I worked at EFF from 2001 to 2019.

When I started, EFF was a very effective coalition between (primarily) progressives and libertarians. This had largely been the case since EFF was founded in 1990 by both progressives and libertarians. When people would call EFF a "left-wing" organization, I would correct them. It wasn't a left-wing organization, it was a big tent and had consistently had very significant non-left-wing representation in its membership, board, and staff.

This was perhaps comparatively easy to achieve because EFF was mainly working on free speech and privacy, and both progressives and libertarians were happy to unite around those things and try to get more of them for everybody, even without necessarily agreeing on other issues.

Maybe "both progressives and libertarians" doesn't feel like that big a tent in the overall scheme of things, but it was a good portion of people who were online by choice early on and who were feeling idealistic about technology.

I'm sure everyone reading this is aware that, as American society has become more polarized, there are fewer and fewer institutions that are successfully operating as big tents in this sense. Somewhat famously ACLU is not. EFF is also not.

EFF is still doing a lot of good work in a non-partisan sense. However, the way that they think and talk about that work, in terms of what motivates it or what it is meant to achieve, is now a predominantly left-wing framing. If you don't have a left-wing worldview, you're at least not going to be culturally aligned with EFF's take on things, even if you agree with many of their positions and projects.

This should not be taken to mean that they never take on non-leftist causes or clients or never successfully work in coalition with non-leftist organizations. It's most about how they see what they are trying to do.

I again want to be clear for people who are saying "it's no surprise that a political organization is political" that EFF's politics and rhetoric are not what they were in earlier decades. There are many interpretations of that that you might take if you agree with some of the changes (you might feel that they became more politically aware or more sophisticated or something), but the organization's coalition and positioning is really very different from what it was in earlier eras.

It's very apparent to me that EFF was more skillful at staying neutral on a wider range of questions in the past than it is now. I remember hearing the phrase "that's not an EFF issue" spoken much more frequently in the earlier part of my time at the organization.

(Another more neutral interpretation is that the Internet successfully became a part of everyday life, with the result that more and more historically-offline political issues now have some kind of online component: so maybe it's more of a challenge to deliberately not have a position on a range of "non-tech" politics because people are regularly pointing out how tech and non-tech issues interact more.)

I experienced these changes as an enormous personal tragedy, and it's deeply frustrating for me if people would like to pretend that they didn't happen.

I'm still rooting for them to win most of their court cases.

It was over for me when the EFF advanced the charge of government censorship of the internet. The EFF had previously been a client of mine so I was somewhat familiar with how things worked and basically once Gilmore was out, it went downhill.

They did a lot of good work (much like the ACLU) but they are now honestly unrecognizable.

My old company donated around $3k/mo of services for almost a decade which in the grand scheme of things isn't a lot but we kept them online when other ISPs would've shut them off.

I've ceased donating to them and the ACLU because they no longer stand for freedom on or off the internet. My money now goes to groups that actively pursue the government for violating our constitutional rights.

> groups that actively pursue the government for violating our constitutional rights

Could you share some examples?

Yep, great example.

not the ancestor poster, but you might want to check out https://fire.org/ and https://ij.org/

What specific cause are you referring to here as government censorship of the internet?

> when the EFF advanced the charge of government censorship of the internet

Wait, when did this happen? What are you referring to here?

When they supported the legislation called "Net Neutrality" which attempted to supplant the concept of actual net neutrality with some quasi government control of the internet. It would've enabled massive censorship on the internet, something that we've seen is a very very bad thing.

Citations heavily needed.

It's depressing now, but also was genuinely amazing how great EFF was early on. I think a lot of that had to do with the board, membership, and staff (such as yourself) intentionally trying to keep things balanced and focused. Thank you for all the great stuff you and the rest of the org did back then.

Too late to edit, but I realized that the correct dates for my time at EFF are actually 2001 to 2020 (I was thinking about how I left during the COVID-19 pandemic, but that was in 2020).

> I remember hearing the phrase "that's not an EFF issue" spoken much more frequently in the earlier part of my time at the organization.

I'm not saying that isn't a valid critique, but from 2001 to 2019 so much more of out culture, politics, and protest have shifted to online spaces (for better or worse). Do you think that the EFF just has _more_ to do now because of the shifting needs of our online spaces and the increased governance on them?

I mentioned that interpretation very briefly in my post.

