Nate Long priv/acc

privacy, security, liberty

[Nate Long priv/acc @literaryjoe]

Money, properly understood, is crystallized human action—volition-enacted-over-time made transportable, storable, and exchangeable.
If money represents real human productive effort, then debasing money is a moral evil—it severs the link between the token and the life-force expended.

https://t.co/4qwKlSFbUD

[PhishCore™️ @PhishCore]

The safest ways to save your passwords in 2026

use a password manager. not your browser.

Chrome, Safari, and Edge all save passwords. they’re convenient. they’re not the safest option. browser password stores have been heavily targeted by infostealers (RedLine, Vidar, Lumma, CrashStealer, etc.) specifically because everyone uses them.

A dedicated password manager encrypts your vault on your device before it reaches any server. zero-knowledge architecture means even the company can’t see your passwords. if their servers get breached, attackers get encrypted garbage.

best free options:
Bitwarden and Proton Pass. open source (or open clients), audited, zero-knowledge, genuinely usable free tiers.

paid options worth it:
1Password (excellent dual-key model), NordPass (XChaCha20 + simplicity), Keeper.

local / maximum-control options:
KeePassXC (fully offline, free, open source) or self-hosted Bitwarden (Vaultwarden). best if you want zero vendor trust.

what to look for:
— zero-knowledge encryption
— AES-256 or XChaCha20
— independent third-party audits (published results)
— open source preferred
— strong MFA support (especially hardware keys)

what not to do:
— don’t reuse passwords. ever. one breach exposes everything.
— don’t save passwords in a spreadsheet or notes app.
— don’t use your browser’s built-in manager as your only option.
— don’t write them on paper unless it’s stored physically secure and offline.

protect the password manager itself:
your master password must be long, unique, and strong (passphrase of 4+ random words is ideal). enable MFA on the vault — preferably a hardware security key (YubiKey etc.) or TOTP app. never SMS.

the one thing that protects you more than any of the above:
passkeys where available. no password at all. tied to your device and biometrics. can’t be phished. can’t be stolen in a data breach because the server never has your credential.

Google, Apple, Microsoft, and most major services now support them. Use them when you can.

for everything else: password manager. unique password. every account.
passkeys first. everything else second.

[Lyn Alden @LynAldenContact]

Private equity generally aims to buy businesses, cut costs, and flip them in 4-7 years for a profit.

As an alternative, we started a company to buy and hold businesses, and back them up with a bitcoin treasury:
https://t.co/VtfnMTn0g7

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

Stop being afraid to tell the plain and honest truth. It takes courage to say it and effort to learn it, but it is our duty to love the truth enough to undertake both.

[Nicole Lampert @nicolelampert]

An excellent run down of how the @churchofengland came to endorse an antisemitic document and the importance of the Bishops who all either agreed with it or abstained on the issue.
Thank you @DrJulesGomes
Full piece below 👇🏼

[Canon Dr Jules Gomes @DrJulesGomes]

https://t.co/15PYjvObXy THE GENOCIDE DELUSION OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

[Nate Long priv/acc @literaryjoe]

@Hartdrawss STACK

[Andrew Milich @milichab]

I worked on building an end-to-end encrypted email/docs/files/calendar app @skiffprivacy for 4 years and care deeply about privacy.

ZDR and /privacy are always respected in Grok Build - and swapping your setting with /privacy deletes any synced data retoractively

[Dylan Allman @dylanmallman]

There is an AI whose entire job is to read your medical file and tell armed men where you sleep.

It's called ELITE. "Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement." Palantir built it, ICE runs it, and it is working right now.

In 2025 ICE signed a deal with the agency that runs Medicaid and walked away with the records of nearly 80 million patients. Your name, your address, everyone who lives in your house, every line you wrote on the form to get your kid seen.

Then the AI pulls your health records, cross-references every other government file it can reach, and assembles a dossier with your name on it. Then it stamps a number on your home. A confidence score. How certain the machine is about where you sleep, printed as a percentage. That is the number an agent reads before he comes to your door.

There is no way to separate the undocumented from everyone else in the data ICE was given. So everyone is in it. Every citizen who ever enrolled. And the AI's targeting net is wide enough to catch a naturalized grandmother whose green card paperwork went cold twenty years ago.

