Chinmay

Audio, Software, Electronics. ♥s #WebAudio. Engineer at @subnero.

[Max Tegmark @tegmark]

I'm excited that SignalShot, our community quest to formally verify Signal Messenger, is now about 80% done! 🎉 As you can see, the Beneficial AI Foundation (B) and Google DeepMind (G) have made roughly equal and complementary contributions. Despite Wired "formal-washing" and claiming it's all done, it's not - please help us double down and get to 100% asap! Detailed status update in thread below.

[Chinmay @ntt]

@omtalk Don’t get me started on ripped off videos from YouTube shared on WA groups. We’re just old. 😭

[夏雨婷 @cherylnatsu]

这个跟Jensen出轨的Alice我很熟悉，经常在密码学文章里见到她和一个叫Bob的把机密信息传来传去，应该是间谍

[Rob Miles @robertskmiles]

Attention all companies: I never want to use your AI assistant on your website. I want to use *my* AI assistant on your website

[Jun @NSJunXiu]

I think Singapore deserves a tasteful bus app.

[0x45 @0x45o]

this guy figured out how to leak your exact location from any video with sound using the Doppler curves of nearby airplanes

[Thomas Gorissen @serrynaimo]

Guys, ... guys! This is for Singapore like, ... the Vatican electing a new pope!!1 The world will never be the same!

[Oxide Computer Company @oxidecomputer]

We're hiring! See open roles: https://t.co/b2iYxTq62R

[Tivadar Danka @TivadarDanka]

Math isn't hard. You had bad teachers:

They taught you math was all about symbols. They forced you to memorize formulas you didn't understand. They forgot to teach you how to derive concepts from first principles. They never showed you math using spatial intuition.

That's why you never learned. That's why you felt it was beyond your capabilites.

But it was never your fault.

[lcamtuf @lcamtuf]

I would like to congratulate the organizers of the 2026 Cybersecurity Awareness Month for putting together a truly spectacular event

[Anuj Deshpande @anujdeshpandey]

I will die on the hill which says that USB C is a shit spec and govts forcefully adopting it has been a mistake

https://t.co/xdnJQuPjAc

[cursed_connectors @cursedconnector]

Sigh.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

I wrote a quick new post on "Digital Hygiene".

Basically there are some no-brainer decisions you can make in your life to dramatically improve the privacy and security of your computing and this post goes over some of them. Blog post link in the reply, but copy pasting below too.

Every now and then I get reminded about the vast fraud apparatus of the internet, re-invigorating my pursuit of basic digital hygiene around privacy/security of day to day computing. The sketchiness starts with major tech companies who are incentivized to build comprehensive profiles of you, to monetize it directly for advertising, or sell it off to professional data broker companies who further enrich, de-anonymize, cross-reference and resell it further. Inevitable and regular data breaches eventually runoff and collect your information into dark web archives, feeding into a whole underground spammer / scammer industry of hacks, phishing, ransomware, credit card fraud, identity theft, etc. This guide is a collection of the most basic digital hygiene tips, starting with the most basic to a bit more niche.

Password manager. Your passwords are your "first factor", i.e. "something you know". Do not be a noob and mint new, unique, hard passwords for every website or service that you sign up with. Combine this with a browser extension to create and Autofill them super fast. For example, I use and like 1Password. This prevents your passwords from 1) being easy to guess or crack, and 2) leaking one single time, and opening doors to many other services. In return, we now have a central location for all your 1st factors (passwords), so we must make sure to secure it thoroughly, which brings us to...

