Its the weekend and I have grant proposals to write, but need a distraction. So here's a crypto meme crudely edited to accurately summarizes the state of privacy techniques on blockchains.

Friend messaged me: Signal's going mainstream. They've got 150+ active chats. Work life invaded their friend space. Its not just Signal being in the news: people don't trust other apps. Too many places to half-ass privacy: be it backups, ads, or an AI reading over your shoulder.

We should rename zk-rollups to k-rollups. It's more succinct. It accurately reflects that they aren't zero-knowledge. And when someone wants to tell you about their cool 'zk' rollup, you can just respond with: k.

It's the year 2030. AIs write all our sitcoms now, but they're just endless FRIENDS clones because the underpaid content moderators in offshore offices learned that's the pinnacle of American comedy.

This is crazy. Senior US officials using Signal for sensitive chats is one thing (depending on procedures that may not have been followed). Using an Israeli company's fork of it which has questionable secure backup/archive feature is nuts. The Mossad pager of secure chat apps.

Whats worse than adding the editor of the Atlantic to your Signal chat?

Google announced they will support privacy preserving age verification via zero-knowledge proofs. You prove you have a signed digital copy of a drivers license and it says you are over 18 without revealing anything about you (name, birthdate, etc)

I have students working on bot detection. JS fingerprinting is a common tool, but while libraries exist, there's little on distance measures or detection thresholds. Plenty on circumvention techniques, but even obsolete methods seam undocumented b/c of security through obscurity.

Whats the best explainer for zkSNARKs you've seen for a non crypto audience? Needs to have some level of details, explain some tricks with polynomials. I'm thinking IOPs and permutation arguments are probably too far.

overhead: "SEC Chair Jay Clayton turned out to be the greatest patron ever of distributed algorithms"