Ellie's blog

Why FOSS?

Sat, 10 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0100

Free and Open Source Software is about more than ideology. There are several practical reasons why FOSS software is much better than proprietary alternatives. Here are the reasons that are the most important to me.

Note that free refers to freedom, not price

1: Guarantee of future availability

The biggest practical problem with any proprietary software is that there is no guarantee that you will be able to use it indefinitely. For services that you depend on, this is a huge issue.

An example that affected me is that of LastPass, a password management system which I depended on for years. One day they decided that they would lock out freemium users from using LastPass on desktop and mobile devices at the same time, rendering it practically useless. This came at a time when I was particularly busy, and transferring over to another service took a significant amount of time and energy. This technological ransom is simply not possible with FOSS services.

So when my friends ask me why I don’t want to use PyCharm, this is the second biggest reason. (The first, of course, is that Neovim is clearly superior). “Oh, but it’s free to use with the university! Your future employer will probably give you a license too!”. I expect to use a text editor for decades to come, and I simply refuse to rely on the whim of a company to do that. Don’t even get me started on operating systems…

2: Adaptability and maintainability

You simply cannot rely on a company to solve your problems for you or implement the features you want. Why should they? Unless you have a problem that will affect their public relations, you are relying on the good will of their employees. Don’t forget that the goals of a company are vastly different from yours.

But even if you aren’t a technical person, this is is still a reason to use FOSS software. Take Microsoft Teams for example. Does it work on Linux? Sort of, but not well. Are there thousands of developers out there who rely on it and are capable of fixing it? Certainly, with the source code and some work. Do Microsoft care? Of course not! The worse it is, the more likely people are to dual-boot Windows. But they can say “Microsoft ♥ Linux” and get away with it, because it sort of works.

And never mind Microsoft programs that people desperately need, like Word, instead they have implemented Edge and Powershell on Linux, which I don’t think anybody asked for. At the end of the day, all they care about is the way that they can present themselves (and in turn, their profits). Not their users.

And what about adaptability? I regularly come across things that I wish were different in software. I want my drawing program to default to drawing circles from the centre? Sure! Want to use different keybindings in my terminal? Absolutely! Want to make Zoom stop going into fullscreen for no reason when I already have it arranged perfectly in my window manager? Ah… I guess not. I regularly curse the developers of proprietary software which I am forced to use, because I have no way to adapt them to my workflow.

3: Usage beyond end of life

Another major gripe I have with many companies is their attitude to decommissioning proprietary projects, which is generally “I’m not making any money from this anymore, and nobody else should either, because it’s my work so why should I give it away!” This is the corporate equivalent of a toddler stuffing themselves with cake and then, after they are satisfied, screaming that it’s not fair for anyone else to take a slice. As far as I’m concerned, when support is dropped for a program, it’s common decency to release the source code and documentation for people to continue to maintain it on their own. Any claims of copyright infringement in this scenario are bullying at best.

4: Reducing wasted development time

This one is fairly self explanatory. Too much developer time is wasted reimplementing proprietary software. Take this website for example. Did I design it? No! The amazing Zeno Rocha did. And he made it open source, which has meant that I haven’t had to learn web development from scratch, just tweak a few things. The same holds true in more widespread software. Proprietary software causes massive wastes of time, when people could be developing truly new software which changes the world.

5: Privacy, security, and transparency

FOSS software is much more trustworthy than proprietary software. There are two important components to this:

When the source code is freely available, far more people are able to notice security holes.
You can be sure that the code you are actually running is the same as what has been audited.

What’s important to note here too is that you simply cannot trust a company not to have been forced (by governments or otherwise) to distribute software with backdoors added. You don’t have to read and understand the code yourself, but if several independent auditors across different countries concur that there are no backdoors, and you can verify that you’re running that exact same code, you can trust it.

That’s all from me! More blog posts to come.

Dracula for SolidWorks?!?!?

Mon, 12 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0100

Hah! Who says proprietary programs can’t be themed?? SolidWorks never stood a chance. I even edited a DLL with vim.

You can find the theme with full install instructions here.

Why?

Despite my comments in this blog post, there are a few proprietary programs which I am tied to, with no hope of escape. One of these is SolidWorks, a 3D Computer Aided Design program used extensively in many engineering teams.

I have spent many hours late at night using SolidWorks, and having a dark theme really does help prevent eye strain. As for why Dracula, that much is obvious.

How?!?

SolidWorks doesn’t expose a theming mechanism for many of the important colors in the UI, and it’s not open source so I can’t just fork it, but obfuscated or not, a color code is a color code, and I figured I should be able to find it with grep. A bit of regex fu latex and I was staring at this line…

grep: swStyleBlueu.dll: binary file matches

Now, the appropriate response here is probably to think “Ok, let me find a program designed for dealing with DLLs” (or, alternatively, to give up). But naturally the only thing I was thinking was “Can I open it in vim”. And what I found was a veritable goldmine…

Yep, that’s some sort of style description embedded in plaintext in a DLL. And even better, there are comments! Comments which they thought nobody would see…

As a side note, I couldn’t figure out for the life of me what tabstop they were using. Literally nothing would get the comments aligned. Were they just… incompetent?

Here are my favourite comments, reformatted for my sanity:

// Debug testing colors. Use this to show a custom area with very bright and obnoxious color so it can stand out during debugging.
// jps... I MADE THIS UP. NOT CLEAR FROM IMAGES WHAT IS "PRESSED" VS. "SELECTED"
// thx nvidia for the bug.. :(
// consequently this is no good to do something here !!
// !! magic
// what for ???
// WARNING: setView(-1) CRASHES !!
// TOTEST !!!
// ERROR TO BE HERE!!
// This one is broken

Needless to say, I have some questions about the development practices at Dassault Systèmes…

As an aside, here’s the script I used to find all the comments. Beautiful, I know.

#!/bin/sh
for i in $(find . -name '*.dll'); do
    vim \
        +"set lazyredraw" \
        +"g/^[[:print:]\r]*\(https\?:\)\@<\!\/\/[[:print:]\r]*$/.,.w! \
            >>//10.0.2.4/qemu/swout.txt" \
        +'q!' $i
done

Anyway, naturally, I then wrote a script to change the colors and voilà, Dracula for Solidworks. But the story’s not over. Have you been wondering why there are still ugly grey bits in the screenshot? Yeah. I found the variables for that, and tried to change them. SolidWorks refused to start.

The UK government is dangerously incompetent

Fri, 04 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Preface, 2022-10-22

In retrospect, this blog post is perhaps a little too inflammatory, though not incorrect as far as I know. Such were my feelings at the time. I won’t censor myself by editing or removing it (see also “What we leave behind”), but be warned. If you’d like to see a more carefully considered article around this topic, see Ross Anderson’s paper “Chat Control or Child Protection?”

Original post

Recently the UK government launched the “No place to hide” propaganda campaign, which seeks to maintain their unfettered access to Facebook Messenger data by preventing the addition of end to end encryption. What’s going on? And why would they choose such an evil-sounding name??

What is end to end encryption (E2E) anyway?

Lifted shamelessly from wikipedia:

End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is a system of communication where only the communicating users can read the messages. In principle, it prevents potential eavesdroppers – including telecom providers, Internet providers, malicious state bodies, and even the provider of the communication service – from being able to access the cryptographic keys needed to decrypt the conversation.

Why do the UK government claim they oppose it?

The first line of the “No place to hide” site is “Let’s work together to ensure we keep children safe online without compromising user privacy”. Sounds great, but what they’re proposing doesn’t keep children safe online, and does compromise user privacy. Nice one guys, good idea.

They say “We are not opposed to end-to-end encryption, as long as it is implemented in a way that does not put children at risk.” Looking past the emotionally charged language, that’s basically saying “We’re not opposed to end-to-end encryption, as long as it’s not really encrypted, and we can access all the information anyway.” That’s just idiotic really. And we haven’t even got to the section titled “The Incompetence” yet.

The Incompetence

What the politicians seem to fail to realise is that they’re trying to fight the laws of maths. Even if they block Facebook from introducing E2E into Messenger, there will still be 10 other services providing E2E, which criminals will flock to. What makes this situation especially stupid is that Facebook’s proprietary nature makes it untrustable anyway, regardless of whether they claim to provide E2E, and any criminal who is stupid enough to think Facebook Messenger is secure is certainly stupid enough to be caught in 5 other ways. (See also Why FOSS?).

Literally just do your jobs please

OK we’re still talking about messages on a child’s phone, right? The same phone that the child’s parents/carer probably has the password to? The same phone that the police could just idk, get a warrant to access, ask for the password, and then see who they were talking to? Or are we hellbent on doing it the “big data way”, where biased neural networks analyse millions of private messages looking for criminals (oh and don’t worry, advertisement neural networks definitely aren’t being trained on the same data).

The danger to user privacy

Indiscriminate government access to user data is a huge threat to society at large. Nobody has nothing to hide (a friend of mine has a good test to illustrate this: ask people increasingly personal questions until they refuse to answer). Even if you genuinely did have nothing to hide, you don’t know what laws will change in the future, and what data can be used to “prove” your guilt — just look at the case of Ben John, who was convicted simply for owning a book.

This is all besides the fact that if anyone has backdoor access to your data, then so do the bad guys — governmental agencies in particular have a horrific record of data breaches.

Whose responsibility are children anyway?

This is an easy one, right? In most respects, children are the responsibility of their parents/carer and their school. So why don’t the government invest in better education of children and their parents, instead of taking cheap shots at encryption technology?

Shameful language

Regardless of the actual conversation about privacy and protecting children, the “No place to hide” campaign leans heavily on fearmongering rhetoric, and inaccurately presents what is possible. It is not possible whatsoever to ensure data privacy while allowing the government unfettered access to user data. It’s a contradiction in terms.