Hardware security key. The most critical services in your life (e.g. Google, or 1Password) must be additionally secured with a "2nd factor", i.e. "something you have". An attacker would have to be in possession of both factors to gain access to these services. The most common 2nd factor implemented by many services is a phone number, the idea being that you get a text message with a pin code to enter in addition to your password. Clearly, this is much better than having no 2nd factor at all, but the use of a phone number is known to be extremely insecure due to the SIM swap attack. Basically, it turns out to be surprisingly easy for an attacker to call your phone company, pretend they are you, and get them to switch your phone number over to a new phone that they control. I know this sounds totally crazy but it is true, and I have many friends who are victims of this attack. Therefore, purchase and set up hardware security keys - the industrial strength protection standard. In particular, I like and use YubiKey. These devices generate and store a private key on the device secure element itself, so the private key is never materialized on a suspiciously general purpose computing device like your laptop. Once you set these up, an attacker will not only need to know your password, but have physical possession of your security key to log in to a service. Your risk of getting pwned has just decreased by about 1000X. Purchase and set up 2-3 keys and store them in different physical locations to prevent lockout should you physically lose one of the keys. The security keys support a few authentication methods. Look for "U2F" in the 2nd factor settings of your service as the strongest protection. E.g. Google and 1Password support it. Fallback on "TOTP" if you have to, and note that your YubiKeys can store TOTP private keys, so you can use the YubiKey Authenticator app to access them easily through NFC by touching your key to the phone to get your pin when logging in. This is significantly better than storing TOTP private keys on other (software) authenticator apps, because again you should not trust general purpose computing devices. It is beyond the scope of this post to go into full detail, but basically I strongly recommend the use of 2-3 YubiKeys to dramatically strengthen your digital security.

Biometrics. Biometrics are the third common authentication factor ("something you are"). E.g. if you're on iOS I recommend setting up FaceID basically everywhere, e.g. to access the 1Password app and such.

Security questions. Dinosaur businesses are obsessed with the idea of security questions like "what is your mother's maidan name?", and force you to set them up from time to time. Clearly, these are in the category of "something you know" so they are basically passwords, but conveniently for scammers, they are easy to research out on the open internet and you should refuse any prompts to participate in this ridiculous "security" exercise. Instead, treat security questions like passwords, generate random answers to random questions, and store them in your 1Password along with your passwords.

Disk encryption. Always ensure that your computers use disk encryption. For example, on Macs this total no-brainer feature is called "File Vault". This feature ensures that if your computer gets stolen, an attacker won't be able to get the hard disk and go to town on all your data.

Internet of Things. More like @internetofshit. Whenever possible, avoid "smart" devices, which are essentially incredibly insecure, internet-connected computers that gather tons of data, get hacked all the time, and that people willingly place into their homes. These things have microphones, and they routinely send data back to the mothership for analytics and to "improve customer experience" lol ok. As an example, in my younger and naive years I once purchased a CO2 monitor from China that demanded to know everything about me and my precise physical location before it would tell me the amount of CO2 in my room. These devices are a huge and very common attack surface on your privacy and security and should be avoided.

Messaging. I recommend Signal instead of text messages because it end-to-end encrypts all your communications. In addition, it does not store metadata like many other apps do (e.g. iMessage, WhatsApp). Turn on disappearing messages (e.g. 90 days default is good). In my experience they are an information vulnerability with no significant upside.

Browser. I recommend Brave browser, which is a privacy-first browser based on Chromium. That means that basically all Chrome extensions work out of the box and the browser feels like Chrome, but without Google having front row seats to your entire digital life.

Search engine. I recommend Brave search, which you can set up as your default in the browser settings. Brave Search is a privacy-first search engine with its own index, unlike e.g. Duck Duck Go which basically a nice skin for Bing, and is forced into weird partnerships with Microsoft that compromise user privacy. As with all services on this list, I pay $3/mo for Brave Premium because I prefer to be the customer, not the product in my digital life. I find that empirically, about 95% of my search engine queries are super simple website lookups, with the search engine basically acting as a tiny DNS. And if you're not finding what you're looking for, fallback to Google by just prepending "!g" to your search query, which will redirect it to Google.

Credit cards. Mint new, unique credit cards per merchant. There is no need to use one credit card on many services. This allows them to "link up" your purchasing across different services, and additionally it opens you up to credit card fraud because the services might leak your credit card number. I like and use privacy dot com to mint new credit cards for every single transaction or merchant. You get a nice interface for all your spending and notifications for each swipe. You can also set limits on each credit card (e.g. $50/month etc.), which dramatically decreases the risk of being charged more than you expect. Additionally, with a privacy dot com card you get to enter totally random information for your name and address when filling out billing information. This is huge, because there is simply no need and totally crazy that random internet merchants should be given your physical address. Which brings me to...