If EFF had continued to be better at political neutrality, I'm sure many observers would have been surprised at times that it declined to take positions on some of the hot issues of the day. That hypothetical reticence could have been interpreted as cowardice or irrelevance, or as saving up political capital to really focus on a smaller number of more fundamental issues.

For example, I have an ill-formed notion that EFF might be more effective in fighting against age verification mandates right now if the organization were seen as less leftist. Among other things, this is because there's one narrative where age verification is something the right wants and the left doesn't. I say "ill-formed" because I haven't been close to this issue and haven't seen exactly how various audiences have parsed it in practice.

The culture war part of this question is how good or bad it is when it's easy for young people to talk to strangers in spaces that aren't overseen by adults (or approved by their parents). I guess forms of this issue are possibly among the most divisive questions in the world.

However, you could also look at questions like online anonymity, privacy, data breaches, competition, ad targeting, decentralization, FOSS, and user control of technology, which are all being impacted by these measures. EFF cares about these things a lot and has cared about them for a long time. I would hypothesize that some of those concerns are now getting dismissed by audiences that think EFF's "true objection" is anti-parental-control and that the other issues are just noise. Again, I haven't been close to this and I'm not positive that this is how it's actually playing out.

Age verification is a great example. We've seen what Alec Muffett has been doing around this and its telling that the EFF is doing basically nothing.

To be slightly more (maybe less) fair from an admittedly leftist bias, I think that the example of age verification misses another important component that has been pulled into the culture wars: a lot of age verification laws also target things like sexual education, which in some cases is construed to mean anything that touches on queer identities, even biographies and basic educational material.

The religious right tends to be against all forms of sexual education that aren't based around abstinence and usually want explicit parental involvement, but many on the left feel a basic but complete sexual education is important to educate kids about consent and bodily autonomy, which often helps children recognize things like grooming and assault where other forms of education fail.

Unfortunately that is an emotional topic and quickly gets into an area where classic libertarians (and there doesn't seem to be many left, these days) prioritize parental choice over freedom of speech. The EFF still needs to navigate these issues to be effective, but I don't think the old coalition holds like it used to.

> Unfortunately that is an emotional topic and quickly gets into an area where classic libertarians (and there doesn't seem to be many left, these days) prioritize parental choice over freedom of speech.

Since I don't live in the USA, I might miss some US-specific political nuances, but I would say that

- I am both for freedom of speech and parental choice

- What I am against is control and surveillance by government and big tech - and this is what the age verification discussion is all about.

So where is the issue that you mention?

You misunderstand my post.

I didn't claim there is actually a conflict between freedom of speech and parental choice. My point is that libertarians in the US have been manipulated by years of propaganda, to the point where they now side with government control of speech under the guise of parental choice, instead of standing on principle for freedom of speech. That is the problem.

This reads to me like you are putting effort into presenting your car is sick a way that satisfies your version of objectively neutral. I wonder if that is at the expense of details, because your claims provide no specifics for us to weigh independently.

As objective as you may want to sound, without any objective specific facts, all those words just boil down to "I'm a libertarian who used to support the EFF but don't like the way they're message anymore."

>if the organization were seen as less leftist

I don't understand what you think should happen here. I honestly don't think that the EFF has shifted nearly as much as people have in this hyper partizan environment. The trouble with being "center" is that you get pulled around by the most extreme. The flag is tied to the center of the rope right? If the right pulls away should the EFF compromise their values just to be seen as less leftist?

When being the center is the principle value, you stop being defined by your own values. If you're the flag, you don't get to have a say. One side could hook a tractor up to their end of the rope. The flag has no agency.

Do I think the EFF should have more outreach to the right? Sure. But that outreach can't be: we compromised our principles to chase the moving target loosely defined as "the center" of the moment.

Of course the EFF had more allies on the right during the Obama years. They were suing the Obama administration! There is always going to be a nontrivial amount of tribalism going on. How do you think suing the Trump administration has affected the left? They are eating it up!

No, the EFF should stick to their principles and try to pull people out of their tribalism rather than cater to it. Suing the "your team" administration should not automatically be seen as "look how other team they are!"

It's obvious to me that EFF should sue every administration. I started working at EFF during the first George W. Bush administration, and I worked there throughout that administration, the Obama administration, and the first Trump administration. EFF sued all of them, I worked on all of those cases, and I supported all of those cases.