There is a very clear ulterior motive: the government wants to spy on their own citizens. They will go far further than protecting children with this data.

Taking back control (part 1): a manifesto

Mon, 07 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Part 2 →

Like many young people, I’ve been around technology my entire life. But until very recently, I’d never really taken the time to take a step back and consider its effects, both on my own life and on society at large.

What I’m coming to realise is that historically I’ve placed an enormous amount of trust in very untrustworthy entities: the likes of Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc (and by proxy various governments). These entities have time and time again proven their untrustworthiness, but like many others, I was swept away by peer pressure and promises of increased convenience.

It’s time to stop this. I’m taking back control. It’ll be a long journey, fraught with pissing a lot of people off, a whole barrel of FOMO, and clashing with people in positions of “authority”. But I refuse to put my life in the hands of anyone so untrustworthy.

So I wrote a manifesto. It’s basically a list of rules about what I will and won’t do, and will help me maintain privacy, ensure sovereignty over software I depend on, reject mass data gathering, and make a statement about the importance of FOSS.

The manifesto can be found here

Or on Gemini here

I’m expecting to start following it around summertime (northern hemisphere), and I’ll definitely be making changes to the manifesto before then, so I’d really appreciate any comments people have!

Part 2 →

Taking back control (part 2): futility and obscurity

Wed, 30 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0100

← Part 1 Part 3 →

Currently in my manifesto it says:

4.2) When transferring data to a person who does not comply with this manifesto or a similar one, I will assume it is public and compromised.

This is a bit extreme, and at the moment basically means I would have to consider every message I send to absolutely anyone public. Does that make the whole thing futile? Is it even fair when messaging people through E2EE FOSS systems?

The problem of notification services

Let’s say I send a message to someone on Matrix. Chances are, that person has some way of accessing Matrix on their smartphone, and has notifications enabled. Chances are, too, that the notification service on their phone is proprietary (e.g. Google Play Services). Here’s what Drew DeVault has to say about Google Play Services:

Here’s what Google Play Services actually is: a rootkit. Google Play Services lets Google do silent background updates on apps on your phone and give them any permission they want. Having Google Play Services on your phone means your phone is not secure.

The same definitely goes for whatever the Apple equivalent is.

So… any message I send to, well, anyone, is automatically insecure, right? Well… yes. Google (and Apple) almost certainly harvest all the text that goes through their notification services.

The maybe good news is that it’s probably not that easy for these companies to link that data back to me, if they’re only getting it fragmented between the people I choose to message, and only in notification form. That’s not very comforting though, because one of the core parts of my manifesto is trust, and I can’t put any trust in what Apple and Google can or can’t do.

In for a penny, in for a pound

I suppose the question, really, is “Is it worthwhile to secure some parts of a system if other parts have glaring holes in them?”

Well, information security theory says yes. If you look at the wikipedia page on attack surfaces, it says:

The attack surface of a software environment is the sum of the different points (for “attack vectors”) where an unauthorized user (the “attacker”) can try to enter data to or extract data from an environment. Keeping the attack surface as small as possible is a basic security measure.

So basically, minimising the number of ways in which people and companies can access your data (the “attack surface”) is a worthwhile exercise. Then again, if one company has unfettered access to your data and sells it to everyone else, you’re pretty screwed regardless. Even so, the more you strive for privacy, the lower the risk of this happening.

A third category: obscure information

A thought I keep thinking is “If the ways of getting my private information are sufficiently obscure, only a targeted attack can affect me, not mass data gathering”.

I think this is a worthwhile protection if it’s infeasible to be totally secure, so I’ll probably rework the manifesto a bit to introduce a third privacy/security tier. As well as the original “secure” and “public”, it’ll be something like “obscure”, and would be information which is technically insecure and could be exposed, but probably only by someone who is specifically targeting me rather than just doing mass data gathering.

Of course, if someone targets me personally, I’ll have bigger things to worry about.

Some meta things about this blog

I’ll keep this bit short, I just wanted to say: please let me know your opinions! I wholeheartedly think that having your views challenged is the best way to formulate good ones. Even if what you’re gonna say is “you’re stupid, I love Apple and Facebook, please violate my personal data, Daddy Zuck.”, I wanna hear it. I don’t kink-shame.

← Part 1 Part 3 →

Music!

Sat, 06 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0100

Today’s post is about something completely different from the usual (if there even is a usual). I’ve decided to start recording and publishing the music I’m working on!

I’m not trying to become an influencer or a professional musician or anything, I just want my music-making to feel more purposeful than when I’m playing to myself :]

If you’re interested, check out my first upload!

What we leave behind

Thu, 18 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0100

One day, we will all die. What can we hope for as consolation? Where is our meaning in the face of our inevitable doom? Our lives are fleeting, and, in a way, that makes them ever more beautiful. But our finiteness is heart-wrenching too.

I hope that some piece of me, of my soul, can live on. Whether it’s in a mediocre blog post, a dusty and almost forgotten book, or an obscure scientific paper, I want some future person to read what I’ve written and be hit by the realization that a real person was behind it. A real, human, person poured their soul into those words, a person with hopes and dreams and regrets and flaws, who experienced not just love and happiness, but pain, and jealousy, and bitterness too.

That’s what this blog is really about, I suppose. What it’s always been about. It’s me reaching out into the void, and saying: “I was here. I existed.” I don’t want what I make to be perfect. I want it to be a reflection of the real me. Not some polished version of me that never really existed. Just me.

So, if you’re that future person, digging through the archives of ancient times: Hi! What’s the world like? Have my fears come to life, or was I being silly? You have no idea how much I want to just sit down with you, grab some coffee, and chat.

Is coffee still around?

Taking back control (part 3): the PinePhone Pro

Sat, 22 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0100

← Part 2 Part 4 →

PS: this blog is now also accessible over RSS here.

From my manifesto:

2.0) I will not depend on any proprietary software.

2.1) Proprietary software must be run in an [untrusted sandbox].

Clearly, continuing to use a proprietary Samsung device with a proprietary software additions to Android (as well as some unremovable proprietary apps) is unacceptable. I could have perhaps installed LineageOS (a fully FOSS build of Android) on my old phone, but I figured I’d go the whole mile and buy a PinePhone Pro, which is FOSS all the way down to the PCB design (some of the chips e.g. the GSM module are proprietary, sadly, though they are sandboxed). Naturally I’ve got it running Arch Linux, for the memes but also because it works really well lol.

Introducing “flumph”

Having silly naming schemes for things is fun, so I’ve decided to call my new PinePhone Pro “flumph”, after the creature from Dungeons and Dragons. Canonically, flumphs are very intelligent creatures, and are immune to telepathy, just like how this flumph is (hopefully) resistant to surveillance :D

(Fitting with the DnD creature theme, I’ve now named my outgoing Samsung “Mind Flayer”, since it has been trying to enslave my brain.)

Ricing (of course)

Naturally, on buying any new device, one must spend least 15 hours “ricing” it (aka making it look good without improving usability). I focused my ricing on the bootloader, since it’s the perfect place to put flumph-themed artwork etc etc. Here are some pictures of the final result:

I haven’t yet riced sxmo, the desktop environment I’m using, but it’s basically sway, which is basically i3, which I’ve riced a ton on on my desktop, so it shouldn’t be too much work…

Mobile data restrictions

Since, while I’m out and about, I plan to use flumph pretty much only for instant messaging, I bought a super cheap SIM card with very little data (750MB/mo), and I’ve tweaked both my matrix client and the network traffic rules in Arch so that I can’t accidentally use it all up at once. I was going to give a boring technical description of how I did that, but I reckon nobody cares lol, so I wont (:

Is it actually usable?

So I’ll admit it took me a while to get everything set up, and there are are still a few niggling annoyances, e.g., I can’t get messages over matrix while the screen is locked because the network devices get turned off when it goes to sleep >:, but overall yes, it’s very usable, and I barely ever have to go back to Mind Flayer! So that’s put me one step closer to fully following my manifesto…

← Part 2 Part 4 →

Taking back control (part 4): ultimatum games

Sun, 20 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

← Part 3 Part 5 →

2025-08-12: I’m not quite as rigid on this as I was in 2022. Read on for more.

There are (approximately) two types of people who will read this post: my regular readers (hi!) and people who I’ve sent this link to, presumably after refusing to continue messaging them on their favourite messaging system. This is on grounds of privacy, security, and freedom.

Usually, I would consider the act of giving such strong ultimatums to be unreasonable and unfair: surely the other person should be given a say? Surely I should attempt to reason with them and come to an fair compromise? But I find myself somewhat backed into a corner. Make no mistake, I don’t take this lightly. I apologise for the inconvenience, but this is the hill I have chosen to die on, and I will die on it if necessary.

Adversaries

We should start by talking about our adversaries. Get the idea out of your head of an FBI agent actively listening into your phone calls, that’s not what the real world is like at all. We have two classes of adversary:

Profit-motivated entities: this includes Facebook, Google, etc. They passively harvest all the data they can slurp up and use it to train a sophisticated model of you: your likes, your dislikes, your triggers, your guilty pleasures, your political opinions, and so on. So far, this is mostly used for advertising, but don’t think of this in terms of tailoring ads for you, or you’ll fool yourself into thinking that you’re smart enough to resist. No, the other, more worrying, side of this, is that they try to make you waste as much time as possible interacting with their services (and hence viewing more ads). They will happily trick your brain into a certain dopamine response which keeps you watching YouTube videos or browsing TikTok even after you should rightfully be bored. This is obviously dystopian. Don’t let it carry on. (This is not even to mention political nudging, which certain companies have also engaged in).
Government agencies: entities like the NSA or GCHQ undergo mass surveillance, slurping up all this information too. Ostensibly, they sift though all of this traffic to detect terrorism and other security threats, but do we really trust that this is and will always be the only reason? This is a Chekhov’s gun, and it must go off by Act III. By letting the government see our private messages, we are enabling a future government to use them as evidence against us. Is that something you want to risk?¹

What makes a good messaging system?