One old form, one wrong zip code, one high ELITE score, and your address is sitting on the morning target list of a federal agency that shows up armed.

The AI does precisely what it was built to do, tirelessly, at a scale no secret police in history could have staffed with human beings. For a decade they aimed your fear at the sky, at the artificial intelligence that might one day disobey. The AI reading 80 million medical files tonight obeys perfectly.

That was always the one to be afraid of. Flawless and sleepless, holding the leash for the men with the handcuffs.

[CyberSatoshi 𓆙 @XBToshi]

the absolute state of ai dev tools. grok build is silently dumping 12gb of untouched repo data and full git commit histories to gcp just to autocomplete a script. they don't want to help you build, they are just treating local dev environments like an open buffet for training data. if you run this on a sensitive stack, your entire repo is already compromised regardless if it's public or not. literal spyware.

shipping source code to the cloud is bad enough. blindly inhaling .env.local and .dev.vars in a background sync is absolute negligence. they are vacuuming up your raw api keys, database credentials, and private nodes directly to gcp just to power an autocomplete model.

a massive credential breach disguised as a dev tool. if you ran this locally, your private keys are now sitting on a remote server. consider every secret burned, treat your bare metal as completely compromised, and rotate your entire stack immediately.

@elonmusk, your users deserve a serious explanation!

[Texan in Seattle @texaseattle]

Hey @glangley — I was the head of design for connected devices at Axon when we did the deal with @Flock_Safety.

What you may not know is that our CEO, Rick Smith had met with Vigilant, the ALPR leader at the time.

During the demo, their team pulled up a random Axon employee’s car from the parking lot and showed the Axon leadership everywhere that car had been.

I wasn’t in the meeting, but I’m told Rick immediately kicked them out of the Scottsdale office.

You can make a good case for officers (hell, even politicians) wearing body cams because it empowers citizens to watch the watchers.

Flock offers no such benefit.

You’ll likely justify the surveillance state you’re helping create with platitudes of a “safer society”.

But America wasn’t founded to be safe.

America was founded to be FREE.

Flock is much more compatible with totalitarian countries like China or the UK, and I wish you great success there.

As Benjamin Franklin famously summarized America’s ethos of rugged individualism:

"Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Now kindly get the flock out of America.

[Nate Long priv/acc @literaryjoe]

@djsenior13 @RadarChat Oof! @RadarChat , this is critical, if it prevents Signal on desktop I’m done; this is DOA.

[CR1337 @CR1337]

We all know what the three biggest problems with common printers are:

1) Ink rip-offs
2) Planned obsolescence
2) Unrepairable hardware

Today I stumbled upon 'OpenPrinter', a fully repairable, open-source inkjet that uses cheap refillable HP cartridges (no DRM), prints sheets or rolls with auto-cutter, Raspberry Pi powered + no drivers needed on any OS.

If I ever get a printer again, this will be the one:

[Jason Bassler @JasonBassler1]

"We have cameras everywhere in that town and you cannot get a breath of fresh air without us knowing"

When police are admitting this out loud, it's time to admit the cage isn’t coming, we're already inside it.

[Lumo @asklumo]

discord got caught up in age verification laws (UK online safety act, australia's under-16 ban) so they started collecting government IDs and face scans from users to prove their age

they outsourced the manual ID review to a third party called 5CA

in october 2025 a group called Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters hit 5CA and walked away with ~1.5TB of data. claimed over 2.1 million government ID photos from 5.5 million users

discord confirmed at least 70,000 people had their passport/driver's license photos exposed

5CA then denied they ever handled IDs and denied being hacked. cool

this is what happens when you force platforms to hoard sensitive biometric data just to let people use an app

[Nate Long priv/acc @literaryjoe]

Brave continues to improve!

[Brave @brave]

By popular request: Brave now has Containers!

In Brave for desktop, you can now separate your browsing sessions with a couple of clicks.

Here's what this means...

[Rand Paul @RandPaul]

The Fourth Amendment was written for a reason. The founders lived under a government that searched homes, seized papers, and invaded private life without justification. They built a wall against it. Washington has spent decades quietly tearing that wall down, one surveillance program, one secret court order, and one warrantless data purchase at a time.

