Information Security, Privacy, and Freedom under God. Consulting and Research @VentralDigital @Spearbit A138 F4D2 C62D 1404 AA6E 0B05 ACEF 4728 1DAD 4E26

BTW if you don't wanna hear about my personal crap, go follow @VentralDigital where it's kept strictly technical✌️
2
1
21
New model benchmark: Animated SVG finger flick.
214
.@ChatGPT don't do that, that's weird
2
3
318
patrickd retweeted
if, as alleged, TornadoCash was a money services business (MSB), the only real coherent theory is that the unincorporated association of relayers comprised that MSB (they are the only ones who arguably "accepted and transmitted value")...if so, then Chainanalysis, as a relayer, was much more clearly engaged in that MSB than Roman (who did not even run a relayer, merely owned ethereum:0x77777feddddffc19ff86db637967013e6c6a116c )...that's why they pled the 5th...but it shows this whole trial is a farce, @DonaldTrump @JDVance please save this man from unjust trial and imprisonment for software development...
One thing before I start: everything in this post is public information from my own docket. None of it is new, and I'm not revealing anything you can't already find in the court filings yourself. The retrial just got pushed to April 26, 2027. The order came down today (Dkt. 300). My acquittal motion is still sitting there, undecided. I honestly don't know when this ends. Prosecutors are supposed to protect American interests and go after people who broke the law. A jury deadlocked on the two most serious counts against me. And still SDNY won't stop, because this case was never just about me. It's about setting an example. Don't take my word for it. Tara La Morte, the chief of SDNY's Illicit Finance and Money Laundering Unit, said it herself at a New York City Bar Association event (Law360, Feb. 23, 2024; filed on my docket as Doc. 25-2): "We want the industry to take notice." "What we're trying to do is sort of bring the industry into compliance, and I think Tornado Cash is an example of that." An example. Out of a developer who wrote code. At that same event, her deputy praised the government's blockchain-tracing partner, Chainalysis. Here is what they didn't tell the audience. All of it is from the public docket in my case. According to the trial transcripts, Chainalysis was running its OWN Tornado Cash relayer, and earning fees on the transactions flowing through it. - Chainalysis's own lawyers admitted to "a relayer node that Chainalysis operated"; my subpoena sought documents on Tornado Cash relayer(s) "used from March to August 2022." (Dkt. 211) - In open court, the prosecutor said it plainly: "I think the parties agree as to that part of the testimony, that the Chainalysis relayer earned fees." Same hearing: "there's zero evidence that the defendant was in any way aware that Chainalysis was running a relayer." (Dkt. 259, July 25, 2025) So the company that helped trace my "criminal" transactions was itself profiting from Tornado Cash transactions, while I was prosecuted over software I helped create. And when my lawyers subpoenaed them to testify? - Chainalysis moved to quash. (Dkt. 211) - The government backed them: "Your Honor, we agree with the position outlined in the motion." (Dkt. 255) - The night before, prosecutors called Chainalysis's counsel. The judge asked point-blank: "Did you let them know that they were potentially subject to investigation or prosecution?" The answer: "We have discussed at a high level some of the issues surrounding the relayer with Chainalysis." (Dkt. 259) - The Chainalysis witness took the Fifth. My lawyers learned about that call only afterward, from Chainalysis's own lawyer. (Dkt. 263) The jury never heard any of it. This spring, at the Bitcoin 2026 conference in Las Vegas, something happened that I still can't quite believe. The Acting Attorney General, Todd Blanche, and the FBI Director, Kash Patel, sat on a panel called "Code is Free Speech." Think about that. The two top law enforcement officials in the country. Blanche told thousands of developers: if you're a coder and you're not the one committing the crime, "you are not going to be investigated and not going to be charged." He said the last administration's crypto cases were "outrageous attacks on the industry." Patel praised "the Chainalysises of the world" as FBI partners. And when the moderator pointed at the elephant in the room, my case, Tornado Cash, Roman Storm, the Acting Attorney General called it a "lingering case" they are "continuing to deal with." So here is my hypothetical question. If code is free speech, why am I still being prosecuted for writing it? And if the Chainalysises of the world are the partners, the same Chainalysis that ran its own Tornado Cash relayer and earned fees from Tornado Cash users, while I never did, why is it off the hook? They made an example out of a developer for writing code. Their own vendor ran the same infrastructure, pocketed the fees, and got a phone call instead of a prosecution. Sources 👇👇👇
13
58
405
25,334
I see that people are now happily connecting their gmail to Grok Bot, made by the people who did Grok Build, which uploaded users' entire private git repositories.