As you correctly point out, people who liked each of these administrations were often unhappy when we sued them, and often assumed that we were politically biased against them. I always encountered people who effectively said "my party is using power appropriately for good purposes, and you should not question how we use power; that only helps my opponents". Part of the civil liberties framework and something that EFF has done well (including since the time it's become significantly left-leaning) is questioning how every administration uses power.

So, I'm absolutely not suggesting that EFF should praise or celebrate the Trump administration or not sue it.

> No, the EFF should stick to their principles and try to pull people out of their tribalism rather than cater to it. Suing the "your team" administration should not automatically be seen as "look how other team they are!"

I completely agree with this.

That's the thing: They choose leftist allegiances over their ostensible job. For example, search for "twitter files" on the EFF's Twitter account. Nothing. Blatant government effort to censor people. Zip, zilch, nada.

Now they abandon X that's become more free, and head for Bluesky and Mastodon, which are basically recreations of the stifling atmosphere of pre-Musk Twitter.

Freedom for their favoured people to do what they like, perhaps. But for me and others? Nah, not on the program.

A lot of what happened politically in the late 2010s and hit its peak during COVID was that this meme grew that people were thinking and saying things so offensive, we had to make sure they didn’t have a voice on any viable platform.

Oh, yeah, they could still in theory host their own website on Tor Onion, but in practice people would pull whatever domain they had, tell their hosting provider to get these people off of their network, and otherwise try to completely, excuse me, censor what they had to say.

There are two ways to deal with speech we don’t like:

• Do what it takes to bring the speech offline, so no one can read it.

• Respond to the speech with more speech.

Let me give you one example: The manosphere guys. What they believe is that they are learning to somehow become these mysterious “Alpha” guys, they believe the fiction that women only want to sleep with a minority of men, they believe every woman wants to sleep with those relatively few guys, that women will cheat on their partner to sleep with one of those guys, etc.

It’s a pretty misogynistic view of men, in summary.

So, how were they handled in the 2010s? Well, to give one example, one prominent manosphere guy (RooshV) was falsely accuse of advocating for “rape”, his books were pulled from Amazon, hackers attacked his webpage and forum to try and push him offline, forcing him to get a DDos-resistant Cloudflare account, etc. He was kicked off of Twitter. The UK blacklisted him so he is not allowed to travel there; Australia too.

It caused his followers to feel like they were being attacked by “Women and betas”, causing them to further the spread of their beliefs and them continuing to believe they were a persecuted minority.

The lies they believe: That women only want to date and sleep with a few “Alpha” men, that women will cheat on their partner if he is a “Beta provider”, and what not are still memes being widely spread online.

The attempts to censor those ideas didn’t work. They just made the idea stronger when everything was said and done.

What I am doing, however, is spreading facts and information countering their misogynistic lies. [1] Because I agree with Gilmore: The answer to speech we don’t like is more speech.

Point being, insomuch as the EFF feels one should deal with speech one doesn’t like with censorship, instead of more speech, they are no longer following their original ideals.

[1] https://nuancepill.substack.com/ is spreading the good word.

I also heard the slogan "the answer to bad speech is more speech" frequently inside EFF in the first half of my time working there and almost never in the second half.

It's actually a conceptually challenging question for me to try to account for why that changed. I would like to go off and ponder that a bit.

I should also emphasize that EFF has never advocated for narrowing what is protected speech under the first amendment. Even when people stopped habitually saying "the answer to bad speech is more speech", they didn't somehow start saying "the answer to bad speech is making it illegal".

I think there was a relatively rapid shift in many parts of American society around 2012 away from optimism about the potential of debate, discussion, and conversation. I remember in college (1997) someone had a poster based on the Pink Floyd song "Keep Talking" with the quote that they use from Stephen Hawking:

  It doesn't have to be like this
  All we need to do is make sure we keep talking

I can't really imagine a college student in 2026 having that poster (regardless of that student's political views).

I think the problem with the free speech ideals is a combination of engagement farms (i.e. a room full of smart phones where people “like” or view particular content so it artificially becomes more popular on social media) and bots (which, with modern AI, are pretty hard to distinguish from people who know how to write) which make modern online content a lot less organic.