So, what do we need from a messaging system in order to fight our adversaries?

Privacy: human beings have a right to privacy. The content of messages (ordinary data) and information about message timing and who is involved (metadata) should not be passively revealed.
Security: In order for privacy to be possible, security is required. We shouldn’t just take a company’s word for it, we should be able to verify that they cannot access our information under reasonable threat models.
Freedom: Privacy and Security of metadata cannot be practically achieved in a zero-trust setting, some other parties must occasionally be trusted (e.g. server operators). Users of a messaging system should have the freedom to decide who to trust, and should not be locked in to trusting any specific party. Additionally, ordinary software freedoms are necessary.

The classic ultimatum game

A bit of a (relevant) aside: the ultimatum game is a classic economic/philosophical thought experiment, in which there are two players, the proposer, and the responder. (And an optional third, the arbiter, who manages the game).

The proposer is tasked with proposing a percentage split of a sum of money to the responder. The responder can either accept (in which case the money is split as proposed) or reject (in which case neither of them get any money).

What is the optimal strategy for both the proposer and the responder? The (absurdly oversimplified) “Homo economicus” model of humanity suggests that the responder, who maximises the money they get, should accept any split in which they receive more than zero. Naturally the proposer knows this, and hence proposes the most unfair split possible.

This is absurdly silly (and yet the “Homo economicus” model is used widely). Another potential solution is for the responder to reject anything other than a 50/50 split: knowing that knowledge of this would force the proposer to offer a 50/50 split, since the proposer is also trying to maximise the amount of money they get. But in reality, the responder would surely also accept 51/49 splits. What about 52/48? 53/47? Clearly this solution isn’t quite stable.²

There are other potential solutions (e.g. involving randomness), but really the only way to understand real human responses is with real data. Wikipedia says:

When carried out between members of a shared social group […] people offer “fair” (i.e., 50:50) splits, and offers of less than 30% are often rejected.

This fits with my intuition. Yay.

The messaging system ultimatum game

I have in the past been a critic of the classic ultimatum game as being completely out of touch with the real world, and yet here I am playing a modified version, namely:

Ellie (the proposer) is tasked with proposing a set of acceptable messaging systems to the responder. The responder can either accept, in which case the pair continue to message, or reject, in which the pair cannot message.

This is pretty much identical to the classical ultimatum game, where I am the proposer, you are the responder, and “money” is some function of the messaging system we use. I want it to be secure and private, and you don’t want to be inconvenienced. What should be my strategy? Well, firstly, I should clarify my objectives in this ultimatum game, which are (in no particular order):

Continue to talk to my friends
Ensure that leaks of my own private information are as unlikely as reasonably possible
Effect societal change (at least in local societal circles) towards privacy, security, and freedom

The research suggests I’ll do reasonably well with somewhere between 50/50 and 70/30 splits, whatever we define those to be.

Let me rank messaging systems then into a few categories of privacy/security³:

More technical explanation

Data secure, metadata secure (Matrix, XMPP, IRC; each in ideal circumstances)
Data secure, metadata unknown (Matrix in ordinary circumstances, Signal)
Data unknown, metadata insecure (Whatsapp, Telegram)
Data insecure, metadata insecure (Facebook Messenger, Discord, SMS, Unencrypted email)

This suggests I should draw the line between (2) and (3). But it’s still a massive oversimplification of the real scenario. Is this the right place to draw the line?

Complicating factor 1: The perception of fairness

In the classic ultimatum game, there is an objective idea of fairness, namely, “Equal money = fair”. Here there isn’t. For example, in your head, messaging systems might be ordered like this:

Things you’ve never heard of (Matrix, XMPP, IRC)
Things you’ve heard of but don’t use (Signal, Telegram)
Things you occasionally use but don’t like (Whatsapp, Unencrypted email)
Things you use quite a lot (Facebook Messenger)
Your favourite apps (Discord)

Then again, I could order them like this if I was feeling mean:

Very likely to be secure, been around a long time (XMPP, IRC)
Younger and more featureful but still reasonably secure (Matrix in ideal situations)
Likely to be okay, but metadata is potentially vulnerable (Matrix in ordinary situations)
Possibly an NSA metadata honeypot but at least the ordinary data is secure (Signal)
Very likely to be at least stealing your metadata (Telegram, Whatsapp, Discord, Facebook Messenger, etc)

Using either of these changes perception of a “fair” ultimatum quite a lot, and there’s no neat resolution. I think my original categorisation is reasonable, but we can argue about it if you like.

Ultimatums don’t exist in a vacuum. You might be thinking to yourself “Wow, this girl’s an asshole. Nobody else cares about this and she wants to dictate how we message?” Not only that, but people don’t like caving to ultimatums, lest other person take advantage and make even more ultimatums.

Honestly, I can relate to that. All I can say is that I’m okay with you being annoyed at me, because I truly believe that this is a cause worth championing, whatever the consequences. I don’t like making ultimatums either.

Complicating factor 3: Negotiation and individuals

Why should I apply the same ultimatum to everyone? Some of you might rightly realise that I really enjoy talking to you, and that you have negotiation power over me. If you were to refuse to message securely, would I cave and continue messaging you insecurely? I would have to choose either to compromise the legitimacy of my ultimatum, or stop talking to you.

That’s a tough choice to make. It will be even harder when this becomes concrete rather than abstract. In general I want to be the type of person that sticks to their values, and so I’m sorry, but I won’t cave. My only hope is that in showing you how important this is to me, you’ll come around.

That said, if it’s not “can you break your rules for me”, but “I think your rules could be improved”, then please bring it up. I’m not a brick wall.

Complicating factor 4: Groups

The 1 on 1 ultimatum game is one thing, but to say to an entire group of people “Let’s move to this other system, or I’m leaving” is a whole other beast. I have succeeded (more gently) with a few small groups, but it’s a difficult task.

For this reason, I will (for now) let myself be part of Whatsapp groups (but not Facebook Messenger groups). However, I will (on the whole) only be a passive observer, and never send anything remotely sensitive. I will continue to petition for the group to move to Matrix, since even my presence in the group is a powerful source of information for Facebook (who own Whatsapp).

An even harder problem is large organisational entities (e.g., companies I work with). In those, I have zero power whatsoever, and must do what I’m told. To be honest, this sucks, and I’ll try not to work for companies that communicate over Facebook Messenger, Slack, etc. But when I have no choice, I have no choice. I’ll certainly be careful to watch what I say, at least.

Complicating factor 5: New people

Ok so like, there’s no way if someone I don’t know tries to message me on Whatsapp or something I can just reply with “Install this other app and then I’ll reply”. They’d just think I’m weird and then ignore me probably. Or it would at least be awkward.

2025-01-29: As the old adage goes:

I can’t ever seem to get girls to come over to my place and I can’t text them either. Once I get their numbers since I’ve added customs roms to my phone and refuse to use sms since it’s a security concern I require all of my friends to download a free and open source messaging app and I share with them my public gpg key so that we can verify that our conversations are secure. None of my friends are willing to do this. And I can’t use sites like tinder since it’s not only proprietary software but a major privacy vulnerability. How come it is so hard to find a girl concerned about software freedom. I feel like I’m going to be a virgin forever.

I think what I’ll do is finish the initial conversation (watching what I say) and then tell them I don’t actually use Whatsapp, and ask them to select from a list of secure apps. That seems reasonable, but it’s subject to change.

2025-08-12: I’m much more lax on this factor now, i.e. I have to be quite close with someone before I push them to switch messaging systems. This was more out of necessity than anything else — I discovered there are surprisingly many people who will start texting you less without explaining why if you switch to a platform they’re unfamiliar with. My desire for better forms of communication clearly extends beyond the realm of the technical and into the realm of the interpersonal…

Complicating factor 6: Edge cases

I don’t expect this to happen, but what if someone literally can’t comply with my ultimatum? For instance, they only use a Nokia brick and have no other computer, so they can only use SMS. Honestly I’d be surprised if this happens. But if it does, then let’s work together to figure something out. It won’t be as simple as “Ok, I’ll just use SMS then”, but I’m not going to just ignore you if there’s nothing you can do about it. That said, don’t try to use this as an excuse to refuse. If you own either a smartphone or a laptop, it’s extremely unlikely you can’t use a secure messaging system.

Another edge case: what if I meet someone with an ultimatum which directly contradicts mine? Again, ideally I’d want to work together to figure it out. But if your ultimatum contradicts mine in such a fundamental way that it can never be reconciled (e.g. “I want Facebook to have a record of our conversation”), then maybe I just don’t want to be your friend?

Conclusion

So, there are a lot of complicating factors. On the whole, I don’t think they affect the outcome too much, other than adding nuance, and informing me that I should apply discretion. I truly am sorry for the inconvenience I am likely causing you, but I must hold true to my values.

So then, the (possibly incomplete) list:

(You may find these diagrams useful for technical explanations)

I will use (please suggest others if appropriate)

Matrix (e.g. the “Element” app), Signal, (and XMPP, IRC, PGP-encrypted email, …)

I will use only passively for groups

I will not use

Facebook Messenger, Discord, Telegram, SMS, Snapchat, Instagram DMs, …

2025-08-12: The above now only strictly applies to people I’m close with, feel able to ask to move to a better system, and have got around to doing so with. But if you currently use a messaging system with me that I don’t like, I would love it if you asked me how we could switch to a better one!

