I mean post-apocalyptic stories and novels are one of my favorite genres, but didn't think I'd be getting a front row seat.

But hey, I got a unique seat! Got to see the rise of the Internet and commodity technology to AI to corporations owning everything, including people's lives via their livelihoods and medical care, with no hope of things changing on the horizon. If anything, prepare for it to be much worse :(

It's a lot. I don't get how people are making it cause I'm barely

- I loved loved loved cyberpunk.... but yeah, living in a more mundane boring version took its appeal away from me.

Big way I am making it is through solarpunk (for this VERY reason). I need something to hope for and something to build towards. So it's solarpunk literature, art, and in my actual life - building solarpunk apparatus and community.

- Actually. It will.

You push back against your rep, and they log it and report it in their meetings.

One of the major jobs of a customer service and sales rep is to document and report on current client trends and perceptions.

Push back. And continue to push back. Make it their problem so they pass the problem on.

They change their product and offerings all the time to get more money from clients. If clients are pushing back, threatening not to spend more money, they will alter their actions to get more money.

The bottom line is the bottom line for a reason.

mastodon.social/@Crookie/11614…

Crookie

2026-02-27 15:14:21

I'm guessing bitching to my Cisco rep won't get me far either...

@Rin3d - You are correct - halfway. I'm referencing Discord dropping Persona specifically - the current pushback was tied to their use of Persona as well as their intended actions.

arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…

This sounds A LOT like the justification DHS put out to approve their own (totally illegally in like, multiple ways) not-a-rule-but-absolutely-a-rule to collect social media handles to.. root out... terrorists attempting to enter the country... when the whole system only affects those legally in the country. "Immigration benefits are optional."

Except the biggest chunk of people affected are literally not applying for an immigration benefit. Naturalization is explicitly carved out in the Constitution. All the other stuff is pulled out of someone's ass to keep out first the Chinese and then all non-northern-Europeans 100 years later.

And sure, if you have already finished the I-485 process it's entirely optional to apply for the non-benefit in question, but the other applicants are applying because DHS have insisted on illegally detaining them if they fail to do so with a huge lead time. It would be optional if their liberty interest is optional. Enforcing illegal EOs is also optional. Working for DHS is optional. Except agents had an actual choice that they made to be fascist thugs who repeat the utter nonsense coming out of the White House which accidentally defined foreign terrorist in a way that only Donald Trump seems to fit the entire set of definitions to a tee (thanks to the UK's nationality laws technically making him not someone who can move there but via his mother, the equivalent of what we call being a national). Can't make this stuff up.

@marshray

I thought in Curve25519 (and ECC in general) you do have a neutral element but no absorbing element? IIRC usually only a cyclic subgroup is used?

@project1enigma @marshray yeah but you generally do (curve point) * (scalar) multiplication. (writing + for the group operation)

(or, if you write * for the group operation, then it'd be exponentiation)

@mei @marshray

Ah yeah. But then the exponent (if the group operation is written as multiplication) isn't a group element but always an integer. Only the result of using a zero exponent would be the neutral element of the group (if I understand correctly, for ECC the point at infinity).

@project1enigma @mei @marshray Please don't read too much into the notation I'm using.

The entire point of that mess was to communicate "x * 0 = 0" in a generic way that vaguely describes Diffie-Hellman-shaped protocols.

the fact that both this and your 2024 findings were done pretty casually is also very worrying from a "the fuck else is wrong in there" perspective - not just in their crypto, at least for me personally. Not all of it is probably going to be as "what the fuck how did this ship" levels of bad as these two (incl. how they handled the disclosures) but like...

These seem like somewhat trivial things to not do? I'm not a cryptographer by any means - I fuck with power systems controls bullshit, not this, I get the joy of working with a very... unique language and ecosystem - but seeing these seemingly-obvious flaws not only a. exist but also 2. not be addressed (or acknowledged to be a Concern) does not inspire confidence in their design.

Echoed for emphasis:

We've previously considered adding it but ultimately avoided it due to the conclusion that there's no practical security impact on Matrix.

Once again, they are insisting "We already knew about this risk but decided it's okay to not fix it or tell anyone about it".

Which is FUCKING BONKERS for a so-called secure messaging product!

why didn't you post the full reply?

To sketch out an argument, it's helpful to consider two possible cases of where it might matter. One, an active attacker, Mallory, trying to manipulate a handshake between two honest parties Alice and Bob. Two, a dishonest participant, Malice, taking the place of Bob.

In the first case, the handshake is protected from Mallory on the Matrix level, by the fact that Matrix requires all key inputs used in the Olm 3DH handshake (except for the "base key") be signed by the long-term Ed25519 identity keys of the participants. Inbound session establishment is only accepted when the sender identity key matches a signature-verified device key for the claimed sender, and outbound uses signature-verified key bundles.

Thus, a third party like Mallory cannot replace any of the bundle keys (the X25519 identity key or the signed pre-key, be it an OTK or the fallback key). The only key that can be replaced is the base key Ea (i.e. Alice's ephemeral "base" key, assuming Alice is the one opening a channel with Bob) which, if replaced with a small order subgroup element, would result in an all-zero DH(Ib, Ea) output on Bob's side. But even then, the attacker cannot influence the corresponding term on Alice's side, so Alice and Bob would still derive different shared secrets and therefore the session would not be viable.

The second case is outside our threat model, given that Malice doesn't gain any additional advantage from using this attack compared to the things she can already do by virtue of being one of the conversation endpoints.

We believe this covers all threat scenarios relevant for Matrix. If our reasoning is flawed and you see a practical attack, can you please sketch it out?

That said, given that vodozemac could potentially be used outside the context of Matrix, we will consider adding the all-zero DH output rejection check in the 3DH path as a defence-in-depth. As a nice side effect, this stops further confusion on whether this is an issue and makes X25519 handling consistent across the entire crate. At the very least, the behaviour should be documented so the user can make an informed decision.