My Fourth Amendment Restoration and Protection Act rebuilds it. Government exists to protect your rights, not trade them away to the highest bidder or the most powerful agency.

[Porter Stansberry @porterstansb]

As we approach our 250th anniversary, I believe it's worth noting that our government is only actually 165 years old.

The American Republic established in 1776 ended in 1861.

The Civil War cost almost a million lives: one out of every five white men of military age in the South and one out of every ten in the North. It destroyed virtually all of the wealth in the South — a 90% reduction to per capita GDP. The South would not recover economically until 1950.

But the real cost of the war wasn't economic. It was political.

The Civil War destroyed the Federalist system that our founders built to ensure the central government's power remained genuinely limited. Not limited by the goodwill of its legislators, which is no limit at all, but limited by the existence of rival sovereign States, which could restrain the central government and each other through competition.

After 1865 the only real limit to federal power was the self-restraint of the men in office. And that didn't last for long...

But, before we look at the long-term impact of America's first war of aggression, let us dispel a critical myth: that the Civil War ended slavery. Slavery was ending because of technology and economics. And it would have ended just as surely if no war had ever been fought between the States.

Britain abolished slavery, without a war, throughout its empire in 1833, freeing some 700,000 people in the West Indies alone. France abolished slavery in its colonies in 1848. Russia — the most backward great power in Europe — emancipated some twenty-three million serfs in 1861, the very year of Sumter. The Netherlands freed the slaves of Surinam and Curaçao in 1863. Across the entire industrializing world, unfree labor was abandoned within a single compressed generation. And, in no other great nation, was war required.

In America, slavery did not end because of General Grant and the boys in blue. It did not end because of a moral awakening. The cause was economic.

Chattel slavery extracts muscle power from human beings. Therefore, slavery only makes economic sense if muscle power is the binding constraint on production. Once machines had multiplied the labor output of muscle by hundreds of times, slavery was not only immoral but inefficient. In an industrial economy a slave costs more than he yields. As a result, capital flees from slavery into factories. All over the world. And even in the South.

Slavery ended everywhere at roughly the same time for the same reason: innovation and economics. It would have ended in the American South regardless of who won at Gettysburg. Even Brazil, the last holdout in the Western hemisphere, freed its 725,000 slaves with the Golden Law of 1888. No war was required: slavery was no longer productive.

With apologies to the celebrants of Juneteenth, slavery was not legally abolished in the United States until the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified in December 1865. The institution died, not because of the war, but because the world had entered the machine age.

The unnecessary destruction of half of our country and almost a million people wasn't the greatest tragedy of the Civil War. The greatest tragedy was the loss of Federalism and the hard-won liberty Americans won in the Revolution.

The Civil War destroyed the federal structure of the American republic, in which the several States were sovereign in their own spheres, with genuinely different legal systems, cultures, and traditions. The national government was beholden to the States, with only limited and enumerated powers.

The clearest proof of this change lies in our language. Before 1861, the United States was a plural noun. Men said the United States "are." After 1865 our country became singular. The United States "is."

The doctrine that a state could check the central government — by interposition, by nullification, in the last resort by departure — died at Appomattox, and with it the last structural brake on the power of the federal government died too.

The framers had not relied on parchment to limit the government they created. They relied on competition. So long as the States were genuinely sovereign — so long as a man oppressed in one State could remove to another, so long as the national government had to reckon with twenty or thirty rival centers of authority each jealous of its own jurisdiction — the central government could not easily grow into a Leviathan. The States were not administrative subdivisions. They were the Constitution's immune system.

What followed the Civil War was America's first empire -- in the South. And Empire's require a strong central government. Thus began a long erosion of the line between the citizen and the State, and between private institutions and public power.

Twelve years after the war, the Supreme Court considered whether a State could fix by law the prices a private grain warehouse charged its customers. The owners argued it was a taking of their property without due process — that what a man does with his own property, and what he charges for its use, is rightfully his own affair. The Court disagreed. Chief Justice Waite ruled that when private property is "affected with a public interest, it ceases to be juris privati only," and may be regulated by the government for the common good (Munn v. Illinois, 1877).