In addition, the outrage culture (because anger increases engagement) went from us being “I disagree with you, but I defend your right to say that” to “What you say is so awful I want to destroy you”. It’s this second issue which has made things difficult for the EFF—their original mission was to allow the racists, misogynists, misandrists, and what not to have their soapbox. But that’s something which just doesn’t work in today’s political climate.

Ironically, I think X in a lot of ways was a beacon of free speech in a world where people advocating certain ideas will just be permanently banned from a given platform without question. Yes, they had issues with going out of their way to discourage people from linking outside of their walled garden [1], but they allowed a lot of content that would instantly get someone banned on Bluesky or Reddit.

Don’t get me started on how Facebook has morphed from being a place where I could see what my old college buddy from 30 years ago (who I parted ways with when I changed colleges) was up to, into a place where I just mainly see slop from content farms and troll farms.

[1] I left Twitter because they marked me as a “spammer” because I would link to Substacks or blogs showing men that, no, women aren’t only sleeping with 10% of men.

First off, just want to say thanks so much for posting your top comment - I'm only tangentially familiar with the changes to the EFF over the years so I appreciate the insight.

> I think there was a relatively rapid shift in many parts of American society around 2012 away from optimism about the potential of debate, discussion, and conversation.

I think you really hit the nail on the head with this one (small data point to think about - the reddit r/jailbait controversy was in 2011, and that was when, AFAICT, Reddit first implemented policies beyond "anything except outright illegal speech". I also remember that, regardless of ones opinion on the topic, Reddit didn't really have a choice in the matter - they would have been sued or legislated out of existence if they didn't ban r/jailbait and similar subreddit. I also have trouble believing either the "old" ACLU or EFF would have defended the r/jailbaiters, but you were there at the time so maybe you could offer insight).

But I'd argue that this isn't just some opinion change. One of the unstated beliefs of many who believed in the power of free speech is basically that when people are free to speak out, the "best" ideas, or at least the factually true ideas, win out. I don't know how you could be alive on this planet for the past 15 years and still believe that.

To take a relatively non-political example, look at Ann Reardon, a YouTuber who originally got big with a baking channel but switched to "food debunking videos" because there was so much food bullshit online, and worst, "food porn" makers were hawking cheap, bright videos of recipes online that were inherently impossible while real amazing bakers (who showed recipes that actually, truthfully worked) were having to leave YouTube because their views plummeted in the face of "So Yummy" and the like.

Similarly, take the rise of MAHA, which has now mainstreamed pseudoscience and rejected evidence-based policies. Fine, one could argue there is a lot of opinion baked into that statement, but in a lot of cases some MAHA pronouncements make no sense because they're not even self-consistent. Like the new nutrition guidelines literally say "When cooking with or adding fats to meals, prioritize oils with essential fatty acids, such as olive oil." Except olive oil, despite being a great choice for many people because it is high in oleic acid, is actually a very poor source of essential fatty acids. There are lots of other BS items I could bring up with respect to MAHA, that's just one that is so undeniably clear that the authors didn't know what they were talking about.

To emphasize, I think the rise on the left of "you're a bad person if you say the wrong things as we define them" is not just a horrible, but ultimately extremely counterproductive, approach. I myself have very little idea what the optimal solution is, but I think technology, with its algorithmic feeds and difficulty that it presents differentiating bots from humans, has fundamentally changed a lot of the "axioms" people assumed with free speech absolutism, and to deny that feels like sticking one's head in the sand.

Because of the asymmetry of energy required to refute bullshit, letting people spew bullshit and cleaning up afterwards is very expensive. And because some people are very bad at updating information in their heads (worse than the average, which is already poor), people will be told a refutation, agree, and later will forget, and repeat the refuted bullshit. And I truly believe they forget, not just pretend to agree with the refutation.

So preventing some things from gaining a big platform is good.

But, the mainstream media is extremely not neutral. A lot of what is said is not strictly true, because people are pushing an agenda. People have a right to talk about it. People need to resist very bad social engineering experiments being done on them "for their own good". The fact that sometimes people have to issue retractions and apologies and are even sometimes fired proves that if you just accept the first version of every story you hear and don't let people make a fuss about lies, even more lies will be accepted as mainstream truth. There needs to be an opposition to keep people honest. The opposition must be not cranks or enemies, but reasonable skeptics.

People who simply note that men and women are not exactly the same are grouped with rapists and pimps, and that is similar to the strategy to declare classical liberals who are not leftists "far right".

