TIL that pseuds on AO3 are not, in fact, like sideblogs. They are not for hiding your identity at all, but rather for collecting other names you might be known by and pointing them back to the main profile.
Which is wild, because that's the opposite of what actual pen names were used for.
we gotta get back to torrent distribution, i just watched someone eat eight grand in bandwidth charges because they ran a direct-download piracy site with local file hosting through cloudflare. torrents were invented literally for this exact reason
i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3
unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it
i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map
i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs
this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.
crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.
Here’s the thing: authors know when they get a rec on an older story. There’s a telltale uptick of kudos (with a 10-15% comment rate if you’re lucky) in your digest email.
The thing is, there’s no way to know where these people are coming from. In the before, when fandom was more in the corners we all knew about, you could search LJ or a message board or whatever social bookmarking site we were using. You could join the community and participate.
You could get a little dopamine hit by seeing someone tell their friends why they loved your story.
Anymore, those recs are hidden in discords, or in tiktoks or instagram slideshows that you can’t search for. They’re inaccessible, not discoverable unless you’re already there. You may never know why 27 people left kudos on an old story of yours, what they liked and found in your writing. You just get the thumbs up and a kinda lovely feeling, cause these could be your people. You could like them, maybe. You could be friends.
But you’ll never find out why they stopped by, or what people are saying about you begging your back, and that’s sad.
So thank you to the people who still do public red lists on this webbed site. You are my sunshine, and I’m appreciative of all of you.
Note: When this happens I often add to my end author's notes a little bit like "Hey, I noticed this fic is getting some attention, please let me know where you found it!" And you know what? Someone usually does! If I'm really lucky it's even a public post and they give me a link so I can go thank the reccer.
But to commenters - even if they don't ask, it never hurts to start your comment with "hey I found this fic via X"
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Truly just a perfect crossover vignette pwp. It captures just enough of Krycek and Methos's personalities, draws an absolutely clear picture, leaves them both satisfied and you wanting more.
My next book is The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, out next month. Pre-order it now, including as a DRM-free audiobook or ebook, at my Kickstarter, and help me continue to prove that DRM-free isn't just the right way to reach an audience, it's also the best way to reach them.
From the earliest days of technopolitics, the role of technology in resisting authoritarianism was unclear. On the one hand, there's the indisputable fact that modern cryptography, properly implemented, can deliver a degree of privacy that is proof against all technological attacks.
That is to say, if you pull out your distraction rectangle, fire up the camera, and tap the shutter button, in the ensuing eyeblink instant the image you've captured will be scrambled so thoroughly that it could never be unscrambled without the secret key unlocked by your passphrase or biometrics. Even if every hydrogen atom in the universe were converted into a computer, and even if all those computers spent all the time between now and the end of the universe trying to guess what the key was, we would run out of universe and time long before we ran out of possible keys.
What's more, this extremely robust form of scrambling and descrambling can be combined with other techniques to block tampering with the encrypted data, and to allow parties to reliably identify who scrambled the data and also to restrict who may unscramble it. These remarkable technological facts have inspired many excited debates about what they mean for our politics, most notably among a group of people who called themselves "cypherpunks":
One cypherpunk faction believed that modern cryptography could enable a kind of technological secession: by allowing ordinary people to communicate, transact and collaborate without the possibility of state interception or control, crypto could make states themselves obsolete.
But another faction pointed out that no amount of mathematics could help you if an agent of the state – or a criminal the state failed to protect you from – tortured you until you revealed the secret passphrase needed to unlock your secrets. This was (ironically) called "rubber hose cryptanalysis" (as in "Tell me your passphrase or I'll hit you with this rubber hose again"). Later, this became known as a "wrench attack" after a famous XKCD comic about $1m worth of security technology being defeated by hitting someone with a $5 wrench until they divulged the password:
https://xkcd.com/538/
Once you stipulate to the problem of wrench attacks and rubber-hose cryptanalysis, it becomes apparent that your cryptography is only as good as your physical defenses. What's more, the most effective physical defenses we have come from a strong rule of law, because even the thickest safe door benefits from the threat of prison for anyone who breaks into the safe, and the most effective tool for preventing a cop from hitting you with a rubber hose is the existence of a judge who can send that cop to prison for abusing your civil rights.