Address. There is no need to give out your physical address to the majority of random services and merchants on the internet. Use a virtual mail service. I currently use Earth Class Mail but tbh I'm a bit embarrassed by that and I'm looking to switch to Virtual Post Mail due to its much strong commitments to privacy, security, and its ownership structure and reputation. In any case, you get an address you can give out, they receive your mail, they scan it and digitize it, they have an app for you to quickly see it, and you can decide what to do with it (e.g. shred, forward, etc.). Not only do you gain security and privacy but also quite a bit of convenience.

Email. I still use gmail just due to sheer convenience, but I've started to partially use Proton Mail as well. And while we're on email, a few more thoughts. Never click on any link inside any email you receive. Email addresses are extremely easy to spoof and you can never be guaranteed that the email you got is a phishing email from a scammer. Instead, I manually navigate to any service of interest and log in from there. In addition, disable image loading by default in your email's settings. If you get an email that requires you to see images, you can click on "show images" to see them and it's not a big deal at all. This is important because many services use embedded images to track you - they hide information inside the image URL you get, so when your email client loads the image, they can see that you opened the email. There's just no need for that. Additionally, confusing images are one way scammers hide information to avoid being filtered by email servers as scam / spam.

VPN. If you wish to hide your IP/location to services, you can do so via VPN indirection. I recommend Mullvad VPN. I keep VPN off by default, but enable it selectively when I'm dealing with services I trust less and want more protection from.

DNS-based blocker. You can block ads by blocking entire domains at the DNS level. I like and use NextDNS, which blocks all kinds of ads and trackers. For more advanced users who like to tinker, pi-hole is the physical alternative.

Network monitor. I like and use The Little Snitch, which I have installed and running on my MacBook. This lets you see which apps are communicating, how much data and when, so you can keep track of what apps on your computer "call home" and how often. Any app that communicates too much is sus, and should potentially be uninstalled if you don't expect the traffic.

I just want to live a secure digital life and establish harmonious relationships with products and services that leak only the necessary information. And I wish to pay for the software I use so that incentives are aligned and so that I am the customer. This is not trivial, but it is possible to approach with some determination and discipline.

Finally, what's not on the list. I mostly still use Gmail + Gsuite because it's just too convenient and pervasive. I also use 𝕏 instead of something exotic (e.g. Mastodon), trading off sovereignty for convenience. I don't use a VoIP burner phone service (e.g. MySudo) but I am interested in it. I don't really mint new/unique email addresses but I want to. The journey continues. Let me know if there are other digital hygiene tips and tricks that should be on this list.

Link to blog post version in the reply, on my brand new Bear ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ blog cute 👇

[Dan Garon @dangaron]

I recently used Claude as a therapist, and I was delighted to find that it validated my view of the world and confirmed my suspicion the other person was completely at fault. Strongly recommend, 10/10. Human therapists are cooked.

[TechVerser @realfxw]

乐鑫（Espressif）官方开源了一款非常亮眼的嵌入式利器：基于 Rust 编写的 esp-emulator，无需任何实体开发板，就能在本地终端乃至浏览器中直接模拟运行 ESP32 系列 SoC 固件。

这次更新与功能覆盖相当全面，直击嵌入式开发者和 CI 自动化测试的痛点：

广泛的芯片支持：全面覆盖 RISC-V 架构的 ESP32-C3、C5、C6、H2、P4、S31，以及 Xtensa LX7 双核的 ESP32-S3。不仅模拟 CPU 指令集与 FPU，还还原了 PMP/PMA 权限控制、MMU 与加密加速器。

