hardware. 💚

Be careful what you download. How PDFs can be dangerous.