ALT No Way Abandon Thread GIF

4
409
patrickd retweeted
This paper is inaccurate slop. It makes a large number of clearly inaccurate claims about GrapheneOS and presents results which are verifiably false. It's filled with nonsense which appears AI generated. > The Clone Strikes Back: Efficient Vulnerable Code Detection in Custom Android-based Systems The authors wrongly believe GrapheneOS has diverged from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). The starting point for GrapheneOS is the latest stable release of AOSP with all of the AOSP security backport commits applied. Our changes to AOSP repositories are maintained as cleanly rebased patches. Our AOSP changes are reviewed and improved on an ongoing basis. It's not only the code being improved but also commit structure. We're always preparing for porting to the next stable release. It's handled as if our AOSP changes are being prepared for submission to the project for the first time. We start fresh with each stable release of AOSP. All our changes are ported to the new source tree. There's no merging process but rather porting and submitting the changes to the new source tree. Major changes are often required including entirely rewriting certain features for the new release. This entire paper is based around a misconception. The authors wrongly believe we need to identify and incorporate all of the upstream changes into GrapheneOS. It's our changes we need to make sure to fully and correctly port to each new release of AOSP, not the other way around as they believe. The authors should have seen that each of releases has all of our changes to AOSP repositories cleanly rebased on top of the latest stable release. We do make substantial changes to AOSP but it can all be reviewed as a set of patches applied on top of the latest AOSP release with zero merge commits. Android Security Bulletins are a list privacy and security patches backported to older releases of the OS. These aren't the privacy and security fixes made in the development branch but rather incomplete backports. Far more fixes made in the development branch and the approach is often different. Android's development branch can do major refactoring and rewrites. It can make privacy and security improvements requiring substantial changes to the code. It can fix weaknesses requiring backwards incompatible changes. The backports don't even attempt to cover Low and Moderate severity patches. The authors of the paper took the diffs from the Android Security Bulletins and created tooling to look for the changes made by those diffs being missing. They present the findings where they manually confirmed lines of code don't appear to be present as if those are missing patches in GrapheneOS. They should have easily figured out GrapheneOS releases are based on the latest AOSP release. They should have used their tooling on AOSP itself as a control. They would have gotten the same results for AOSP and GrapheneOS if they used versions from the same date. Instead, they're misleading people. If they checked the latest AOSP release at the time, they would have seen there's no actual difference in what their tooling finds between AOSP and GrapheneOS. The code they identified as not present in GrapheneOS wasn't in the latest AOSP release at the time. It also doesn't show anything is wrong. Many of the security issues fixed by Android for older releases aren't present in recent releases due to rewrites and changes to the code. Fixes in the development branch are often difficult to backport with major changes or entirely different approaches being needed. Backports are their own thing. It's common for the initial attempt at fixing a privacy and security issue to be incomplete or incorrect. These changes sometimes even introduce new vulnerabilities. There are often multiple rounds of partial fixes. Truly fixing it often requires major changes or rewrites impractical to backport. This paper is built around an incorrect understanding of how GrapheneOS is based on AOSP and Android's security patches. All of the patches included in Android at the time were shipped by GrapheneOS. If any of what they found was an actual issue, which is doubtful, then it was missing in AOSP too. Aside from the incorrect premise and methodology, the paper is filled with many other inaccurate claims about GrapheneOS. Look at this example: > For instance, GrapheneOS eliminates unnecessary background processes and applies exploit-hardening techniques to reduce CPU and battery usage. Did a human truly write that sentence? We aren't aware of any background processes we've eliminated compared to AOSP. Our exploit protections certainly don't reduce CPU, memory or battery usage. We do take great care to minimize the overhead and provide toggles for features with a substantial cost. The paper is filled with statements which sound reasonable to non-experts but are nonsense. We wouldn't be surprised if most of the paper and code was LLM generated. There are many strong signs of it and it's hard to believe humans wrote all of this. We think it should be investigated further. There are 4 authors listed for this. The person listed 3rd is a Senior Research Scientist in the Platforms Security and Privacy team at Google. It's published as part of the 2026 IEEE 11th European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P). What happened here? computer.org/csdl/proceeding… Google published Android as an open source project and it succeeded based on it. For years, they've been engaging in illegal anti-competitive tactics to gain control over what was an open platform supposedly governed by a group of companies rather than Google. That includes the Play Integrity API. Play Integrity API is pushed based on the false premise that it's a security feature. In reality, it's a core pillar of an illegal anti-competitive business model and clearly harms security. It bans GrapheneOS despite it being far more secure than anything they certify including far better patching. This paper pushes Google's false narrative of alternatives to Google certified Android not providing standard patches and protections. A Google researcher being directly involved as an author is scandalous. The claims made by the paper about GrapheneOS are clearly false and it needs to be retracted. The paper links to a GitHub repository with code, data and a copy of the paper. It's strange they apparently never thought to run this against the AOSP release which the GrapheneOS release they tested was based on. There are 0 differences in most of the relevant code... github.com/Demeter2025/Andro…
20
120
1,115
42,602
Watching the World Cup has reinforced my intense hatred for "Smart TVs". Just give me Program Prev/Next, let me select an input and leave me alone
1
3
445
Inter Profile Sharing can continue working on Android 17, if you want it to.