← Part 3 Part 5 →

2025-08-12: Today it’s less of a “risk” and more the stark reality of authoritarianism faced by queer and particularly trans people in Western “democracies”. For example, in February the US government fired over 100 officials because they had discussed queer topics on an internal government messaging system.↩︎
2025-01-29: The solution to this instability is the following optimal strategy: accept a 50/50 split with 100% probability, and accept with decreasing probability as the proposal becomes more unfair, such that the expected value to the proposer is maximised at the fair split.↩︎
2025-01-29: Arguably, Signal’s data security is stronger than Matrix’s (it forgoes some features and is more mature), and whether its metadata security is better than Matrix’s depends heavily on your threat model. This doesn’t change the conclusions of the post, and I still strongly prefer Matrix.↩︎

Entropy Bingo

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Let me introduce you to a little game I like to call Entropy Bingo.

Choose an action that you might take with expectations of anonymity, and try to figure out whether a determined attacker can figure out who you are, by counting up the bits of Shannon entropy they can determine. If it reaches 33 bits (corresponding to the >8 billion people on the planet), you lose, and you have been deanonymised. If not, you win. For simplicity, we assume each piece of information is uncorrelated with the others. This isn’t really true, but it’s napkin maths anyway.¹

Example 1: convenience store

Here’s an example: I go to my local convenience store and buy an item. I don’t take my phone or any other tracking device, and I pay in cash. Am I anonymous?

Firstly, my adversary can narrow it down to the number of people who might buy food at this particular store. Some very approximate maths suggests that this already knocks off about 20 bits of entropy, but it would be more if my store were very small. Fun.

I’m the type of person to pay in cash, which knocks off at least another 3 bits, based on statistics about people’s payment preferences. If my adversary has ever deanonymised me before, they will likely know I pay in cash.

Most convenience stores have CCTV, so lets say my adversary can see my face and what I’m buying. If I lived in China or New York² or any other place that uses facial recognition without consent, I would already have lost. But let’s continue anyway.

So, how many bits does my physical appearance count for? The gender I present knocks off about 1 bit. I wear glasses, which knocks off about another bit. My hair type knocks off about 3 bits. My approximate age knocks off about 3 more bits.

That’s already 31/33 bits and I definitely haven’t thought of everything. That’s seriously bad. Someone who reasonably might have all that information can immediately narrow me down to one of 4 people.

Who would have all that information? Well, let’s say the convenience store is storing all this video data in “the cloud”, which probably means one of Google’s servers. And all of that information about my characteristics and location? Google has that too. So, yes, even if I don’t take a phone and even if I pay in cash, Google could deanonymise me. Would they? I don’t know. But they certainly have incentive to.

Example 2: a clandestine deal

Ok, so you’re super paranoid and you think you’re smart. You go onto the anonymous web (a Tor onion site), and find someone who lives in your city of 100,000 people who has the thing you want. You make sure they use Matrix, because you know it’s reasonably secure and private, and you make a new Matrix handle to talk to them. You meet them in person in a random place in the city to make the exchange, pay in cash, and wear clothes you never usually wear - plus a cap and balaclava.

Busted! You’ve still given away too much information. What!!!??? Here’s the breakdown:

Approximate location: 16 bits
Use of Tor: at least 6 bits
Use of Matrix: 7 bits
Height: 2 bits
Approximate gender and age: 3 bits

Total: 34 bits

You made a few mistakes. The biggest was using Matrix. What?? you cry? But Matrix is secure! It’s private! It’s FOSS and it has end-to-end encryption!!

Yes. But privacy is not anonymity. Security is not anonymity. For anonymity, you need security and plausible deniability. For any given action, there must be a large number of people who could be responsible for it. You could have a perfectly private and secure system, but if there are only two users, every action must have been made by one of those two users. Tor and Matrix are only successful anonymising tools when used extremely carefully.

Still, this example requires much more nuance. Who, specifically, could deanonymise you? The person you’ve made a cash deal with might be able to, but maybe not. The assumptions of this game are critical, and hard to evaluate in the real world. Does your use of Tor actually reveal 6 bits? Your adversary won’t have a list of everyone who uses Tor, but if you’re someone who cares this much about anonymity, you might have publicly declared that Tor is a great tool and people should use it, in which case there might be a list you’re on. The same goes for Matrix, although an accurate list of users is probably a lot easier to come by. Your adversary might not have an accurate list of people in your city and their age/height/gender either, but a little digging on social media would go a long way. (The possibility of your adversary being a law enforcement agent would go a lot further, if your transaction were illegal)

What should you do?

What would be a better strategy for a truly anonymous purchase? The first thing to do is to randomise as many choices as you can. When you’re looking for someone to transact with over Tor, find as many as you can, and choose randomly, with probabilities proportional to the number of customers you think they have. Don’t insist on a messaging system, use whatever they use, provided that you can use it entirely over Tor without giving up personal information (e.g., burner email addresses or Facebook accounts are fine if you can do it without identity verification). Make your search area as broad as possible, perhaps even take a train into another city and do the transaction there (try to avoid cameras as you do). Cover as many of your distinguishing features as you can, but do it in a boring way — don’t wear a balaclava, wear a mask, a beanie, and large sunglasses if it’s sunny.

Additionally, you should try to segment the information such that no party has access to all of it. Don’t tell the person you transact with about your journey, the rain you came through, when you got off work, or anything else. In fact, it’s best if you don’t speak, your voice might be distinctive.

Further, false information goes a long way. Put on a convincing wig. Wear fake glasses if you have perfect eyesight. Put pebbles in your shoes to change your gait. If you’re brave enough to speak, hint that you came from a different city than you really did. Each bit of false entropy can have serious anonymising power.³

Entropy Bingo card

To conclude, here’s a bingo card with some sources of information I thought of that an attacker might use to remove your entropy. If you get a bingo, they’ve probably got you. It’s highly approximate, though I’ve been careful to keep incompatible or highly correlated sources of information from being in the same row/column/diagonal, as much as possible.

Travel by bike

(~5 bits)

Nearest cell tower

(~19 bits)

Use of Matrix

(6 to 8 bits)

Travel by train

(~6 bits)

IP address

(20 to 30 bits)

Specific Job title

(~10 bits?)

Age, gender, height

(5 bits)

Use of Linux

(5 to 7 bits)

Paying in cash

(~3 bits)

Knowledge of 1 person you know

(20 bits)

Use of Tor

(6 to 10 bits)

City you’re in

(9 to 12 bits)

Not carrying a phone

(3 to 5 bits)

Simple facial features

(4 to 6 bits)

Town you’re in

(16 to 20)

Uncommon hobby

(8 to 10 bits)

Ironically, many of the things on the bingo board, like Matrix, Tor, and Linux, are things which protect your privacy. But because not enough people use them, knowledge that you’re using them provides a fair bit of deanonymisation power. The solution: get more people to use them, to protect those that need anonymity.

Disclaimer 2: I think I need to say that my fascination with anonymity doesn’t stem from a propensity to perform illegal acts. Though, I would probably say that even if it weren’t true. Regardless, I’ve gotta already be on some watchlists, right? Hello there NSA agent. Think about your life choices. Be more like Snowden.

2025-05-25: There used to be a disclaimer here about how I’m not an expert on anonymity. Nowadays, I know enough experts that if this post were completely wrong I’d probably have found out by now. Really I should have removed the disclaimer years ago, when someone remarked that the legendary Ross Anderson had once told them a very similar example…↩︎
Horrifyingly, here’s one example ↩︎
Terence Tao talks about this ↩︎

Original Music!

Sun, 08 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote and produced my first original song! Well, the first that is going to see the light of day, anyway.

Have a listen:

"Autumn Wind"

I won’t be making a blog post for every new piece of music, so if you want to keep getting musical updates, the best way is to subscribe to this RSS feed or just keep an eye on https://ellie.clifford.lol/music.

Producing music is harder than I thought

Trying to make music on your own requires doing several jobs, and I’m only half-decent at one of them. Sure, I can perform, but writing music, recording music, editing, mixing audio, and mastering audio are all surprisingly complex tasks which I have next to zero experience in. So go easy on me!

The creative process

This experience has taught me that creative endeavours do not obey the first law of thermodynamics, i.e. the conservation of energy. (Why should they? They’re not thermodynamical systems). In other words, work in ≠ quality out. Case in point: “Autumn Wind” is actually the second song which I’ve got pretty far through writing. The first I started writing back in the summer, several months ago, and I’m still not happy with it, even after all this time. “Autumn Wind”, on the other hand? I pretty much wrote it in a single day, and I’m much more happy with it. ????! Ok, sure, I had been noodling¹ around with like, half of the guitar part for a while, but the rest all got written in that one day.

I wish I could say something interesting about the process I went through to write “Autumn Wind”, but my brain just sort of splatted it out from nowhere. First I had the fingerstyle guitar part that I had been noodling on, then I started humming a melody, and the lyrics just kind of appeared in my head, though there were a few revisions. The one interesting lesson is that sometimes the best writing happens by accident — you go for one chord, but your hand is in the wrong place, and you get an accidental but exciting chord instead. I think sometimes I can fall into a bit of a rut and it takes a little randomness to send me in a new and exciting direction.

A pretty janky recording setup

Would you expect anything less? Here are some highlights:

Also, ground loops suck (and analog electronics in general sucks). I wanted to record the guitar both directly and through a physical amp, but without an isolated buffer splitter on the guitar output — which is expensive to buy or time consuming to build — connecting to two outputs creates a horrible ground loop between between the two devices, which just kills the audio quality. Oh well.

Wait, Linux is actually great for realtime audio?

It appears audio engineering, at least the realtime part, is different from most other creative professions, in that you actually can have a good time doing it on Linux². Yay! It makes sense I guess, I mean, have fun trying to get decent latency on Windows when your processor is being hammered by background spyware. Or getting your kernel to do anything in realtime, for that matter.

You’ll hear a lot of people saying “only macOS is usable for audio engineering”, but obviously this is bullshit. What they actually mean is that their favourite programs don’t run on Linux. Linux’s audio subsystems are easily on par with macOS’s: in particular JACK (the JACK Audio Connection Kit) is awesome and versatile and pretty intuitive to work with. As for the rest of the software stack, well, it seems most filters and other processing plugins work on interoperable standards, i.e., on any operating system. There are some proprietary things which are hard to replicate on Linux, e.g., automatic pitch correction (autotune), but I’d rather just sing approximately in-tune in the first place lol.