完整的无线协议栈仿真：
Wi-Fi：内置 Soft AP，支持 WPA2/WPA3 握手、企业级 802.1X 以及 DHCP 服务。
用户态免配置网络（User-mode NAT）：无需 sudo 或 TAP 网卡，开箱即用实现 TCP/UDP 转发；更自带 mDNS 记录重写，支持无缝调试 Matter / HomeKit 配网。
BLE & Thread：BLE 支持配合 Google Bumble 进行纯软件仿真；ESP32-C6 和 H2 支持通过 UDP 桥接两台仿真器，组成两节点的 802.15.4 Thread 真实 Mesh 网络。

无缝嵌入现有开发工作流：
支持 --uart-tcp 桥接，https://t.co/30rBOeGbe1、https://t.co/j5my1es0HO 和 https://t.co/bRnwvwpoOK flash 可以直接通过 socket:// 烧录固件与 eFuse。
内置 GDB 远程调试存根（--gdb），并提供 --trace 输出 Perfetto/Chrome 跟踪文件，无需在固件内插桩即可精确观察 FreeRTOS 任务调度与 CPU 耗时。

零安装体验：官方构建了 WebAssembly 版本并直接部署在 GitHub Pages，只需把编译合并好的 merged-binary.bin 拖拽到网页中，就能实时查看控制台输出、GPIO 状态、寄存器与内存。

单行脚本一键安装体验： curl -fsSL https://t.co/Ysryjs2l2A | sh

做固件 CI/CD、网络协议栈验证或手头没有板子时的救急调试，推荐务必收藏体验！

#ESP32 #Espressif #RustLang #IoT #Embedded #OpenSource

[MG @_MG_]

$100M across 500+ addresses so far. Crypto hardware wallet owners are freaking out because of a new supply chain attack. Let’s see how we could make it worse!

People are opening their hardware wallets to look for hardware implants. REMINDER: 5 years ago I converted a Ledger into a malicious wallet WITH NO VISIBLE CHANGES. So visual inspection isn’t everything.

The attack seen today is a hardware backdoor that reads the seed phrase right off the screen & sends it to the attacker using its own cellular radio. And it seems the attacker may have purchased an official Ledger reseller so they could ship backdoored wallets to customers. (It’s all still unfolding, not everything is confirmed, new implants are showing up, etc)

A Chinese company bought an official reseller of Ledger, & possibly used an NDA to prevent it from being made public. I will say that even if the new owner wasn’t complicit, mergers & acquisitions are very attractive times to target a company. Lots of stuff is changing quickly, lots of new names, lots of urgent needs, etc.

In theory, the reseller is where they inserted the implants. They opened legit Ledger wallets and added an extra PCB with extra components. The implant tapped the lines of the Ledger’s screen & was able to read the seed phrase exactly as shown to the user. This phrase was then sent out over a slow cellular radio designed for low traffic IOT.

Tapping the screen has been a known attack. Joe Grand did a talk on it earlier this year. We have seen more “primitive” looking implants that do it.

But buying a company is a big step forward from prior attempts. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some state funding here. I guess we will find out as people dig into the corporate paper trail of the business, the account associated with the cell service, etc.

Hardware wise, they cleaned things up a lot to make it less noticeable to a wallet owner who opens the case. But I can’t help but wonder why they didn’t improve a few areas… I’ll go into that in replies to this post.
🧵1

[Michael W. @Michaelskywal]

The cheat sheet.

Thin stack-up (ground 0.1 mm below the top copper):
- connector pads: hole = pad size
- 0402: part outline + 0.1 mm
- 0201: part outline + 0.05 mm

Standard 0.2 mm stack-up: only the 0402 needs one.

Never add margin.
10/12

[Michael W. @Michaelskywal]

Should you cut a hole in the ground plane under the pads of a USB-C or HDMI connector? Some engineers swear by it, others say never.

I simulated it 327 times to settle it.

Answer: yes, when the pad is wider than the trace. And make the hole exactly the size of the pads. 🧵1/12

[Ian Carroll @iangcarroll]

My OpenAI dot produced this PCB and then hit its usage limit and gave up. AGI is here

[Anuj Deshpande @anujdeshpandey]

I think it’ll make sense to have an insane amount of test reports available for every hardware product I make
Just so that the agents that come searching have a very high bar set when comparing it with other similar hardware products