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harold.bsky.social
hal
@harold.bsky.social
part-time poster | researching privacy in/and/of public data @ cornell tech and wikimedia | writing for joinreboot.org
Reposted by hal
"I'm happy to report I'm just fine. I lost a button. But I'm gonna sleep in my bed tonight, safe, with my family... At that elevator, I was separated from someone named Edgardo... Edgardo is in ICE detention and he's not going to sleep in his bed tonight."
June 17, 2025 at 8:38 PM
line go up📈📈📈

up to 717k requests to wikipedia per second!!

grafana.wikimedia.org/d/O_OXJyTVk/...
May 8, 2025 at 5:27 PM
continuing on the real-time public Wikipedia data train:

here's a graph of requests / second to WMF infra over the last 3h, since "Habemus papam"

The infrastructure has gone from 172k req / sec to 243k req / sec (⬆️41%) in under an hour!

follow along here: grafana.wikimedia.org/d/O_OXJyTVk/...
May 8, 2025 at 5:07 PM
english wikipedia pageviews for the conclave movie starting from oct 20 2024 (five days before release in the US)

first big spike is the academy awards, second is pope francis’ death

pageviews.wmcloud.org?project=en.w...
May 7, 2025 at 8:45 PM
excited to share this new piece by @bkeremg.bsky.social and @m0na.net (edited by me) about conceptualizing AI alignment as a process of censorship

really fascinating line of critique — I strongly encourage you to read it and lmk what you think!

joinreboot.org/p/ai-alignme...
April 6, 2025 at 9:14 PM
and set your devices to update automatically!
Other than using signal probably one of the easiest things most people can do to boost their digital security is get a password manager and start using real passwords instead of your dogs name or FaceID
April 4, 2025 at 2:29 PM
Reminder that a key part of the privacy harms from genetic information is the fact that *we all share genes with our relatives*!

Deleting or refusing to share genetic information protects your family in addition to yourself

oag.ca.gov/news/press-r...
Attorney General Bonta Urgently Issues Consumer Alert for 23andMe Customers
Californians have the right to direct the company to delete their genetic data OAKLAND — California Attorney General Rob Bonta today issued a consumer alert to customers of 23andMe, a genetic testing ...
oag.ca.gov
March 24, 2025 at 3:48 PM
Excited to announce a new preprint from my lab (with @rishi-jha.bsky.social and Vitaly Shmatikov; my first as a first author!) about severe security vulnerabilities in LLM-based multi-agent systems:

“Multi-Agent Systems Execute Arbitrary Malicious Code”

arxiv.org/abs/2503.12188

1/12
March 18, 2025 at 3:23 PM
do you have ~feelings~ about location sharing culture?

i'm editing a project on locations and want to hear from YOU (<5 min)

forms.gle/iG1UZJKrcNwm...
January 11, 2025 at 7:23 PM
brb updating median voter theory to reflect the fact that 30% of american adults read at a 10yo level or below

from on.ft.com/4fBSEwy
January 9, 2025 at 3:12 PM
January 8, 2025 at 3:47 PM
hi world! are you interested in writing stories about campaign finance (or understand how money flows)?

🗣️📈DATATALK📈🗣️ is a platform for asking natural language Qs of FEC data that I've been working on with folks at Stanford, Big Local News, and the Brown Institute

datatalk.genie.stanford.edu
October 11, 2024 at 12:32 AM
🫣🫣🫣
September 19, 2024 at 3:13 AM
Reposted by hal
i think the one thing i am most struck by is how fragile these personalities are. most of them received essentially mild pushback and immediately jettisoned whatever principles they claimed to have inthesetimes.com/article/form...
Losing the Plot: The “Leftists” Who Turn Right
What do we make of former friends who fell down the rabbit hole of the Right?
inthesetimes.com
December 13, 2023 at 12:21 AM
new piece out in Reboot!

this one is a deep dive into the extreme privacy community — the people who dedicate their lives to hiding from the internet

what drives people to want to disappear? what can we learn from them?

joinreboot.org/p/threat-model
November 18, 2023 at 5:11 PM
[chanting] hey hey! ho ho! automate that CEO! www.nytimes.com/2023/11/17/t...
OpenAI’s Board Pushes Out Sam Altman, Its High-Profile C.E.O.
Mira Murati, who previously served as chief technology officer, has been named interim chief executive.
www.nytimes.com
November 17, 2023 at 9:11 PM
does anyone know anyone / have experience doing archival research into the Manhattan Project?

I have a (now passed) family member who claimed that he was a part of the project but refused to tell family members any details about what he did there
November 7, 2023 at 8:12 PM
somehow ended up on the wikipedia page for dan savage and came across this absolutely unhinged gem of a story https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Savage#2000_Iowa_caucuses
July 29, 2023 at 9:04 PM
Reposted by hal
If you live in AZ, CO, CT, DE, HI, IL, MI, MN, NH, NM, PA, RI, VA, VT, WI, or WV, you have a Dem senator co-sponsoring KOSA and you can call their office right now to register your opinions. https://www.blackburn.senate.gov/2023/5/blackburn-blumenthal-introduce-bipartisan-kids-online-safety-act
July 25, 2023 at 10:09 PM
Reposted by hal
“may you find the social media home you deserve” is a modern Yiddish curse
i hope every body finds the social media home they truly deserve
July 24, 2023 at 6:31 PM
Reposted by hal
“‘The Social Network’ made me want to get into entrepreneurship”is like “‘Wall Street’ made we want to get into finance,” and overlaps heavily with thinking the point of “Scarface” and “Fight Club” is that Tony Montana and Tyler Durden are super cool guys with awesome lives you should emulate.
It’s quite terrifying how profoundly mindless these tech bro pseudo-prophets are - apparently incapable of understanding the world around them beyond the silliest level of superficiality, and yet enabled to have an outsized influence on the lives of future generations.
July 23, 2023 at 12:58 PM
Reposted by hal
Hearing disturbing rumors that some of these protestors on the picket line are professional actors
July 18, 2023 at 10:16 PM
Reposted by hal
this picture of Biden looking at a quantum computer is fucking hilarious lmao
June 12, 2023 at 9:01 PM
Reposted by hal
this is the funniest thumbnail I’ve ever seen
June 11, 2023 at 3:33 PM