Dating patterns absolutely changed, women's online culture absolutely affects them. When women choose from men they know, like work colleagues, it works out. But on dating apps, women really are only interested in the top men. When judged only based on photo, by the opposite sex, most men are not attractive, while most women are attractive. But now people don't date colleagues and rarely even friends of friends. For many men, 1 match for 10,000 swipes is reality.

Telling the average man that he needs to get in better shape, take better care of his hygiene, dress better, demonstrate that he is a provider and a protector and he wants to spend time with her not only for sex, is not misogyny.

Telling the average woman that sleeping with the most attractive man who will sleep with her is not the way to find a husband is not misogyny.

A lot of dating advice is "adulting" advice. People are immature. They don't know how people perceive them, they don't know how to change that. Their expectations are based on bad fiction. They are overconfident or they are wimps.

Some advice from "the manosphere" should be grounds for imprisonment, and some should be taught in every school, and using a single name for both is terrible.

> the way that they think and talk about that work, in terms of what motivates it or what it is meant to achieve, is now a predominantly left-wing framing. If you don't have a left-wing worldview, you're at least not going to be culturally aligned with EFF's take on things, even if you agree with many of their positions and projects.

Is this due to them literally changing their mission and tack, or is this a shifting of the overton window? I would argue the latter, but you have direct experience there so I'm curious to hear more.

I'd say both of those.

There is a conscious effort to focus more directly and consistently on helping groups that are seen as oppressed.

There was an associated mission statement change sometime around 2015

> The Electronic Frontier Foundation is dedicated to ensuring that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all the people of the world.

(The "for all the people of the world" part is doing a lot of work there.)

Reminds me of when I checked the Sierra Club website a year or so ago (I'm a big fan of American National Parks) only to find that their most prioritized element of their "values" was "anti-racism".

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/us/politics/sierra-club-s...

This appears to be part of a greater pattern of semi-bipartisan organizations veering to the left and losing credibility.

The observation has been called Conquest’s Second Law. It is that common.

My impression is that as EFF's executive leadership has evolved over time, the driving motivations and attitudes of that leadership has changed EFFs style of execution.

It has probably helped increase their raw numbers, but it has also induced "mission drift".

O'Sullivan's First Law:

"All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_O%27Sullivan_(columnist)#...

Entryism. By definition it seems to be the left-wing moving more extreme rather than non left-wing all moving together towards the right. Democrats have shifted more to the left than Republicans to the right: https://archive.is/IILDt

Nah, what right wingers want has stayed remarkably similar over the decades, and many of their stances have in fact become more left-leaning over the years. What has changed is that they're more willing to fight for what they want, and not let the left unilaterally dictate what's respectable. That increased stridency is very real, but their stances and wants haven't become markedly more extreme over time, if anything the opposite.

There's multiple polls and investigations that show that it's the left that has adopted new and more extreme stances and has become less tolerant of dissent from those new goals. eg. Obama's border policy would be unthinkable in today's no human is illegal ideological climate.

That's a good way to put it. When the response to "this shouldn't be politicized" is "everything is political," that misses the point. Digital freedom doesn't need to be left vs right. A lot of powerful lobbying groups don't pick a party and will fight within both parties during primaries instead, for example PhRMA and AIPAC.

Note that EFF is a 501(c)(3) and is not allowed to endorse candidates, unlike other organizational structures. Some groups have multiple entities with different tax classifications, one of which can endorse candidates and one of which can't. EFF doesn't have that.

There is certainly a formula where e.g. single-issue PACs will support candidates of different parties who agree to support their issue. One of my EFF colleagues around 2009 (???) briefly experimented with making a separate PAC organization to lobby on copyright issues by donating to candidates (intentionally both Democrats and Republicans) who would agree to support the PAC's legislative principles. That PAC project only lasted one or two election cycles and I don't specifically remember why; I think the likeliest reason was simply a lack of donors.

Like for the ACLU it seems driven by the personalities that entered the organization.

The type of people who in the most recent generation become professional activists are also those looking for an all encompassing ominicause/ideology that frames disagreement as a fundamental moral failing

It's related, because over 1000 comments here are discussing why they are making such a political move (cloaking it as an audience "reach" issue).

You may want to skim the rest of the comments to understand the issue. The X platform is where many conservatives and centrists reside.

I don't have an issue with EFF wanting to no longer align itself with anyone who is not on the Left, but I prefer they just state that instead.

I dunno man, its seems like you were the one that brought up the political slant. I didn't see politics in that article.

Isn't your bank balance in a bank database also "just a number"? That number still exists if it goes up or down.

I understand that the bank's ownership of its computer means that hacking into it could be seen as (for example) a trespass. However, what if you somehow persuaded a bank employee to change someone's balance? The bank employee has some kind of authority to do this and the result is once again "just a number".

OK, what if you display some fraudulent information somewhere that leads a bank employee to decide to update a balance?

I don't want to entirely dismiss your intuition because after all there is lots of interest in not relying on legal systems to adjudicate issues related to cryptocurrency transactions. However, changing numbers and causing people or devices to change numbers is not inherently categorically exempt from being considered fraudulent. For that matter, computer fraud laws are often explicitly written to apply to unauthorized alteration of data, not just to unauthorized access to a specific device.

You might try to defend this by saying

* the ownership of cryptocurrency assets is defined as the ability to transfer them, and should not be further or separately interpreted apart from that ability, or

* deceiving a protocol is less obviously wrongful (or at least harder to define) than deceiving a person, or

* computer crime should require undermining someone's intent about the use of devices or data and that intent should be clearly manifested and meaningful, which it arguably isn't in a cryptocurrency system, or

* offline institutions create some kind of intelligible notion of ownership that's related to the non-digital world and this kind of ownership is what laws about theft or fraud aim to protect rather than any other kind of ownership without that non-digital nexus. (although this doesn't seem to be empirically true as ownership of, for example, domain names has been recognized as a form of property by courts since at least Kremen v. Cohen in 2003, even though it is just a matter of a database entry and has no offline existence)

These are interesting conceptual possibilities, but not necessarily persuasive for courts, law enforcement, or cryptocurrency end users.

>Isn't your bank balance in a bank database also "just a number"?

Absolutely not, but also "yes, which means no". In the first case, a bank balance isn't "just" a number, it's a massively regulated and legally backed number with many layers of interlocking entities, both private and multiple layers of government, in charge of maintenance, auditing, insuring, and enforcing. There is no equivalency to cryptocurrency there, as has been regularly touted.

To the second, it could certainly be argued that a bank balance is indeed "just a number" and that's the point, what gives the number its value is all the infrastructure around it not anything intrinsic to the number itself. If someone finds out my bank balance in Account ABC is $42076 that might have privacy implications sure, but knowing that number gives you access to absolutely nothing of meaning. That's a completely different situation to one where independently finding a given number, which note you need not even have any idea who it belongs to, suddenly equates to ability to make use of that number in real world relevant ways by social consensus.

We're talking more the equivalent of Adam guessing a winning lottery ticket, and then hanging onto it hoping the value will go up and he can trade on the ticket or do other things with it while not actually cashing it in because it's so unlikely somebody else will guess the ticket. Maybe because the lotto ticket winners are published on a public ledger, and Adam doesn't want the notoriety, or at least not just yet. Then Bob does independently guess it, immediately turns it in, and now Adam's lotto ticket is worthless. Bob didn't steal anything from Adam. Whether what Bob did is ok or not depends on the rules of the game.

>I understand that the bank's ownership of its computer means that hacking into it could be seen as (for example) a trespass

Holy shit are you for real? COULD be seen? Yes hacking into a bank would absolutely mean felony prosecution on multiple counts if you were caught.

>However, what if you somehow persuaded a bank employee to change someone's balance?

They would be committing multiple felonies and you would be committing criminal conspiracy, inducement and so on depending on jurisdiction, and probably wire fraud and a bunch of other stuff if you do it remotely that are sorta gimmes for prosecutors.

>The bank employee has some kind of authority to do this and the result is once again "just a number".

The bank employee does not have legal authority to do this. Any technical authority they have is only within the auspices of the law, internal compliance controls and practices and on and on.

Anyway without going through your whole post you're doing a whole lot of false equivalency. Breaking into and modifying somebody else's systems is no small point, it's explicitly illegal under the CFA in the US and similar in the rest of the developed world. There's no such thing as legally "copying" money from an end owner perspective, even if internally to the global financial systems when it comes to fiat currencies from the Treasury & Fed or other national equivalents to banks and other governments and so on it gets more complicated. It's all meant to effectively be a digital version of actual old fashioned hard currency. Hence the entire core concept of theft: it applies to zero sum games, where one person getting more cash means another person now has less.