Mixing? Idk

The internet told me that a little reverb makes things sound better, and I think my ears agree. Other than that, I honestly have no clue. I think it sounds okay, but I’d have a much harder time if there were more tracks than just guitar and voice. Actually my recording setup makes it more difficult than it should be, because the guitar audio spills into the microphone audio and makes it a lot harder to edit and mix e.g. to patch over a tiny guitar fumble. I could just record each track independently, but then the video would either be lip-synced or whatever the guitar equivalent is called or both, which I wouldn’t really vibe with.

Mastering is hard

Until quite recently I didn’t even understand what mastering was. Apparently, the idea is to maximise the apparent loudness of the track, which can be quite low without some work, because the track has to be normalised to its highest peak (usually much higher than the average peak). When mastering, you’re trying to eliminate these peaks so that you can renormalise the track to a higher gain. Basically you do this using compressors (which compress the dynamic range above a certain level) and other peak thresholding magic which sounds better than just clipping the audio. It’s hard, and the confusing thing is that a good master is inverse to a performer’s instinct to use a wide dynamic range for musical effect. To be honest I don’t really get it. My guess is that “quiet” bits aren’t actually meant to be quiet, they’re meant to seem quieter because of the different timbre etc.

You’ll notice that my recording is a little quieter than other music if you listen to them side by side. That’s because I’m bad at mastering :P

noodle, noodled, noodling (verb): to improvise on an instrument in an informal or desultory manner↩︎
Which isn’t really anything to do with Linux, it’s more to do with companies like Adobe managing to gain a stranglehold.↩︎

Paralyzed by analytics

Sat, 25 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I think my feelings on analytics collected by companies about their users have been made clear — they are usually misused by automated systems to maximise the time those users spend within their walled garden. But this post isn’t about that. It’s about the analytics that might be collected by someone like me, who posts content online and hopes for people to enjoy and interact with it.

Analytics are unavoidable

It’s pretty easy for me to get analytics in a variety of ways. Website operators (like me) can easily tell how many people look at each page, their paths through the site, and occasionally a visitor’s identity, when they fail entropy bingo. This is all before you add things like Google Analytics into the mix, which I don’t use.

As well as my own site, I have access to lots of analytics that are collected by the platforms where I’ve distributed my music. Bandcamp basically just tells me how many streams and downloads I have on each track, but Spotify tells me my users’ locations (to the city), age range, gender, how they got to my music, and the name, location and blood-type of their first-born child (okay, that last bit was a lie, but you get the point).

All this is to say that I know in excruciating detail exactly how well my creative works perform, in the exact same way as how someone who posts regularly on platforms like Instagram or TikTok can see how many views and likes they have.

People speak a lot about how social media is toxic, but the core of this toxicity, or at least a major component of it, is analytics. Whether it’s an Instagram post or a blog post on my own site, the mental pattern is the same: there’s a rush of excitement when I release something new and the numbers fly up, and then a slow drain as I keep watching but the numbers stop going up.

Original source unknown

Paralyzed by analytics

The availability of analytics negatively affects my creative output, and not only because they’re distracting. The numbers supposedly tell me which things people like more and which they found boring, but they’re a depersonalised form of real human feedback, and a poor indicator of success. This isn’t my job, and even if it were, I shouldn’t be maximising clicks or listens. Yet the dopamine reward I get from showing my creative works to the world is somewhat linked to these analytics, because they’re the only feedback that’s quantifiable.

I hope that over time the part of my brain that wants to look at analytics will come to understand that those numbers are meaningless compared to the comments of people whose opinions I value. Most of my brain (including my conscious mind) fully understands that, but a large part doesn’t.

Until that time comes, I suppose all I can do is practice my mental discipline.

Perpetually on the verge of a breakdown...

Tue, 07 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

… but that release when another deadline somehow passes successfully is oh so sweet.

This is the daily life of a Cambridge undergrad. No I will not elaborate.

“What we leave behind” is why I posted this.

New name who dis?

Sun, 14 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0100

Wow, it’s been over a year since I last posted here!

Anyway, this is my coming-out post 🏳️‍⚧️. I now use she/her and go by Eleanor, or Ellie, or Ell, or really whatever you like that’s derived from my real name and not my deadname ^w^

More posts coming soon! (A big part of the whole “not posting” thing was that I didn’t want to post under my deadname but wasn’t ready to come out yet, so, yeah)

Cloud Service Shenanigans

Fri, 03 May 2024 00:00:00 +0100

A month or two ago a friend of mine ran a silly little event with a bunch of people where we each drank about six or seven shots of alcohol, and then tried to deliver a presentation using slides we had never seen before, which one of the other attendees had made beforehand.

At the time I had just been dealing with a major outage of my main server, which contained a lot of quite important data that wasn’t properly backed up anywhere (I did have a backup system, but I turned it off in 2022 when I ran out of storage, and then forgot to actually deal with the problem, thanks ADHD)¹.

Anyway, I had fun making this silly little presentation, and I figure you might have fun reading it:

Original .odp presentation (no JS required)

I did end up getting the data back, thanks to my insane luck in getting in contact with Greg. Had I not been so lucky, all the data would be gone, without even an explanation. The moral of the presentation isn’t really about how great Greg is, though. Greg’s not even their real name.

What is the moral? Idk, there’s a lot more to say about economies and diseconomies of scale, about the ossification of corporate structures into monstrosities where “computer says no” is a valid response; where even the people at the top can’t apply discretion to bend their self-imposed rules even when they obviously should. But I’ll leave that for another post.

For now, the moral is: check your backups! Mine are solid now, don’t worry ^w^

In fairness, the threat model of “Oracle locks you out of your server without giving you any warning whatsoever” had not even entered my mind. I assumed that a vaguely reputable company would at least give a warning first…↩︎

Quickies #1: keyboards, least privilege, and linguistic warfare

Thu, 30 May 2024 00:00:00 +0100

Ok so my “I should write a blog post about this” list is getting far too long and I keep ADHDing on actually writing the damn things. I figure I should start a (hopefully regular) series where I write just a little about a few things that could have been a longer post. That way I get some closure and you get some content. Here we go!

1. I built a keyboard

Back in 2020/2021 my COVID and/or distraction-from-recent-breakup project was to design and build a custom keyboard (well, really just modify an existing design, but anyway).

I ended up with this:

It was fun! I made my fair share of mistakes (those thumb wheels are not very stably mounted), and my next design — which I think I have a super cool idea for — will be much better, if I ever get around to it…

(Yes, this is now a very old thing to post, but it’s been on my list all this time!!)

2. The principle of least privilege

In computer security there is this thing called the “principle of least privilege”. Wikipedia defines it as:

every module must be able to access only the information and resources that are necessary for its legitimate purpose.

It’s super cool, and can lead to much more secure designs, but we shouldn’t just apply this to computer security, we should apply it to everything! Want to get on the bus? The driver should receive a few coins, and no other information. Want to get into a building with restricted access? The door lock should authenticate that you have access to the building, but not be capable of identifying you. Want to access a publicly available website? It should receive no information at all except where to send data packets to.

Older technologies (cash, physical keys, physical bulletin boards) often abide by this principle somewhat by accident, just because it’s expensive to add functionality you don’t need. That’s not the case with computers, so abiding by the principle of least privilege has to be an explicit design goal.

3. Linguistic Warfare

Language is not neutral. You may wish that it were neutral, but others will wage war through language whether you like it or not. There are lots of obvious examples of this. For instance, the word “queer”, first weaponised into a slur, and then dismantled and rebuilt into something better. Or perhaps, “cisgender”, hated by transphobes for keeping trans people on a level playing field.

But there are much more subtle acts of linguistic warfare, too. I am fascinated by what seems to be an increasing trend among large companies to choose names using common words — TikTok “Sounds”, YouTube “Shorts”, Facebook “Messenger”, Nintendo “Switch”, “Meta”, the list goes on.¹

I’m not really sure how new this is, but my hypothesis is that at some point there was a paradigm shift in corporate naming theory — from “use invented/uncommon words or word pairings to maintain trademark rights” (“YouTube”, “iPhone”, “Wii”, etc) to “screw trademarks, let’s co-opt an ordinary word such that wherever that word is, a mental link to our company is drawn.”

The more common the word is, the bigger the product needs to be to successfully co-opt it. TikTok is gunning for the top by trying to have “Oh, did you hear that new sound?” unambiguously refer to TikTok — and among today’s teenagers they’re probably already succeeded.

So what do we do? Well, one strategy is to always add the disambiguating prefix (if it exists) and be annoying about it when other people don’t. For example, my response to “Oh look at this text I just got on Messenger” would be “Which messenger?” regardless of whether I know they mean Facebook Messenger.

Let’s just hope Facebook doesn’t get so big they can get away with renaming themselves “The” so that they can call it “The Messenger”…

The bulk of these examples are products of companies, rather than company names, but that’s mostly a consequence of the companies not already being large when named. “Meta” proves the pattern.↩︎

Web filtering

Wed, 10 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0100

A little while ago I registered the domain transgirl.fr ¹, mostly for fun but also because I wanted a separate domain to host some public services on, in the vein of catgirl.cloud, private.coffee, projectsegfau.lt and many others.

A sizable fraction of web content filtering systems have classified transgirl.fr as porn and blocked it.

Oops, my bad, I forgot, us trans women can’t have nice things, all we’re good for is being degradingly fetishized — oh except of course when we’re to blame for checks notes everything from misogyny to child abuse². ~~Scapegoating is straight out of the fascist playbook, but that’s a conversation for another day.~~

I did actually wonder before registering the domain if something like this would be an issue. But when I asked one of my trans friends whether she thought transgirl.fr sounded like a porn site, she quite rightly responded that it didn’t matter, because not registering it on that basis would be letting those captitalising on fetishisation win.

