Dan Wallach

Program Manager, DARPA Information Innovation Office (on leave from Rice University).
@[email protected]

[Dan Wallach @danwallach]

News! I’m now a program manager at DARPA (on leave from Rice) in the Information Innovation Office. I’m looking forward to doing some exciting work in and around cryptography and computer security. Houston will be my home base for at least a few months. https://t.co/xAHZWI2U6G

[Dan Wallach @danwallach]

Roughly 20% of the Twitter accounts I follow are now on Mastadon. Many have announced that they're no longer posting on Twitter. I've decided I'm done posting here as well. So long and thanks for all the tweets.

[A. Derfel @a_derfelGazette]

1) Hi, everyone. I wanted to share with you the scary recent experience I had with my original Twitter account, @Aaron_Derfel, which was hacked two days ago, and how I fear this raises serious concerns about the future of this social media platform.

[Dan Wallach @danwallach]

@AlSweigart Fellow Houstonian, occasional mask wearer here: I wear masks, but it's increasingly socially awkward to do so. And nobody seems to be making policy changes based on these alarming wastewater data.

Only redeeming factor: unseasonably warm weather, outdoor restaurant seating.

[Dan Wallach @danwallach]

@mdwelsh Ultimately, you're going to be limited by what's actually available. The automotive supply chain is still a mess. Supposedly things are only now just barely turning a corner, with inventory appearing on dealer lots. https://t.co/u7nLP76Gv5

[Dan Wallach @danwallach]

@CZEdwards A few months ago, I had jury duty in Houston. Shared, enormous jury pool; hundreds arrive daily. Masks required. I wore an N95 and they required me to put a cheap surgical mask over it!

Only one fellow voir dire participant w/ me had mask below his nose. Coughing noticeably.

[Dan Wallach @danwallach]

@sebastiangood @ShriramKMurthi @entersudonym I'm on my 2nd generation of Nest Protect smoke detectors for exactly this reason. Nevermore a 3am beeping to track down. Just run the app and it tells you exactly where the problem is.

Downside: seven year expiration. At exactly that time, they loudly insist you replace them.

[Ian Brown @igb]

The @TwitterSpaces team no longer works at Twitter and is currently looking to get hired as team/package deal. These folks are top-notch large-scale social audio engineers and worth $$$ to any Twitter competitor.

[Dan Wallach @danwallach]

Nasty thought: this could be used to generate one-off spam emails, which will be sufficiently different as to get through many spam filters.

[Dan Wallach @danwallach]

@CrispinCowan0 @AnilSomayaji @Office @IEEEorg @perrymetzger @yoshi_kohno @jdp23 @jeremyinfosec @DrKevinFu @nikitab @sa3nder @wjrucklidge @FalconDarkstar @noplasticshower @dylanmc @CormacHerley @Adobe I think that serious authors use a bibliography management tool like Zotero (or Endnote, in the old days). I still do LaTeX for most things, and Google Docs for the rest.

[Dan Wallach @danwallach]

@CrispinCowan0 There are some fun moments. Like when Spectre/Meltdown came out, we had a multi-hour phone call to make sure we both understood it.

[Dan Wallach @danwallach]

I don't talk much about being a 2nd-generation computer geek, but this book (and the effort it documents) launched my father's career. And every caution and caveat that Jessamyn offers is something that every potential startup engineer should consider.

[Dan Wallach @danwallach]

@jessamyn @casahighland Thank you for your service. 🫡

[Maria Pevchikh @pevchikh]

1/20 Dear friends, I need to draw your attention to something super bad and super important (and it doesn’t originate from Russia for once). Last week the EU has taken a shockingly stupid and damaging decision to close down national corporate registers of beneficial owners 🧵🧵🧵

[Gwendal Le Coguic @gwendallecoguic]

New GitHub search is 🔥🔥🔥

[Dan Wallach @danwallach]

@perrymetzger @CrispinCowan0 @KelseyTuoc @ESYudkowsky This strikes me as whataboutism. Vaccines are an important part of public health. They work better in aggregate than they do individually. Also, we already do have mandatory vaccines in many cases (notably for kids in public schools in many states).

[Dan Wallach @danwallach]

@perrymetzger @KelseyTuoc @ESYudkowsky There's the rub: of course we want the best vaccines and the highest fraction vaccinated, but we really need both to control community spread.

Sure, I'm enormously relieved we have high tech vaccines. I would feel much safer if they were mandatory.

[Dan Wallach @danwallach]

@perrymetzger @KelseyTuoc @ESYudkowsky This research is super impressive. You could also imagine a vaccine where you generate 20 variants of the COVID spike protein, not just the ones seen in the wild, to create a cluster of related antibodies.

My concern is with antivax nonsense. Can we get high vax rates any more?

[Dan Wallach @danwallach]

@NetworkDemonic But will NeuraLink get jacked?

[Dan Wallach @danwallach]

Nerd gift recommendation: the compact Anker 747 charger has 3 USB-C ports plus one USB-A. What sets it apart is that the total output (150W) is available in any mix between the ports, so you can charge laptop, phone, etc from the same cables. Convenient.
https://t.co/C68v10wP51