I'd welcome any actual specific laws on the books about cryptocurrency that contemplates what would happen if someone simply guesses a private key with no interaction with anyone else and then uses it on the network. But without that it's hard to see any existing precedent. On the contrary, cryptocurrency people have repeatedly pushed, and built into the core foundations, the notion of code being law, that possession of a private key is all that's needed and the rest is up to the network and you're supposed to be in charge of that (or someone else is on your behalf and that relationship can be subject to contracts).

> Holy shit are you for real? COULD be seen? Yes hacking into a bank would absolutely mean felony prosecution on multiple counts if you were caught.

I meant to refer specifically to the trespass theory (advocated about 25-30 years ago by some companies as a way to enforce terms of service) as a reason one might attempt to distinguish "changing a number on company X's computer" from "changing a number in a distributed database". That is, there might be legal theories that are more protective of individual companies' computers just because the physical computers belong to the companies as opposed to information-in-general.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trespass_to_chattels#Early_app...

However, other forms of computer crime law can protect information-in-general, regardless of where it's stored or by whom.

My point was that existing laws have been happy to punish changing numbers on computers based on the meanings that those numbers have to people, what people act as though those numbers represent. I believe some of these laws are drafted broadly enough that they already treat stealing cryptocurrency as illegal. Even if legislators didn't consciously regulate it this way, courts may conclude that concepts of fraud, property, conversion, etc., already apply to cryptocurrency systems, even if there isn't an obvious technical difference between a transfer intentionally authorized by a human owner and a transfer authorized as a result of fraud, hacking, bugs, etc.

I understand that in, say, Bitcoin, "ownership" of assets stored in a UTXO is implemented only as the ability to cause a transaction that consumes that UTXO, and that this ability doesn't refer to a person's name or identity, or to good or evil, or to the reason that someone caused such a transaction, or to how someone came to possess the necessary information to create it. The blockchain consensus is updated based on whether the transaction followed certain deterministic rules, and concepts like "the owner" do not in fact appear directly anywhere in those rules. However, this doesn't stop a court from saying that some such transactions represent fraud or conversion or something while others don't, even though the transactions in question were equally valid according to the blockchain consensus.

I understand that there's uncertainty and debate in the cryptocurrency world about how we should want legal systems to regulate or not regulate cryptocurrency, remedy or not remedy otherwise-wrongful actions committed via cryptocurrency systems, and enforce or not enforce agreements implemented in or through cryptocurrencies. I also think you're right to point out that there's an issue about whether the content or behavior of the code is, or is meant to be, the "entire agreement" among parties using it, or whether it just somehow reflects other kinds of relationships that are also partly enforced by legal systems.

I currently work on smart contracts for a living. I find the question of how legal systems should view them fascinating, and I don't have a clearly articulated position on it.

Edit: I'd again like to point to Kremen v. Cohen as an analogy. In that case there was a privately (sort of) created database of domain name registrations. There weren't specific laws or regulations created to describe how the courts should view domain name ownership. The defendant in that case fraudulently caused a domain name to be transferred from the plaintiff to the defendant. The courts agreed that the domain name was "property" and that the defendant could be sued for this, again even though there was no specific legislation regulating the domain name industry. Now, many people are unhappy about various ways that the legal systems of various countries try to control and regulate domain name ownership and transfer. I know people who've worked on naming systems that are explicitly meant to be harder for governments to regulate.

Still, when courts looked at the original DNS decades ago, none of these forms of queasiness about the government's role stopped the courts from concluding that domain names were property based on their characteristics and use, and that people could be sued for fraudulently taking domain names away from other people.

It seems like you might be perceiving a kind of hypocrisy in the notion of people wanting to deliberately create things that are harder to regulate, and then still sometimes involving the courts in disputes over them.

As was alluded to in the comments, my colleagues at Blockstream Research are doing some work on this with mechanisms called SHRINCS and SHRIMPS.

Of course, inventing and demonstrating a quantum-resistant signature mechanism isn't the same thing as deploying it in consensus or upgrading everyone's UTXOs to it, and it's fair to say that there are many steps in between!