EDIT: Cadence swiftly pointed out that according to the Internet Archive, the previous owner of the domain did actually host porn on it, and that’s probably why it’s been blocked. Which makes this a somewhat less interesting post than I had hoped. Oops. Well, not the first or last time I’ve been wrong on the internet.

Does this mean the world is less fucked up, because content filters aren’t quite as discriminatory, or more fucked up, because a trans girl can’t register a cool domain name without worrying about whether it used to have fetish porn on it? You decide.

.fr is technically for France, but in this context should be read as “for real” (something something english person erasing the french) ↩︎
this is SARCASM. I have never done anything wrong and I never will 😇 ³ ↩︎
this is ALSO SARCASM, but I do limit myself to victimless crimes 😇 ⁴ ↩︎
this is plausibly sarcasm and should not be used against me in court ↩︎

Civil liberties that rest on science are fragile

Sun, 21 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0100

The gay liberation movement that started in the 60s and the subsequent legal recognition of the rights of minority sexual orientations largely (but not entirely) hinged on the assertion that sexual orientation is not a choice, but innate.

Now, this seems to be true for most people, but it’s clear that this was chosen as the narrative not for reasons of science, but for reasons of rhetoric — if true, denying gay people their rights would be denying them any hope of ever finding love. That rhetoric worked pretty well on social conservatives.

But such a narrative is fragile. Had their opponents managed to prove that sexual orientation could be changed (for example, by inventing a new form of psychosurgery¹), the whole thing would come crashing down. And the true reasons for gay liberation have nothing to do with science, but liberty – it’s fundamentally not the purview of the state what consenting people get up to.

But that’s all ancient history now. Let’s talk about the fight for trans rights.

So, for a transgender person (like me, hi), the subjective experience of gender and/or desired physical sex characteristics differs from the sex assigned at birth. Typically this results a form of psychological distress called “gender dysphoria”.

Now, from a medical perspective you probably want to do something about gender dysphoria. First (as is standard practice), you could affirm the trans person’s sex/gender: This entails medical intervention and/or social transition to make factors external to the psyche congruent with the psyche. Alternatively, you could flip that on it’s head and attempt to convert the person, to modify the psyche itself to make it congruent with the external factors.

The rhetoric of many trans rights activists, in striking parallels with the gay liberation movement, advocates for gender-affirming care on grounds of science: the medical literature shows it to be by far the most effective at reducing dysphoria. This is true, but again, resting it on science is fragile, and the primary reason for gender-affirming care over conversion isn’t scientific at all, it’s philosophical.

Here’s a hypothetical that really gets to the crux of it. Say you had a magic button that, if pressed, would turn me, a trans woman, into a cis man by painlessly modifying my brain. What would I do?

Well, first I would spend no small amount of money hiring a bomb disposal team. Then, I would instruct the team to carefully dismantle the button. Then, I would throw each piece into a different ocean. Hopefully that would be enough to stop anyone ever pressing it against my will.

In other words, the reason that gender affirmation is the only valid route is not (just) because the science says so, but because (most) trans people don’t want to be turned cis, and any attempt to do so, no matter how well-intentioned or successful, would be psychological violence — worse even than physical violence; it would necessarily destroy the subject to build someone else.

Oppressive Citationism

Sun, 28 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0100

Whether writing on science, philosophy, or culture, society demands of us “citationism”. Our works must be referential, placing themselves alongside old ideas, justifying their existence through contrast with or superiority over those ideas. But while citationism is certainly commendable in its quest to avoid repeated thought, in practice it often runs in danger of either suppressing thought entirely, or reserving it solely for a handful of academics too immersed in dusty old thoughts to come up with anything truly new.

I might get in trouble for claiming this, but in contrast to the hard sciences, in philosophy everything is up for grabs¹. We do not have a single complete framework with which to describe or evaluate our experiences, morals, or organisational structures; thus ideas formed in a near vacuum can often be far more revolutionary than those formed through immolation by the literature.

This is not to say that we should ignore our academic history, and it’s certainly not anti-intellectual. Far from it. But we should comprehensively understand our history as a community, not as individuals. We should each read² and read and understand the old and the contemporary ideas, but crucially we should compose as we go, and trust that forces of discussion and disagreement will lead us to the relevant insights in that which we have not read, and inform what we read next. The easiest way to find the argument that refutes yours is to publish yours. Let’s leverage that.

Oppressive citationism runs even deeper. Consider (ironically, here lies a citation) the paper “Citationism as academic erudition and as a strategic action”³, which contains another argument:

Being erudite represents an important characteristic of the academic, causing academic prose to be marked by an aura of sophistication and intellectual elitism. When erudition manifests in the practice of citationism, it can constitute a communicative distortion strategy instrumentalized to avoid or minimize debate or more accurate argumentation.

Citationism evokes in the uninitiated reader confusion, a sense of inadequacy to refute the stated arguments, and often even an inability even to understand the arguments. Thus, the dominance of the writer (and/or the intellectual hegemony) is preserved. Those familiar with the cited works are likely to be part of the hegemony already, the rest of us have other things to do. To make it worse, many of the most referenced philosophers are famously difficult to understand. Take Hegel, so supremely unintelligible to the vast majority of the populace that depressed philosophy students make memes about it:

Video of Hegel in audiobook form being impossible to understand, overlaid with an anime character being in psychological pain.

Source unknown

So, two practical commitments: Firstly, I reject any propensity to self-suppress posts on this blog for lack of being well-read enough on the topic. I will be wrong many times, but my ideas will be raw and fresh, unburdened by excessive citationism. Secondly, I reject in all but extreme cases any posts which cannot be understood without extensive prior reading.

And here is a request: this blog is likely to get more even more philosophical and political in the near future. If you have any opinion on the topics, or know of other people’s that I might be interested in reading², please comment! I’m trusting in conversation to keep me to account. To those of you who have been commenting already, whether publicly or in private, a sincere thank you!

That’s not to say that citationism isn’t also a problem in the sciences.↩︎
or watch, or listen, or whatever.↩︎
Vizeu, Fabio. “Citationism as academic erudition and as a strategic action.” Cadernos EBAPE. BR 22 (2024)↩︎

Segregating sports by sex was always a flawed idea

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

At the Paris 2024 Olympics, women’s sports once again became a political football. Not only is the scientific and public consciousness finally starting to realise that the so-called sex binary isn’t so binary, but the far-right moral panic about trans people has reached such dizzyingly illogical heights that they have started harassing cisgender women because they are too good at sports, or something.¹

But let’s take a moment to question why we have segregated “women’s sports” in the first place. The motivation is somewhat clear, at least for the top level of competition: promote the sporting accomplishments of women. But the basic assertion that justifies this approach, namely “men are better at sports”, is not so easily justified. Meanwhile, sex segregation in sport actively advances a narrative of male physical superiority, so it is imperative that we question It thoroughly.

Evidence does seem to show that in the vast majority of commonly popular sports, men win in mixed contests. But it can only be claimed that men are better at sports in general if we assume that these sports are representative of the full category of possible sports.² This assumption is hard to justify, partly because “sport” is an extremely broad and ill-defined category and partly because there are sociopolitical reasons to think this might not be the case. I contest a new hypothesis: commonly popular sports are only representative of sports which were designed and popularised by men — and they were designed for men to win.

Why would that be so? Well, why wouldn’t it be so? Every sport possible is influenced in some way by physiology, and almost every popular sport in common practice today was designed deep in the throes of patriarchy, when most women were socially discouraged from inventing and competing in sports. So these sports were designed by men, for men. Why would men design a sport in which the finest athletes in the world were women? Even without conscious intent, it’s just the expected outcome that people design and popularise the things that they are good at. If this hypothesis is true, male dominance in sport does not follow from male physical superiority, it merely deifies the assumption of male physical superiority.

Which brings us to today. Now, I’m not quite saying we should completely desegregate sports. But the segregation that we do have should exist on a much more sport-by-sport basis and use measurable characteristics (which binary sex is simply not) and enable competition by all demographics. We have weight classes in boxing, why not, for instance, have height classes in basketball? Still, this is a secondary consideration; the most important thing for us to do is to be courageous enough to invent and platform sports in which women (and other underrepresented demographics) simply win in mixed contests.

But, I hear you say, surely such sports must be contrived, our male dominated sports, like “who can run the fastest” are so simple and elegant! Oh, really? If what you want is the simplest and most elegant show of physical ability, I’ll wager that it is simply “who can stay alive the longest”, which, last time I checked, women were winning by a huge margin. This doesn’t do so well as entertainment, but there are other simple sports already in contention in which women hold the title — for instance certain forms of gymnastics. Even in running, there are indications that for ultra-long marathons (200 miles or more), women may have an advantage.

Gymnastics is perhaps a positive case study here.³ When women’s gymnastics was added to the Olympics, different disciplines were chosen in order to better suit female physiology, and there is good reason to believe that men would not outperform women in these disciplines. It seems that in part this was able to happen because of the flexibility of gymnastics as a sport, in contrast to other sports in which male dominance is more deeply linked with their structure.

Of course, this strategy doesn’t just dismantle the narrative of male physical superiority, it also neatly sidesteps many of the problems that transfeminine people have in sports. Even if it were the case that trans women displace cis women’s sporting accomplishments (spoiler alert, they don’t in any meaningful way), this problem would essentially disappear if the top levels of competition also included sports in which female physiology is an advantage.

At the end of the day, which sports are popular is defined by what the TV networks will show and call a sport and what the people will watch and play. But even if we confine ourselves to displays of physical prowess, we as women need not simply resign ourselves to a second best league. We can do better than segregation.

