counting down the days till work
work
I managed to keep getting work done this week, though it slowed down toward the end. I canceled a few meetings, so I was mostly just focused on writing the papers that I want to get done. I'm still not sure what I'll submit to Eurocrypt this year. I'm on the program committee, so I can only submit two papers. Anything I don't submit though, I think will do well either at STOC, Crypto, or TCC next year too though. No matter what happens with submissions, I'm glad that I am really enjoying the problems I'm researching right now.
I'm also looking forward to my first rebuttal phase on a PC, which I think starts next week for S&P. Hopefully, the authors of the papers that are still in the running have some good light to shed on the papers that they wrote. In the meantime, I'll continue to count down the days till I officially start at Stevens.
non-work
Life outside of work has been crazier than expected. I'm still mostly doing my regular things. Baldur's Gate is going well. My partner and I are almost finished with Community. The weather has been warm and nice, so I've enjoyed running a lot. I'm almost done with my next Maddaddam book. Beyond that though, my partner and I have been trying to plan the coming years. She got a great job offer, but it'll require her to relocate for a while. Hopefully, we can figure out a good system for making that work though, but for now, it's just been really crazy. (Especially because she's been slammed with work at her current job too.)
things i saw this week
A lot of good posts from the Proton Blog about:
A new reddit feature gives some additional privacy for those who want it
A Molly White blog post about how to curate an RSS feed to customize your own feed
An Interesting Times episode about genetic selection of embryos in IVF, which was very thought-provoking
An article reporting that a security group had GPT-5 giving harmful advice only a day after its release
questions
What are good resources to understand the limitations of steganography? Are there interesting open problems?
There are tons of papers about steganography, but they're difficult to parse and understand the specific setting that they're proving things in.
I think this broad literature stems from the fact that there's a big mix of cryptographers, practitioners, and information theoretic researchers that tackle related but nuanced questions
Have people researched ways to make car technology privacy preserving? Are there solutions that companies implement?
This is a recurring question for me, ever since I realized how much data modern cars collect on their drivers.
I don't even know of good privacy preserving options for cars that were built in like the last 15 years.
I wonder if there are ways to bring attention to this issue, or if I've just failed to find the solutions that are out there.
Thanks for reading to the end! Here's a picture from the concert I went to with my friend last week:
