Marcel Keller
LightNews LightNews
mkskeller.bsky.social
Marcel Keller
@mkskeller.bsky.social
460 followers 300 following 37 posts
Cryptographer who likes to implement multi-party computation and works for CSIRO's Data61. Views my own. 🏳️‍🌈🇨🇭🇦🇺 (he/him)
Posts Replies Media Videos
Pinned
mkskeller.bsky.social
Marcel Keller @mkskeller.bsky.social · Nov 16
Hello, world! Sending out-of-season vibes and more accessible multi-party computation from down under: github.com/data61/MP-SPDZ
GitHub - data61/MP-SPDZ: Versatile framework for multi-party computation
Versatile framework for multi-party computation. Contribute to data61/MP-SPDZ development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
Reposted by Marcel Keller
brendannyhan.bsky.social
A staggering statistic: "North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year." What are we doing?
hansonmark.bsky.social Mark A. Hanson @hansonmark.bsky.social · 4d
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 12, 2025 at 1:58 PM
mkskeller.bsky.social
Thanks to Hidde Lycklama, MP-SPDZ now supports BERT inference. github.com/data61/MP-SP...
Add BERT to ML Library by hiddely · Pull Request #1736 · data61/MP-SPDZ
This is an implementation of Huggingface's BERT transformer that I've been meaning to contribute back to MP-SPDZ. I implemented it as part of the evaluation of this work. The implementation...
github.com
November 7, 2025 at 4:10 AM
Reposted by Marcel Keller
perfors.net
Getting nervous for the talk I'm about to give at a workshop about "using AI to drive impact" which features slides such as these.
Slide is titled: You don't need to use LLMs. Science is a process of collaborative meaning making, by which we try to understand the world Even if AI were perfect, we rely on it at our peril — it is not science if we (i.e., humanity as a whole) do not understand and cannot recapitulate all parts of it I very, very rarely use LLMs myself. You can give yourself permission not to. Don’t FOMO yourself into it Conclusion: Don't rely on something you don't understand and can't control If you must use LLMS: 1. Treat them like you would an intern: only use them for things you can easily and thoroughly check 2. Make your process as robust as possible 3. Be aware of your own (human) cognitive biases
November 6, 2025 at 8:41 PM
mkskeller.bsky.social
Why @sydney.yimby.au: www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...
Homes could be $100k cheaper in 10 years with one change to zoning rules, Australian report finds
Allowing three-storey townhouses and apartments to be built across all residential land would unlock more than 1m homes in Sydney alone, according to modelling
www.theguardian.com
November 5, 2025 at 10:55 AM
mkskeller.bsky.social
Remarkable, but important to notice that the change only applies to review/survey and position papers
404media.co 404 Media @404media.co · 12d
arXiv, a preprint publication for academic research that has become particularly important for AI research, has announced it will no longer accept computer science articles and papers that haven’t been vetted by an academic journal or a conference. Why?

A tide of AI slop.
arXiv Changes Rules After Getting Spammed With AI-Generated 'Research' Papers
Cornell University’s academic paper repository will no longer accept Computer Science papers still under review.
www.404media.co
November 4, 2025 at 2:10 AM
Reposted by Marcel Keller
josephcox.bsky.social
The AWS outage bricked people's $2,700 smartbeds, leaving them in a reclining position or with the heat up. People were unable to use them, basically. A GitHub repo exists that lets people operate their beds without reliance on the normal infrastructure

www.404media.co/the-aws-outa...
The AWS Outage Bricked People’s $2,700 Smartbeds
When Amazon Web Services went offline, people lost control of their cloud-connected smart beds, getting stuck in reclined positions or roasting with the heat turned all the way up.
www.404media.co
October 22, 2025 at 1:43 PM
Reposted by Marcel Keller
chrispeikert.bsky.social
Our protocol is simple & modular: it works in the "Arithmetic Black Box" model, and inherits the security properties of the ABB instantiation (passive/active, static/adaptive, etc.).

Using SPDℤ₂𝑘 for ABB, we get about 20,000x and 37x better throughput and latency than SoTA for dishonest majority.
October 14, 2025 at 3:40 PM
Reposted by Marcel Keller
josephcox.bsky.social
openai to finally acknowledge what has been driving the AI boom for years and years but no one really wants to admit: chatbots you can fuck www.404media.co/chatgpt-erot...
ChatGPT’s Hail Mary: Chatbots You Can Fuck
As recent reports show OpenAI bleeding cash, and on the heels of accusations that ChatGPT caused teens and adults alike to harm themselves and others, CEO Sam Altman announced that you can soon fuck t...
www.404media.co
October 14, 2025 at 10:08 PM
Reposted by Marcel Keller
matthewdgreen.bsky.social
This is amazing research by Nadia Heninger and her co-authors Wenyi Morty Zhang, Annie Dai, Keegan Ryan, Dave Levin and Aaron Schulman. TL;DR a huge number of satellite links over our heads are totally unencrypted. satcom.sysnet.ucsd.edu
🛰️ SATCOM Security
Research project homepage for SATCOM Security: papers, source code, and recent satellite communications vulnerabilities.
satcom.sysnet.ucsd.edu
October 14, 2025 at 1:16 AM
Reposted by Marcel Keller
ccanonne.github.io
📢 Come be my colleague: the School of Computer Science at 🇦🇺 #USyd is hiring!