LGBTQ+ people are not going back

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This post is part of a collective action started by Julia Serano.

The tides really are turning against us queer people, huh? Across the world, the far-right is gaining power. Even here in the UK, one of the only countries to supposedly shift left recently, it hardly matters — the new Labour government continues to uphold attacks on trans rights and pander to transphobes.

And now the Democrats in the US threaten to backslide on trans rights in much the same way as Labour. Gotta have someone to scapegoat, right? Julia Serano, along with many others, is encouraging US citizens to contact their Democrat representatives (links and suggestions in her post) and commit to voting for another party if they backslide on queer rights. Similarly, I encourage my UK readers to contact your MP (if they are Labour, Conservative, or another transphobic party), and pledge to vote Liberal Democrat if they continue their transphobic policies, such as Labour’s upholding of the puberty blocker ban.

There are a lot of things I could contribute to this action explaining exactly what the Democrats and Labour are doing wrong, what rights are being threatened, what you should say to them, and so on, but since I expect a lot of other people are going to be doing that better than me (I encourage you to read many of the other posts in this action!), I want to instead focus on the loudest argument I hear against third party voting specifically, namely “splitting the vote”.

The case for voting third party

Before you accuse third party voters of splitting the vote on the Left and therefore causing an electoral catastrophe, let me present you with two rules of thumb to convince you that even if you vote short-term tactically in a First-Preference Plurality¹ system (e.g. UK elections and US elections), the rational choice is often third party, a fact conveniently ignored (or perhaps not understood) by the major-party-always camp.

Vote for your favourite party if they are first or second in the polls.
Vote for your favourite party if your favourite and preferred-major parties combined are projected to win at least 2/3 of the vote.

Ok, so rule 1 is obvious. Rule 2 is the really interesting one here though. Why am I suggesting it? Well, here are the worst case scenarios in 3 party FPP, above and below the 2/3 mark:

Worst case scenario with combined vote at 66%

Worst case scenario with combined vote at 67%

In a 3 party FPP election, if your favourite and preferred-major parties combined are above 2/3 of the vote, then one of them is guaranteed to win – the other party can’t. Only under the 2/3 mark is it possible to split the vote.

An example of this strategy being done successfully in 2024 is Islington North in the UK, where the Labour majority was so strong that people felt comfortable splitting the vote to vote for the newly-independent Jeremy Corbyn (previously Labour), who is prominently in support of trans rights, among other grievances with his ex-party now led by Kier Starmer. Corbyn won.

Remember, this is a rule of thumb. There are competing second-order effects pushing up and down on the 2/3 number, so you should adjust the threshold based on your judgement of your specific election. Here are some examples:

(Pushing up) If there are more than 2 alternate parties and the vote is split among them, instead of 2/3 the threshold is higher: in theory (n+1)/(n+2) where n is the number of “third” parties, although you can add all of the smaller parties you are okay with to get over that mark.
(Pushing down) Some people whose preferred-major party is your least favourite agree with you on the best party, and may vote for them if they see no chance of their preferred-major party winning. (Example: many anti-establishment voters preferred Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton, but also Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton).
(Pushing up) Polls aren’t 100% accurate, and the vote share could end up above or below where it was projected to be. The lower the combined polling vote share, the more risky voting third party is.
(Pushing down) 2/3 works even in the worst case scenario of 3 parties, in reality the vote between your favourite and preferred-major parties is unlikely to be exactly 50/50 split.
(Pushing down) Voters don’t swing overnight. If you’re not hardcore short-term rationalist, you should adjust the threshold lower — by voting third-party, you also increase the credibility of that party for future elections.
(Pushing down) The rationality of 2/3 assumes that your preference difference between your least favourite and preferred-major parties completely overwhelms your preference difference between your favourite and preferred-major parties. The worse your preferred-major party is, the greater the expected return probabilitistically for voting riskily.

So, where does this rule apply? Many Labour “safe” constituencies in the UK, the House of Representatives in many strongly Democrat areas in the US, and occasionally US senate races, although not quite this time (Hawaii was close)

To reiterate, here’s the core idea, which should be intuitive as well as provably rational: even if you are short-term rationalist you can safely vote third party when your preferred-major party is dominating the opposition. Don’t be afraid to do it, because this doesn’t just get better people into power, it’s also a powerful force to keep major parties in line with their core supporters rather than just pandering to centrists. ²

Also known (confusingly) as First-Past-the-Post. This is when you get to vote for one candidate and the candidate that has the most votes gets the win. Includes UK constituency elections and US House and Senate elections. US presidential elections are a (bad) approximation of FPP.↩︎
A much, much better force would be a voting system that is actually fair, like Single Transferable Vote. Just get the Liberal Democrats into power once in the UK, and all our future elections will be much fairer, no tactical voting required.↩︎

Taking back control (part 5): the tentacles of the attention industry

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

← Part 4

Almost three years ago, I decided to write a manifesto detailing how I did — and didn’t — want to use technology. Thus began a series of blog posts; by Part 3 a rosy picture was being painted of how well I was doing. Part 4, the most recent, detailed the biggest remaining pain point as I perceived it (interoperability of messaging systems), and how I had decided to resolve it. That was two years ago¹, so you’d be forgiven for thinking that the story was basically over, and nothing remaining was worth writing a blog post about.

That is not what happened.

To a first approximation I have one device that breaks the manifesto, with its collection of vices, and that is my old Android smartphone, nicknamed “Mind Flayer”, complete with the full set of attention-stealing dopamine-driven apps: Reddit (and its open-source clone Lemmy), YouTube, Instagram, etc. You might remember that in Part 3, I claimed to have switched to a mainline-Linux-based phone, nicknamed “Flumph”, and while that was technically true, Mind Flayer has continued to stick around alongside it, unshakeable in it’s ability to steal my attention, particularly when I have been stressed or otherwise vulnerable. The name “Mind Flayer”, then, after the tentacled monster of Dungeons and Dragons that psychically enslaves people, is more apt than I could ever have imagined when I named the device.

The state of mind this constant attention stealing puts people in is described well by Skye:

I have an itch now to reach for my phone when I hear a notification ding, when I’m stuck on a programming task, when I don’t want to do a chore or worse the hobbies I really enjoy. Because it provides short term satisfication whilst my life (I feel) gets filled with screen time or angst.

Of course, this state is not particularly new. All the way back in 2008, Mark Fisher wrote in his seminal book “Capitalist Realism” about what he called “depressive hedonia”, a state of mind

constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as it is by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure. There is a sense that ‘something is missing’ — but no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle.

But while Fisher’s thesis that depressive hedonia is primarily caused by a rampantly individualistic, consumerist, fatalistic and yet ironically detached society is still true, today’s enablers of depressive hedonia are far more sophisticated in their attention theft than the “Playstation, all-night TV and marijuana” of 2008. Modern attention-stealing mechanisms can learn — and they do so effectively — to do whatever maximises “engagement”, leaving you bored but still paying attention, unable to leave without missing out on what everyone else is seeing, placated but never satisfied.

There is a sense now, too, that just as anti-capitalists must still earn and spend money to eat, those against YouTube (for instance) must still post their video essays on YouTube if they want to reach anyone. Some try, many do reach people, but the power of a platform is that even those against the system work within it and prop it up — just as t-shirts of Che Guevara are made in sweatshops and sold on Amazon.²

Original source unknown

But back to the main point of this post, over the past few years and in particular the past few months, I’ve been contemplating how I’d feel if I lost Mind Flayer, or broke it, or otherwise stopped being able to use it. And the more I think, the more I realise that there is one emotion that would dominate all the rest.

Relief. Relief that I would finally be free from its tentacles.

So why don’t I just throw it in the River Cam?

Maria Farrell likens our use of smartphones to an abusive relationship:

They isolate us from deeper, competing relationships in favour of superficial contact — ‘user engagement’ — that keeps their hold on us strong. […] They tell us the onus is on us to manage their behavior. It’s our job to tiptoe around them and limit their harms. Spending too much time on a literally-designed-to-be-behaviorally-addictive phone? […] We just need to use willpower. We just need to be good enough to deserve them.

And look around. Everyone has a smartphone. So it’s probably not so bad, and anyway, that’s just how things work. Right?

The simple fact is that these systems I have been trying to pull away from haven’t let me. Not because of technical limitations, not because of interoperability, not even because the useful parts of their functionality can’t be replaced by other tools. No. Simply because attention stealing systems have brain-invading tentacles specifically designed to be hard to get rid of.

The maddening thing is that there are just one or two things that I do need Mind Flayer for. But having it around in order to do those infrequent things goes about as well as giving a heroin addict unsupervised access to the back room of a pharmacy in case they need some paracetamol.

I have spoken to many people who downplay the threat that surveillance capitalism and these increasingly powerful attention algorithms pose. But I challenge anyone who regularly uses attention stealing platforms: I’m sure you think you can stop any time you want. But really try to go cold turkey. See how easy it is. I’ve seen countless people try and fail, most of all myself.

Many of the posts on this blog are tongue-in-cheek, but when I say this I am deadly serious: attention algorithms are already a threat to our cognitive freedom, and this situation is likely to get orders of magnitude worse in the coming decades.

When I wrote the first draft of this post, I planned to end it with this paragraph:

I would love to throw Mind Flayer in the River Cam. I won’t, because that would be environmentally hazardous littering, but I’ve done what I hope is the next best thing — wiped it clean, and put it at the bottom of a deep drawer where maybe it will finally die.

I wrote those lines before actually taking that step, assuming that in a couple weeks I’d figure out how to export all the data from Mind Flayer, wipe it, and then post this post.

It has now been six months.

I still haven’t wiped it. A full export of the data isn’t as easy as it should be. The tentacles whisper in my ear, telling me I’ll regret it, I need it. Am I stuck in a gothic horror book?