Inter Profile Sharing v1.2 released with small improvements, fixes and one elephant in the room: Android 17 now actively blocks inter-profile comms via local loopback, which was the loophole the app used. Workaround is using USB Debugging to give it a system permission.
3
9,605
Inter Profile Sharing v1.2 released with small improvements, fixes and one elephant in the room: Android 17 now actively blocks inter-profile comms via local loopback, which was the loophole the app used. Workaround is using USB Debugging to give it a system permission.
1
1
10,549
Android 17: *blocks local loopback network communication between user profiles* ...binding a port in one profile blocks it from being bound in another profile... Someone hold my beer while I turn this side channel into a comm protocol
1
340
New Agent benchmark discovered: Give agent access to Linux kernel code and a device's hardware it can freely flash and reboot. Tell it to rewrite hardware drivers from scratch in assembly until it succeeds controlling hardware. It's been circling for hours...
1
2
610
To protect me from the scrolling algos I now get a daily X/Twitter digest. LLMs, despite being considered summarization machines, are unfortunately still not very good at picking out what is actually important. Also, I'm already craving that sweet scrolling dopamine.
1
195
1. claude.ai/design 2. Slide Deck w/ Speaker Notes 3. Upload docs, ask about difficult things, ask for visualizations 4. Let it cook 5. Share > Export as Editable PPTX 6. Upload to Google Slides 7. File > Make Video 8. Voiceover > All Scenes > Insert
1
306
LLMs are terrible at technical writing I ran codex and claude on a rooted phone with a weakened kernel and had them look for RCEs into the subsystem firmware for a couple weeks Then asked them to turn their notes into technical writeups resulting in verbose, unfocused prattling
It found a DoS/crash in one of the subsystems but complained about not being able to by pass driver allowlist and wanting its own kernel modules... So one Hetzner server auction later we're compiling a patched kernel now.
4
325
Hey claude, add a ∛ button to the the standard calculator Patched, compiled, updated. All locally (except the LLM [yet?]) This, in a secure and private way, is what I want the future to be like.
2
6
2,403
PoC #2: Install a third-party app from source, then fix a bug in it that made it crash. In the future I want, 3rd party apps are source-installed and customizable – with updates automatically merged from upstream and suggestions submitted back to it
1
1
404
PoC #3: Make a bullshit-free small weather home-screen widget In the future I want, small apps for small tasks are just custom-build locally. No advertisements, no none-sense.
3
241
Running out of space on my old backup disk... rediscovering some gems from the old days, being like "ah yeah... that thing, completely forgot I still had it" That RAT remover I wrote in 2007 after infecting myself on accident... That time I reported every imaginable security issue in a CMS some German company made until they gave up on it in 2009... Those notes on all the security issues I found in random Swiss websites (no idea why, but they where the most fun targets back then)... That multi-gigabytes malware database someone send to me via mail from a university in 2011... That flyff mmorpg webGL clone I started writing in 2014... That browsergame exploit I started using after GM insisted it's not a bug... my old PHP webshell collection... Pre GPT, pre social media dominance, pre bug bounty... stack overflow, vbulletin forums, and mails warning me about being sued... Honestly, I miss the times where we just did cool stuff in small communities without algorithms dictating whether we can see each other's cool stuff... Anyone else storing old pearls for nostalgic throwbacks?
1
3
264
GrapheneOS dropped some very cool information on my thread here. Twitter isn't really showing it, so here it is:
Replying to @patrickd_de
We're not only going to be adding support for non-Pixel devices meeting our requirements but increasingly shifting away our focus from Pixels. They're not headed in the direction we want and aren't interested in our input. For now they're still the most secure option though.
1
245