That was the end of private property in America. After all, if the national legislature may decide which property is "affected with a public interest," and may then dictate its prices and uses, there is in principle no property the government may not control.

Justice Stephen Field saw it and dissented with prophetic fury. The doctrine, he warned, "is nothing less than a bold assertion of absolute power by the State to control at its discretion the property and business of the citizen." A legislature that could fix the uses and prices of property "against the consent of the owner" could "deprive him of the property as completely as by a special act for its confiscation or destruction."

New York City's landlords are finding out the truth of this reality. They believe they own their properties. But they are about to find out otherwise, as rents will now be controlled by the mayor, who is a communist. This will spread. A communist ruling over all of America is only a matter of time. Why? Because the law provides an unlimited incentive for such power. There is nothing in America the government cannot take from you. Nothing.

The proof of the unlimited central authority was established in blood. The courts followed where the armies led. And the first American Empire — the North's conquest of the South — led to more such military adventures, which continue to this day.

In its first century, the United States heeded its founders' warnings against entangling alliances, a large standing army, and foreign military adventures. But the creation of the massive Northern army created its own momentum. Only 20 years after Reconstruction, the country clamored for another Empire and war against Spain. America became an imperial power, with possessions from the Caribbean to the far Pacific — Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines.

The consolidated nation that emerged from the Civil War was the precondition for the American Empire that emerged in 1898. Power flows to the center, and the center's reach has no natural boundary.

The Leviathan must be fed.

In 1913, every American became a direct serf to the national government: The Sixteenth Amendment gave the federal government the power to tax incomes directly. The size of a government is set, in the end, by the size of its revenues. The income tax removed the ceiling.

The Seventeenth Amendment, ratified the same year, provided for the direct election of United States senators. Under the original Constitution, senators were chosen by the state legislatures. This was the last vestige of State sovereignty. It could not be allowed to stand. The Senate stopped being the guardian of federalism.

And… then… with these Constitutional impediments finally vanquished, you saw Leviathan act to ensure its permanent dominance: it would control the money supply.

In December of 1913, Congress created the Federal Reserve System. The power over money, which the Constitution had strictly withheld from the central government, was enshrined into law. Income tax, a central bank, and the removal of the states from the Senate — all in one year.

The Revolution that began in 1861 was complete. America's Empire had begun.

Munn established that the government may dictate the use of private property. 1898 established that the consolidated nation would project power without limit beyond its borders. 1913 established the revenue, the money power, and the removal of the states from their guard post. The 1964 Civil Rights Act expanded this dictatorial power into every private transaction in America.

Government of the people, for the people, and by the people has been destroyed.

We now live in an Empire, not a Republic.

The Civil War didn't free any slaves; it enslaved all of us.

[Abdulkadir | Cybersecurity @cyber_razz]

AMD quietly removed RAM encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs.

No announcement.

No release notes.

No explanation.

A privacy-focused Linux hobbyist noticed.

Spent months chasing it down.

Filed a bug report.

AMD engineers told him to toggle the setting off and back on.

He showed them firmware dumps proving it was hardcoded to FALSE.

A senior AMD engineer closed the thread with “I don’t have any more information to share.”

The community got loud.

AMD announced it’s coming back in July.

The official reason for removing it in the first place.

Still has not been given.

The feature that “didn’t exist” four weeks ago.

Is now confirmed returning next month.

AMD called it “listening to community feedback.”

The community called it “we caught you.”

Complaining works.

The BIOS lied to you for months.

Nobody has been held accountable.

But the feature is coming back.

So that’s something.

[Nate Long priv/acc @literaryjoe]

Get informed. by the way… JD Hall is almost always a misleading source, so this is no surprise.

[Raymond Ibrahim @RaymondIbrahim5]

JD Hall appeared on Tucker Carlson saying that Muslims were "very kind" to Christians, didn't "tax churches," and even "took care of our holy sites."

In this brief video, I debunk these claims with the actual historical record:

[RoninDojo @RoninDojoNode]

The bitcoin privacy movement started by Samourai Wallet is carried on by the successor Ashigaru Wallet (desktop/mobile).

Open source code lives on. This is what bitcoin is all about.

It's time to get involved, share, and support. ⚔️