But what do you do if you already live under tyranny? The rule of law is a great defense, but cryptography alone can't bring about the rule of law. What is the role of technology in this foundational struggle?
My technopolitics faction – the faction associated with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where I've worked for a quarter-century – has an answer: the role of encryption is to provide a measure of privacy and security that is best used to organize political struggles to demand the rule of law and respect for human rights. Encryption isn't proof against rubber hoses, but it is effective against many other forms of state repression, and it can provide a technical edge for those engaged in a political struggle.
Another faction – the faction most associated with bitcoin and subsequent cryptocurrency projects – rejects the role of the state altogether, and seeks to replace states (and state-regulated institutions like courts and banks) with mathematics. Rather than asking courts to interpret contracts, we can put our trust in self-executing "smart contracts," and rather than asking banks to safeguard our financial integrity, we can use cryptographic software to ensure that money only moves when the person it belongs to tells it to.
This has many problems. Smart contracts are slow, expensive, and unreliable. The number of people who understand contracts is small, the number of people who understand the software that embodies smart contracts is likewise small, and the Venn intersection of the two is more of a sphincter. What's more, there is irreducible ambiguity in all but the simplest of contracts, which means that even a "self-executing" contract ends up relying on a human adjudicator (an "oracle") who can be bribed or intimidated into cheating:
And when it comes to transactions, crypto proves to be unwieldy, expensive and complex, so that nearly all crypto users end up directing an intermediary (like Coinbase) to hold and move their cryptographic assets for them. The upshot is that cryptocurrency mostly replaces banks – imperfect, but heavily regulated and insured – with unregulated tech platforms with murky ownership and often defective security procedures, who may or may not be insured (or even locatable) in the event of a collapse or a breach. Consequently, cryptocurrency has become a scam magnet of unprecedented and unstoppable power, and hardly a day goes by without people being ripped off in the most ghastly ways imaginable:
https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/
For bitcoin maxis and other anti-state cypherpunks, this is just a skill issue. Anyone who doesn't understand how to manage their own keys and turns to a platform to hold and move their crypto is getting what they deserve. As the maxim goes, "Not your keys, not your wallet," which is cypherpunkspeak for "caveat emptor."
That's where the wrench attacks come in. Because if you are in possession of keys that can be used to irreversibly and instantaneously steal large sums of money and move it to jurisdictions where the perpetrators are beyond any legal or physical recourse (e.g. North Korea), then there is a massive incentive for your adversaries to kidnap you and hit you with a wrench or a rubber hose.
That's precisely what's going on. People with substantial cryptocurrency holdings face grave personal danger, and the physical attacks on their person grow bolder, more violent, and more sadistic by the day:
As crypto critic David Rosenthal writes, this problem is even worse than it seems at first blush:
https://blog.dshr.org/2026/05/wrench-attacks.html
For one thing, cryptocurrencies depend on "public ledgers" that indelibly, publicly record every transaction in the network. Cryptocurrency is nothing without these ledgers, and they have to be immutable and public to work. This is very bad news for anyone who relies on anonymity as their defense against physical attacks.
That's because "reidentification attacks" (where an anonymous person in a dataset is positively identified) get easier to perform over time. You might be represented in a database of hospital prescribing activities by a random number, and that number might be hard to associate with your real identity…at first. But with every subsequent release of data – whether in the form of an anonymized data-set or a breach – it gets easier to cross-reference the facts associated with your record with other facts from other records, such that a detailed, identifying picture of you emerges one fact at a time.
For example, if the taxi company you use suffers a breach that reveals journeys associated with every doctor's appointment at the hospital, now an attacker can pick out the home or work address of the single person who visited the hospital just before you received your prescription. The longer an "anonymized" data-set sits around in public view, the easier it gets to de-anonymize it:
Combine the fact that permanent ledgers make it progressively easier to identify people whom you can torture into revealing their crypto keys with the irreversible, instantaneous nature of crypto transfers and you get some very juicy targets indeed. "Not your keys, not your wallet" means it's "not anyone else's problem" when you get robbed. You can't ask the bank to interdict or reverse the transaction.
