Great news, the US CBP needs a warrant for your cell phone now (at least in the NY district) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/federal-judge-makes-history-holding-bor

This weekend was the #MITBitcoinExpo. Attendance was down from last year, but it was filled with interesting people and talks. All the talks are available for free at: https://www.mitbitcoinexpo.org/streaming I wrote up my experience here:

MIT Bitcoin Expo 2023

This weekend was the #MITBitcoinExpo. Attendance was down from last year, but it was filled with interesting people and talks.

The two most notable talks I saw were ZeroSync's update on ZKP for bitcoin, and the lightning network limitations estimates by Rene Pickhardt. Details in my post! This was the 10th anniversary, and it is all done by the student run @MITBitcoinClub. Kudos to the volunteers who made this critical event possible!

Strong update from zerosync. Performance needs work but they have assume valid working. Really nice progress for a project that came out leas than a year ago!

I'll be presenting updates at the XX Network Public Council Meeting Livestream starting @ 1:30pm Eastern, join me here: #xxnetwork #privacy #crypto

Anyone else going to the MIT bitcoin expo tomorrow? I'll be there around noon!

Some of my thoughts on why it would be good to sunset some traditional banking technology in favor of crypto.

Andrew and David disagree on a lot 😂, interview here:

Andrew Bustamante (CIA ops guy) and David Chaum (godfather of crypto) are streaming an interview at 1700 UTC tomorrow on youtube, it should be a good watch:

Getting COVID doesn’t protect you from getting it again. While a lot of folks believe that catching it does protect you, there is a growing body of evidence that it does not. I recently helped write a peer reviewed analysis in Nature Communications Biology adding to that pile. You can download the full paper for free here: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-023-04687-4

For xx network libxxdk .NET library users, we just merged some major changes. It now builds on all major architectures and we made some quality of life improvements. Our plan is expose the rest of the modules and have a nuget package published sometime in May. Any feedback on improvements we can make are welcomed! My hope is we will see a Wasabi Wallet build or another tool get posted that allows folks to use xx as an option over the summer. Here is a link to the MR:

GitLab

Use a more standard package layout and program structure for C# (!1) · Merge requests · elixxir / libxxdk · GitLab

Makefile to create native libs for different platforms using the go library, and install them to the right place. Update the C# to use a...

Harvard Kennedy school posted this great explainer on the fundamental problem with banning tiktok.

The Journal Vaccines published a vaccine mouse study I helped with that targeted breast cancer: https://doi.org/10.3390/vaccines11030644 It showed statistically significant slowed tumor growth compared to the control group. We believe this is due to a protective T-cell response. This is all based on our current best understanding of how the disease interacts with the body. In future experiments, we would like to see a demonstration of the presence of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes we think are responsible for the effects on tumor growth. We also would want to take advantage of next-generation sequencing, among other measurements. #breastcancer #cancer #immunotherapy #vaccine

For any of the parents out there, some guidance on controlling computer and phone use for your kids:

Harvard Graduate School of Education

How to Support Your Child’s Digital Life

The challenges of raising a child in the age of digital media

Intelligencer

Barney Frank Talks More About the Surprise Shuttering of Signature Bank

“I was sort of vindicated — they have not argued that we were insolvent,” says the author of the Dodd-Frank Act.

Apparently Silvergate was solvent when it was shut down. That raises some questions...

Has anyone written a rebuttal to Nicholas Weaver's latest slanted opus? Link: https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/area/center/isp/documents/weaver_death_of_cryptocurrency_final.pdf It's started to gain traction with the policy wonks I know. He's obviously not entirely wrong about some things, but the ideological bent on this thing is anti-all things crypto, so it would be useful if anyone has done a more fair analysis. Please reboost for visibility with your audiences.

Neat howto for speakeasy sent to me by a community member: FWIW, you don't need to use the speakeasy website to use speakeasy (most of our users don't, actually!), you can run the npm app locally:

GitLab

elixxir / haven · GitLab

Welcome to git.xx.network

Really pleased to release v0.3.0 of speakeasy today, which has the following improvements: 💬 Dms are finally here. Click a username to try it out. You can disable them in your channel settings. 🔒 Control your DMs, what channels you can be DMed from and which Users can DM you 💪 Performance enhancements for large channels. 👀 A few UX tweaks, channel settings are now in the channel header and account settings are now in the top right corner. You can check it out at https://alpha.speakeasy.tech and the main channel invite link is: https://alpha.speakeasy.tech/join?0Name=xxGeneralChat&1Description=Talking+about+the+xx+network&2Level=Public&3Created=1674152234202224215&e=%2FqE8BEgQQkXC6n0yxeXGQjvyklaRH6Z%2BWu8qvbFxiuw%3D&k=RMfN%2B9pD%2FJCzPTIzPk%2Bpf0ThKPvI425hye4JqUxi3iA%3D&l=368&m=0&p=1&s=rb%2BrK0HsOYcPpTF6KkpuDWxh7scZbj74kVMHuwhgUR0%3D&v=1

The xx team just released this tech preview for Proxxy, which adds some privacy when working over Metamask. 🦊 I work on the backend of this with the mixnet. Happy to answer any questions.

"Then, we show how this vulnerability can be used to construct second preimages and preimages for the implementation, and we provide a specially constructed file that, when hashed, allows the attacker to execute arbitrary code on the victim's device. " 💥🔥

IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive

A Vulnerability in Implementations of SHA-3, SHAKE, EdDSA, and Other NIST-Approved Algorithms

This paper describes a vulnerability in several implementations of the Secure Hash Algorithm 3 (SHA-3) that have been released by its designers. Th...

Today I had some fun getting my golang library running in C#, if any .NET aficionados are out there I'd appreciate feedback on how to make it better:

GitLab

elixxir / libxxdk · GitLab

Welcome to git.xx.network