Fiona

Cryptographer at TU Eindhoven.

I’m nowadays mostly using this for the occasional stuff that has some connection to my work. My more personal account (mostly trans-related stuff with the occasional travel-story) is here: tech.lgbt/@Fiona

2024-08-07

@Bundesregierung Wie wäre es wenn ihr mal beim SBGG anfängt. Die Anmeldung ist zum Beispiel unnötig und kann ersatzlos weg.

2024-08-02

@EUCommission You aren’t doing a great job with “all minority groups” and a worse one with Romani…

My closest friend is Sinti and what she had to go through in the Netherlands (not even eastern Europe) is just comprehensively fucked!

2024-07-31

@phoenix The lighting makes the croissant look really moldy though. 😉︎

2024-05-23

When the conference you are giving an invited talk at seriously asks for the power-point version of the PDF-presentation that you handed in, seriously stating compatability reasons.

I’ve now hacked something together that would be workable, but ugly, but there are so many issues with this…

(I created that slides in markdown and use pandoc to build a LaTeX-beamer PDF, which enables me to use LaTeX-specific macros and creating the PPTX was now literally to import that PDF into libreoffice impress, fix the worst of the worst (like text being on top of each other) and exporting it as Powerpoint.

I REALLY, REALLY hope they give me the PDF-version…

2024-05-19
Fiona boosted:
Dave Markdavemark
2024-04-21

"I deleted keys generated by our TV for 5 straight minutes. 5 Minutes of like 200BPM clicking. I restarted. Everything worked again. I laughed so hard I cried. I felt like I'd solved a murder."

Tech people, THIS IS A GREAT FANTASIC READ!!!

The title is, "DO NOT BUY HISENSE TV'S"

cohost.org/ghoulnoise/post/528

2024-04-10

What is your opinion on deniability in the context of instant messaging?

(Please boost this poll for more representative results!)

Deniability (or “plausible deniability”) means that no party in an interaction receives a transcript that can be used as cryptographic proof said interaction happened or what the content was. In order to achieve this, deniable protocols are designed in ways that allow the creation of fake transcripts that are indistinguishable from real ones.

Importantly (and maybe unintuitively) this does not mean that the interaction has to sacrifice authenticity (the certainty for the involved parties to know that they are talking to whom the think they are talking to and that the content of any messages arrives unaltered compared to what was sent)!

#Cryptography #Deniability #PlausibleDeniability #Privacy

Fiona boosted:
timberwraithtimberwraith
2024-04-07

Anyone who is *still* at X/Twitter is doing their own tiny little contribution toward supporting this bigot.

I don't care what your excuses are. You're supporting this by being there.

You have alternatives. Move. If you actually give a shit about harming other people.

If you don't care, if supporting a bigoted monster doesn't matter to you, well, I guess you'll stay.

lgbtqnation.com/2024/04/elon-m

2024-02-01

@jyasskin @andreasdotorg @LukaszOlejnik

This honestly reminds me of the time someone use C++’s std::sort with a random-function to shuffle data (instead of using std::shuffle like competent people) and was pissed when that ended up crashing, because efficient sorting-algorithms rely on the specified invariants holding.

I think Sean Parent(?) shared that story and that it resulted in lots of people at the company in question (Google? Adobe?) using std::stable_sort everywhere, which didn’t crash but was just as much clear-cut undefined behavior.

(There is nothing wrong with stable_sort, besides it being underused in places where stable sorting would be desirable, but there is a reason why the algorithms are called differently and that is unstable sort tending to be faster.)

2024-02-01

@jyasskin @andreasdotorg @LukaszOlejnik

I fully agree and go a step further: The signed-integer overflow is already undefined behaviour on its own, meaning that it is a bug to use this function in any context that can contain INT_MIN as second argument, even if you just call it and do nothing with the result.

This is literally the same as writing to *NULL inside the comparison-function and complaining that your program crashes: You are not allowed to do that in C!

Now, should this be prevented in glibc? I’m genuinely not sure: This is bound to be a widespread issue, but if such a fix comes at the cost of performance to people who do things correctly, this comes down to rewarding the guilty and punishing the innocents, which goes against my axiomatic ethical convictions.

2024-01-16

@max @fj Physics, we should add, that we know not to be a complete and accurate description of the universe we live in. (There is no accepted theory of Quantum Gravity.)

Is this likely to be a problem? Probably not.