This work is important, and I'm looking forward to forming an opinion on it. Maybe a future post! For those who are interested, this is what I'm aware of:

- Tim Ruffing proved that Taproot's commitment scheme was quantum-resilient: https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1307

- Jonas Nick and Mikhail Kudinov have proposed SHRINCS: https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/shrincs-324-byte-stateful-post-... and SHRIMPS: https://x.com/n1ckler/status/2038695067754328095.

Also, LetsEncrypt is very cool! Thanks for working on it.

I'm still confused about 2.7 because it says that we have to use WL so that "the bit line (BL) connects to the storage element for reading or writing". But the accepted solution connects to the storage element only for writing, not for reading (the capacitor is always connected to the output for reading).

I would think that if you wanted to make it so that the storage element was connected either for reading or for writing by the WL and otherwise disconnected, you would need two transistors, not just one.

Perhaps this was meant to say "for writing either a 0 or a 1"?

2.7 is confusing because you can wire up the bitline and the word line the wrong way around and the tests still pass.

Surely this indicates that HN readers are quite divided over this topic, right?

Lots of people posting it, lots of people upvoting it, lots of people flagging it (or maybe more likely downvoting one another's takes in the comments?).

That book is just called House, although I always confuse the title with J. D. Salinger's Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters.

Hah, I should have remembered that title. Just ordered the Truck Full of Money book. I hadn't really kept track of his later works.

I remember Buenos Aires to Porto Alegre (via Foz do Iguaçu) by bus. I guess that's about 1/4 or 1/3 as far, with somewhat less dramatic landscapes. Extremely comfortable except for the violent action movies shown on an overhead TV with sound, even for part of the night.

Edit: but ultimately probably a very different experience because it's so much less mountainous!

That’s basically just a bus up the coast of Uruguay and a bit of Rio Grande do Sul? I did the same route in the opposite direction, via Tacuarembo, mostly on horseback. Extremely uncomfortable, but an interesting week nonetheless.

You might be envisioning a more direct route that doesn't include the Foz do Iguaçu part (maybe crossing the border in Uruguaiana or something). I bet that exists as a commercial bus route option too, but the Foz do Iguaçu stopover is all the way up at the triple border of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. So the Brazilian border-skirting for this trip includes all of Rio Grande do Sul, all of Santa Catarina, and a bit of Parana, then back down again on the Brazilian side after crossing the border.

Edit: Yes, it looks like you could totally do that (Buenos Aires to Uruguaiana, then Uruguaiana to Porto Alegre) and save many hours of travel, or even cut more directly through central Uruguay and save even more time. We took the longer option because we wanted to visit Iguaçu Falls and the Itaipu dam, which were both spectacular.

Latin American noise tolerance is something else, the local passengers probably found falling asleep to the sound of gunfire and shouting from the film soothing

I remember a couple of friends using DR DOS in the 1980s. There seemed to be a disagreement about whether to pronounce it as /di ɑɹ/ or "doctor". (I realize it was named after a company and not after a doctor, so the former is more etymologically faithful.) Was there a standard among the creators or the user community?

There is a precedent for "doctor", based on how people pronounced the company's "DR Logo"/"Dr. Logo"

Digital Research DOS. That's what I called it.

DiRe DOS :)

Any issues about amino acid deficiencies from that? (as opposed to protein more generally?)

When I was growing up, there was a vogue among my fellow vegetarians for the book Diet for a Small Planet which suggested that we needed to eat a diversity of amino acids in each meal, hence "complementary" proteins at the same time. This concept then seemed to fade away completely because it appears that the body can actually successfully make use of amino acids even when consumed at different times. But they have to be consumed eventually!

This was the selling point for a Mexican cuisine staple: that rice & beans had all the complementary proteins. But, good to hear that the body does not need to have the complements in the exact same meal.

There was this scholarly article from Pamela Samuelson and Suzanne Scotchmer

https://yalelawjournal.org/pdf/200_ay258cck.pdf

which, as I recall it, suggested that the copyright law effectively considered that it was good that there was a way around copyright (with reverse engineering and clean-room implementation), and also good that the way around copyright required some investment in its own right, rather than being free, easy, and automatic.

I think Samuelson and Scotchmer thought that, as you say, costs matter, and that the legal system was recognizing this, but in a kind of indirect way, not overtly.