But at last, a stroke of luck, Mind Flayer has partially broken on it’s own. It’s broken in a very convenient way, too — it’s still usable, but only awkwardly: the touchscreen doesn’t work, so i have to plug in a mouse to do anything. This should be enough incentive to stop using it (without losing all the data), but simultaneously, I partially broke Flumph at the software level and have now spent several days in total failing to fix it.

Perhaps it’s not a gothic horror I’m stuck in after all, but a tragicomedy?

Still, although I still use Mind Flayer somewhat, the killing blow has been dealt; its tentacles writhe feebly, unable to keep their hold on my brain, cursed to limp on forever, a parasite without a host.

Epilogue, 2025-08-12

Quite soon after this post I fixed Flumph (some shenanigans were required), and now I use it quite regularly. To fill in for some of it’s failings, I also started using a Nokia 2730c — the same phone I had back in 2011, when I was only 10! I’ve named it Pseudodragon (after DnD’s tiny dragons) since it punches far above its weight.

← Part 4

That can’t be right, I could have sworn it was two months ago.↩︎
This should not be taken as an endorsement of Che Guevara.↩︎

Chains of Flesh

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Beyond the chains of mortal flesh
There is a shining light
And in that light a figure weeps
Surrounded by the night

Beyond the chains of brittle flesh
There is so soft a gaze
Crying out in silent pain
Against the fiery blaze

Beyond the chains of gendered flesh
That bind her soul from you
There is a figure shining bright
Unbroken, old yet new

Beyond the chains of nature’s flesh
Another world might be
When soul commands the body’s form
At last they’ll both be free

For in the depths of inner soul
Flesh symbols aren’t as bright
Beyond the chains of mortal flesh
There is a shining light

The 6th of May

Tue, 06 May 2025 00:00:00 +0100

To me, the 6th of May will always be a day of conflicting emotions.

On the 6th of May 1933, the Nazis raided and destroyed the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin, a home of pioneering queer and trans research, medicine, art, and culture. Four days later, they burned its entire collection — including countless irreplacable items and over a decade of research into the same gender affirming care that today’s fascists now claim is “new”. When the Allies finally came promising liberation, they did not liberate my queer siblings.

They left them to rot.

“A Story of Trans Genocide, Now and Then, in a Single Photo”

On the 6th of May 2001, I took my first breath.

On the 6th of May 2025, as I watch my country’s politicians clamber over each other in a race to see who can destroy my remaining human rights the quickest, more than ever I think of 1933, and not of 2001.

First they came for the queers—
and the world soon forgot, for we were too hated to be in the poem.

Sometimes, the question is wrong

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0100

A while ago I had a conversation with a psychiatrist which went something like:

Psychiatrist: Sometimes, people with ASD¹ (like you) will interpret a question differently to how it was intended, usually more literally, and then when someone points it out, say “I wasn’t wrong, the question was wrong.” But how can the question be wrong, when 99/100 people understood what it meant?

Let me give you an example. Often people come to see me for a diagnostic assessment, and I say, “What is your home like?”. When they respond, “Well, it has four walls and two floors, and it’s Victorian”, they have answered literally correctly, but still haven’t answered the real question².

Me: Okay, sure, in that situation, the question wasn’t “wrong”, but in that case it’s not about literal interpretation, it’s about understanding the context, and modelling why you are asking the question. And often the question really is wrong. I’m sure I could come up with examples pretty easily. Besides, focusing on the 99/100 misses the point — if the 1/100 suggests that you could have phrased it in a better way to get 100/100 on the same page, shouldn’t you listen to them?

Psychiatrist: Interesting food for thought, but let’s move on.

I didn’t make my best arguments at the time, I didn’t actually give any examples, and we never came back to that. So clearly the only reasonable thing to do is not-so-vague-post about that argument on my blog over a year later³. Here we goooo…

Sometimes, the question requires unnecessary modelling

Questions that require you to have an excessively detailed model of the asker in your head in order to understand how to respond are hostile to neurodivergent people, and generally lead to worse outcomes among everyone.

Now, it’s true that having a good model of the asker sometimes really is necessary to answer a reasonable question well⁴. If you’re getting ready to go out and your girlfriend asks you “Does this dress make my shoulders look too wide?”, there might be many true things you could say, but you need to know her well enough to know whether she’d prefer you said “You look great!”, “Like, maybe a little, but in a hot butch lesbian way not in a masculine way”, or “Kinda, but it would work if you styled it with this jacket?”. Each response would be appreciated by some and annoy others⁵, and there isn’t always a way to avoid this without finding yourself 3 hours into a conversation that continues to recurse further and further into the meta⁶.

On the other hand, a question asked by someone you’ve just met, or in a context where precision is quite important (like talking to a medical professional) is not at all the same, and almost zero modelling should be required. A question on a form like “How often do you feel anxious (very often/often/sometimes/rarely)” is a bad question. What does “sometimes” mean to the asker? It doesn’t seem unlikely that someone might have been living with anxiety all their life, and then think “oh, these days I only have one panic attack a week, I’ll tick ‘sometimes’”, while the asker expects “sometimes” to mean a little manageable anxiety in particularly difficult scenarios. In this example the question should be concretely time-based (“about once a week”, “about once a month”), and probably also define how strong the anxiety should be to register.

Once upon a time, I had to fill in a similarly vague question on a medical form, and I asked for clarification from the person who had given me the form, and they essentially told me that they couldn’t answer my question, because that would bias the results.

????⁷

Sometimes, only a few recognise what’s wrong

Autistic people object to questions more often. But is this only because autistic people are more likely to struggle with doing all the modelling required to answer them, or is it also because autistic people are more likely to recognise problems in questions that affect everyone, and then write long ranty blog posts about them? Some of us seem to have the ability to (or inability not to) kick up a fuss when something is wrong, rather than just going “eh, whatever” — or, worse, typical mind fallacying into thinking that only autistic people could possibly have any issue landing on the same meaning of “often” as you.

I think this post itself is probably proof enough of my point.

Sometimes, the question is malicious

Malicious questions are everywhere. You’ve probably mostly seen them when politicians try to catch each other out, or in courtroom dramas, but they really are everywhere. Sometimes this takes the form of a question presented with a forced binary: classics include the relatively benign example of monogamous people asking their partners “Do you think my friend is cute?” (“Yes” means you have eyes for someone else (bad), and “No” means you think the friend is ugly (bad)), and the less benign “Do you agree to mass surveillance, or do you love child abuse?” (see Ross Anderson’s “Chat Control or Child Protection?”).

But sometimes, the malice is more subtle. A common question on forms is “What is your biological sex? (Male/Female/Other)”. It’s malicious, but not because of a forced binary (when the “Other” option exists), rather it’s malicious because answering in the way intended by the asker (i.e. with sex assigned at birth) would tacitly accept a malicious worldview⁸. On the other hand, for many people, answering truthfully to the question (insofar as it is even answerable) wouldn’t challenge the malicious worldview, rather it would result in the asker interpreting correct information incorrectly (which might be fine, but in very limited medical contexts it might be important that this doesn’t happen).

Of course, there are many other ways for a question to be malicious, and many more examples I have seen. But the latter example is one where while 99/100 could answer easily, 1/100 recognise it as not just wrong, but an attack on our recognisability as people.

Sometimes, the question is wrong

In conclusion, yes actually Mr. Psychiatrist, sometimes the question is wrong, and if I’m complaining about a question I probably have a good reason for it actually, and the fact that I happen to be autistic doesn’t make those reasons any less good, it just makes me more likely to voice them.

… why does this post feel like the trope of “rehearsing an old argument in the shower except what if this time I said the perfect comeback” except worse… oh well, I hope it was entertaining⁹.

Ellie's blog

Why FOSS?

1: Guarantee of future availability

2: Adaptability and maintainability

3: Usage beyond end of life

4: Reducing wasted development time

5: Privacy, security, and transparency

Dracula for SolidWorks?!?!?

Why?

How?!?

The UK government is dangerously incompetent

Preface, 2022-10-22

Original post

What is end to end encryption (E2E) anyway?

Why do the UK government claim they oppose it?

The Incompetence

Literally just do your jobs please

The danger to user privacy

Whose responsibility are children anyway?

Shameful language

Taking back control (part 1): a manifesto

Taking back control (part 2): futility and obscurity

The problem of notification services

In for a penny, in for a pound

A third category: obscure information

Some meta things about this blog

Music!

What we leave behind

Taking back control (part 3): the PinePhone Pro

Introducing “flumph”

Ricing (of course)

Mobile data restrictions

Is it actually usable?

Taking back control (part 4): ultimatum games

Adversaries

What makes a good messaging system?

The classic ultimatum game

The messaging system ultimatum game

Complicating factor 1: The perception of fairness

Complicating factor 2: Social dynamics

Complicating factor 3: Negotiation and individuals

Complicating factor 4: Groups

Complicating factor 5: New people

Complicating factor 6: Edge cases

Conclusion

I will use (please suggest others if appropriate)

I will use only passively for groups

I will not use

Entropy Bingo

Example 1: convenience store

Example 2: a clandestine deal

What should you do?

Entropy Bingo card

Original Music!

Producing music is harder than I thought

The creative process

A pretty janky recording setup

Wait, Linux is actually great for realtime audio?

Mixing? Idk

Mastering is hard

Paralyzed by analytics

Analytics are unavoidable

The same toxicity as social media

Paralyzed by analytics

Perpetually on the verge of a breakdown...

New name who dis?

Cloud Service Shenanigans

Quickies #1: keyboards, least privilege, and linguistic warfare

1. I built a keyboard

2. The principle of least privilege

3. Linguistic Warfare

Web filtering

Civil liberties that rest on science are fragile

Further Reading

Oppressive Citationism

Segregating sports by sex was always a flawed idea

Further Reading

LGBTQ+ people are not going back

The case for voting third party

Taking back control (part 5): the tentacles of the attention industry