But that probably puts it very much into the same bucket as most widely assumed computational hardness assumptions for post-quantum settings: Likely fine, but we don’t know for certain.

There is one difference though: We have a good idea for why knowing for certain that the hardness assumptions are hard is so hard (possibly even impossible) to prove:
You (kinda) have to prove P≠NP for such a proof (technically: BQP≠MA) which itself explains why mathematically proving literally anything can be hard.

Does this mean that QKD-assumptions are more likely to turn out false? Maybe, I don’t know, but I haven’t heard a good argument from QKD-people that they are not.

The issue I take here is that this is swept under the rug instead of being clearly communicated.

2024-01-10

Looking for conferences on #Cryptography and #Security. #AfricaCrypt is in #Cameroon this year, a country that imprisons peolpe for *suspicions* of being gay. In 2021 to trans women were sent to prison for “wearing women’s clothing in a restaurant”.

In other words, we are talking about a complete shit-hole country and a non-negligible part of the cryptographic community cannot safely visit the conference because of that.

A conference that proudly associates itself with the #IACR. I think we should have a serious discussion about whether it is appropriate to place conferences in places that will imprison people for who they are and whether the IACR should associate with conferences that ignore these concerns.

For all the problems that conferences in the west have with accessibility (and that you may rightfully criticize), you can usually at least be confident that the government there won’t subject you to torture for who you are.

#lgbt #lgbtrights #gay #trans

2023-11-01

@EU_Commission That graphic is HORRIBLE at getting its point across! Firstly it is unclear what it tries to depict without outside information. Secondly the windmills have different heights without scaling with the numbers, thirdly, and this is likely the worst about it, you are using the areas of randomly placed circles for comparing three numbers. The area of circles is one of the least intuitive ways of doing this and it significantly undersells your progress!

Can you please stop leaving this work to untrained artists and hire someone with a background in data-visualization?!

2023-10-13

@matthew_d_green That’s one way to view it. The other way is that they tried to fool us once (shame on them). If we gave them the opportunity to do it twice it would be shame on us though, if I remember my English sayings correctly.

To be clear: I do not believe for a second that Kyber is intentionally backdoored by its designers and have a very hard time believing that it contains a critical vulnerability that NSA knows about that we don’t.

I do believe that Dan’s writeups would massively profit from being written without him being as salty as he very clearly is.

But some of the responses could also be more productive.

Also, we get back to what I also said in the context of Covid: The media should stay the fuck out of reporting on academic work that has not at the very least been peer-reviewed. This is really where most of the blame needs to go in this situation.

2023-09-28

@Mer__edith I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: Proponents of #ChatControl and similar bullshit who understand the topic are usually either fascists or pedo-criminals.

Fiona boosted:
Frankie ✅Some_Emo_Chick
2023-09-25

Very easy

It's easy to say with hindsight that
NFTs are a stupid scam but it was
also easy at the beginning to say that
and through the middle too
2023-08-18

@enno
Okay, also wenn die Russen die ukrainische Zivilbevölkerung in der Ukraine angreifen sind die Russen Schuld, aber wenn die Türken die irakischen Kurden in irakisch Kurdistan angreifen, ist die PKK schuld? Sorry, aber das klingt nicht sehr überzeugend.

2023-08-13

@enno Natürlich alle brav von deinen Freunden bei der Bild radikalisiert…

2023-07-24

@Volksverpetzer

Merz will von Papens Nachfolger als Steigbügelhalter der Faschisten werden. Er ist eine in jeder Hinsicht an Widerlichkeit kaum zu überbietende Personalie deren zeitnahes Ableben großartig für Deutschland wäre.

2023-07-22

@enno Das Landgericht hat Mist gebaut, er hat sich beschwert, der BGH bestätigt, dass das LGH Mist gebaut hat und sagt sie sollen ihren Job ordentlich machen.

Ich sehe das Problem nicht. Es geht hier ja nicht darum, dass er ungeschoren davon kommen soll, sondern dass er eine GERECHTE Strafe erhält, die weder zu hoch, noch zu niedrig ausfällt.

Dieses Unterschlagen der Bedeutung einer Revision im Gegensatz zur Berufung und künstliche Empörung, dass Straftäter gerne möglichst mild bestraft werden wollen ist lächerlich und untergräbt künstlich und unbegründet das Vertrauen in den Rechtsstaat.

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