Rosenthal provides a litany of the escalating security measures crypto holders are turning to as this problem goes progressively more dangerous and terrifying. There's the guy who splits his keys up in four physical vaults at four separate locations, whose management is instructed to make him wait a minimum of seven days when he asks to retrieve them. Despite all this, he keeps his identity secret:
Rosenthal quotes Nicholas Weaver, who asks what kind of "internet of money" bitcoin can be if it can't be safely stored on a computer connected to the actual internet:
https://doi.org/10.1145/3208095
But an equally valid question is, what kind of escape from tyranny is it that requires you to hide your identity at all times lest you be snatched off the street and brutally tortured? What kind of "liberty" requires you to spend $860,000 armoring your two top execs' personal vehicles to protect them from gunfire and light artillery?
It costs $6.2m/year to protect Coinbase's CEO – "more than the combined amount that JPMorgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Nvidia Corp. spent on their respective CEOs":
Crypto true believers exhort one another to "HODL" (hold on for dear life). Selling your crypto during downturns is considered a moral failing. But now, crypto holders – especially those who manage their own keys – are literally holding on for dear life, as they are hunted by crime syndicates and state actors alike.
It's a good reminder of how badly crypto has failed on its own terms, delivering its biggest users into an existence of fear and physical peril that rivals the plight of even the most hunted dissidents in the most repressive societies. Worse: as cryptocurrency lobbyists have fused crypto with the world's largest and most corrupt governments (especially the Trump regime), crypto now has all the exposure to state coercion that made banks so unsuitable, but without the (inconstant, insufficient) protections offered by traditional banking.
And that's before we talk about the energy consumption problems, the scams enabled by crypto, and the rampant human trafficking that those scams necessitate:
People in my technopolitical faction have a saying of our own: "'Crypto' means cryptography." Cryptography plays a hugely important role in protecting people from crime and state repression. It is no substitute for the rule of law and democracy, but it remains a key tool for securing and defending both:
Cryptocurrency, on the other hand? That's the worst of all worlds.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
i support universal free healthcare for one simple reason: if you are diagnosed with a terminal illness you should quit your job. quitting your job is the correct response to terminal illness. but you can’t do that if your healthcare is tied to your job
listen if somebody knows that they will be dead in a years time, and you are forcing them to continue to come into work, that’s fucked up. terminally ill people should be able to quit their jobs and live their last few months to the fullest. i don’t get how that’s a controversial opinion
You know, if people werw able to take breaks from work when ill, or even just approaching burnout, then the rate of chronic illness would probably decrease. Because colds and illnesses would spread less, and also linger for shorter and create less long term effects. (Also, companies shouldnt be allowed to make people stand up for hours on end because that create back problems, and shouldnt be requiring constamt screen activity for the full day because that creates eye strain and headaches. I remember reading somewhere that part of the reason disability claims are rising in working class america is because theyre in situations where the only available job is retail and they cant do that sitting down or even take breaks to sit because company policies or whatever, so the back pain that, to an office worker, is an annoyance at worst because they can sit whenever, becomes something career halting to the retail worker.)
Folks (this is a general response to a bunch of reblogs), you keep talking about this subject like if it was hypothetical or we are talking about getting to unexplored new heights, and that’s exasperating;
Yes. YES. This is not hypothetical. This is very real. Most countries on this planet actually operate like that. And yes, the results are very obvious when you look at the data. for example, the US fares way worse (sometimes 2x) than comparable countries _in every single metric_ on this report about chronic illness:
Chronic, non-communicable diseases are the leading cause of death worldwide. In the United States, these diseases make up 8 of the 10 top ca
Hell, the US life expectancy is 5 years below my own country’s, even if the US GDP per Capita is more than twice of ours. Yes. People in the US are very literally being exploited to death. And with the amount of money in economy you folks should be burning cars down in the streets until you are at least on pair with the living conditions of countries that have a fraction of your wealth.
LLM psychosis is simply the democratisation of being surrounded by yes-men and unctuous toadies, an experience previously only accessible to dictators and kings and cult leaders and venture capitalists
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