Multiple tenure-track-equivalent positions across the board (including theory!), but with a specific focus on Cybersecurity and Trustworthy Digital Systems, and ML/AI.

⏰ Dec 1
usyd.wd105.myworkdayjobs.com/en-GB/USYD_E...
Multiple Continuing (Tenure-Track) Academic Positions, School of Computer Science, Faculty of Engineering, The University of Sydney
Join a thriving Faculty of Engineering at a University ranked amongst the world’s best teaching and research institutions Located in the heart of Sydney’s bustling inner west quarter, close to beaches...
usyd.wd105.myworkdayjobs.com
September 29, 2025 at 11:45 PM
Reposted by Marcel Keller
spoon-tamago.bsky.social
Japan once again wins the IG Nobel Prize, this year for research showing that painting a cow to look like a zebra decreases bug bites by close to 50%

www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/artic...
September 19, 2025 at 4:36 PM
Reposted by Marcel Keller
timkrief.com
September 16, 2025 at 2:40 PM
Reposted by Marcel Keller
durumcrustulum.com
a bug in this may have already been found
September 17, 2025 at 11:27 PM
mkskeller.bsky.social
New campus, who dis?
September 9, 2025 at 5:06 AM
Reposted by Marcel Keller
benpatrickwill.bsky.social
Academic authors, here's a peek into the black box of journal publishing from an journal editor if you can bear it:
September 6, 2025 at 11:09 PM
mkskeller.bsky.social
Your favourite remote castle just started skeeting. bsky.app/profile/dags...
bsky.app
September 5, 2025 at 3:24 AM
Reposted by Marcel Keller
xanindigo.bsky.social
roses are red
violets are blue
singular they
predates singular you
scalzi.com John Scalzi @scalzi.com · Sep 3
Another day, another whiner complaining that I use the singular "they" in my work, and of course they can go fuck themselves

(you see what I did there)

(also, gift link)

wapo.st/3JEdPUv
Opinion | ‘They’ has been a singular pronoun for centuries. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s wrong.
Jane Austen did it. You can, too.
wapo.st
September 3, 2025 at 9:54 PM
Reposted by Marcel Keller
tobycmurray.bsky.social
This cartoon is so on the money and could as easily be about OpenAI as about any AI powered startup www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
Are AI evangelists really on the money? | Fiona Katauskas
Not everyone’s keeping the faith
www.theguardian.com
August 23, 2025 at 3:44 AM
Reposted by Marcel Keller
mccurley.bsky.social
Anyone who has been an IACR member in 2023-2026 should have received a link to respond to a survey about conferences and publishing. So far over 500 people have responded, but it will remain open for responses until Sept 12, 2025. I would also encourage people to use their forum invitations.
International Association for Cryptologic Research
A place to discuss matters related to IACR
discuss.iacr.org
August 14, 2025 at 4:28 AM
mkskeller.bsky.social
USENIX chair report: "six individuals appear as co-authors on 20 or more submissions, with two authors appearing on 36 and 39 submissions respectively. At such volume, it becomes difficult not to question the nature and depth of the contributions" www.usenix.org/sites/defaul...
www.usenix.org
August 13, 2025 at 8:47 AM
Reposted by Marcel Keller
michae.lv
In a new digital twist to environmental individualisation of responsibility, the UK government is now advising people to “[d]elete old emails and pictures” in data centres to help with the current drought. www.gov.uk/government/n...
HOW TO SAVE WATER AT HOME Install a rain butt to collect rainwater to use in the garden. Fix a leaking toilet – leaky loos can waste 200-400 litres a day. Use water from the kitchen to water your plants. Avoid watering your lawn – brown grass will grow back healthy. Turn off the taps when brushing teeth or shaving. Take shorter showers. Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.
August 12, 2025 at 3:34 PM
Reposted by Marcel Keller
lance.fortnow.com
Springer publishes a P ≠ NP "proof" and Eric Allender has words to say.

blog.computationalco...
Some thoughts on journals, refereeing, and the P vs NP problem
A guest post by Eric Allender prompted by an  (incorrect) P ≠ NP proof   recently published  in Springer Nature's Frontiers of Computer Scie...
blog.computationalcomplexity.org
August 4, 2025 at 6:08 PM
Reposted by Marcel Keller
ethz.ch
A milestone for open AI: ETH Zurich and EPFL will release a fully open multilingual language model, trained on CSCS’s “Alps” supercomputer. Built for the public good, this model promotes transparency, inclusion, and innovation.

Read more:
A language model built for the public good
ETH Zurich and EPFL will release a large language model (LLM) developed on public infrastructure. Trained on the “Alps” supercomputer at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), the new LLM ma...
ethz.ch
July 9, 2025 at 6:42 AM
mkskeller.bsky.social
More MP-SPDZ users, Dagstuhl edition
August 1, 2025 at 8:44 AM
Reposted by Marcel Keller
mccurley.bsky.social
@researchorgs.bsky.social We started gathering ROR for affiliations in 2022, and it now provides a way to see where research in cryptology is being done. eprint.iacr.org/geo/index.html

As with all data collection, there are occasional errors.
Map view of Cryptology ePrint Archive statistics
eprint.iacr.org
July 31, 2025 at 7:44 AM