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Ian Preston

@ianopolous.bsky.social

1.7K followers 2.1K following 640 posts

Mathematician/particle physicist turned privacy researcher. #Java #Oxford Building a better web - private, self-sovereign identity, p2p, social - with @peergos.org. Public social media undermines democracy. #covidisairborne #maskswork #cleantheair

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Ian Preston @ianopolous.bsky.social · Jun 14

The public web is dying as it fills with AI slop and turns search into trash. A private, human focused web would let those who don't want their creations fed into AI to easily not allow that. Search would be forcibly decentralized because it can only run with your access through your social graph.

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Reposted by Ian Preston

Zack Polanski @zackpolanski.bsky.social · 4h

Something extraordinary is happening.

+6000 new members in ONE SINGLE day.

@greenparty.org.uk just hit 130,000 members and rising!!!

Join.greenparty.org.uk

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Reposted by Ian Preston

Dmitry Chestnykh ☮️ @dchest.com · 1d

This is a game changer in the named color technology! 🌈

With CSS5 color-mix() function, you can get a closer match to any sRGB color you want using only named colors.

Compare this beauty:
DarkSalmon 50%, BlanchedAlmond

to this modern horror:
oklch(0.8052 0.0723 48.25)

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Reposted by Ian Preston

JauntyWunderKind @jauntywk.bsky.social · 2d

This makes sense & I get why privacy demands we are where we are.

But it makes me pretty mad to see a special, curated list of blessed fast resources on the web. And for everything else to be slow forever.

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Reposted by Ian Preston

Peergos @peergos.org · 3d

We've got a new release out! This includes a timezone fix for sync, and 1000x faster host dir listing when creating a sync.

github.com/Peergos/web-...

Release Sync improvements · Peergos/web-ui

This release makes updates on Windows easier by using a fixed app UUID. It also makes listing host directories when creating a new sync on desktop 1000x faster by lazily loading to a smaller depth....

github.com

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Ian Preston @ianopolous.bsky.social · 4d

There were actually some useful discounts in there, but nothing needing shouting about.

Ian Preston @ianopolous.bsky.social · 4d

Email subject: IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT NESPRESSO...

Let me stop you right there. First, no need to shout. Second, it's coffee, chill.

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Reposted by Ian Preston

rklaehn.bsky.social @rklaehn.bsky.social · 4d

I recently got nerdsniped by @zooko2.bsky.social
into implementing fast BLAKE3 hashing of multiple small blobs.

I wrote a blog post about my experiment.

iroh.computer/blog/hashing...

It would be cool to polish this a bit and turn it into a public API.

Hashing multiple blobs with BLAKE3

How to quickly hash multiple small blobs with BLAKE3

iroh.computer

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Ian Preston @ianopolous.bsky.social · 4d

Why CBC I wonder?

Ian Preston @ianopolous.bsky.social · 7d

Holy moly! 17,000 new paying members in a week. 2 more weeks of this and Greens will pass the Conservatives. 45% increase in last month since @zackpolanski.bsky.social took over. greenparty.org.uk/2025/10/12/g...

Green Party membership surges past 100,000 as polls show record support - Green Party

The Green Party of England and Wales has today announced that its membership has surged past 100,000 members, the highest in the Party’s history. This marks over a 45% increase since Zack Polanski was...

greenparty.org.uk

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Reposted by Ian Preston

Carissa Véliz @carissaveliz.bsky.social · 8d

Very nice to see my TEDx Porto talk is out! How #privacy can save your life. For more on privacy, get the #book - Privacy Is Power. #AIEthics

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSPR...

How privacy can save your life | Carissa Véliz | TEDxPorto

YouTube video by TEDx Talks

www.youtube.com

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Ian Preston @ianopolous.bsky.social · 8d

Heretical opinion: forward secrecy (FS) mostly doesn't matter unless all chats + clients enforce disappearing messages. Otherwise when the client is compromised all previous messages are compromised regardless of any FS.

Ian Preston @ianopolous.bsky.social · 8d

It was indeed that joke.

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Ian Preston @ianopolous.bsky.social · 8d

Sometimes its privileges are too high.

Ian Preston @ianopolous.bsky.social · 8d

If I had a dog I would call it sudo.

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Reposted by Ian Preston

IntentToShip @intenttoship.dev · 9d

Blink: Intent to Prototype: Algorithm Updates in WebCrypto

groups.google.com

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Ian Preston @ianopolous.bsky.social · 9d

To avoid timezone issues missed because "works on my machine".

Ian Preston @ianopolous.bsky.social · 10d

Developers shouldn't be allowed to live in UTC.

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Reposted by Ian Preston

Peergos @peergos.org · 11d

We've got a new release out folks! github.com/Peergos/web-...
This let you easily migrate servers with a single click! This of course keeps all your data, friends, and identity intact. There is also a way to request/pay for another server to live mirror your data.

Release Easy migration + mirror · Peergos/web-ui

This release includes UI support for easy migration between servers. You can now request or pay for storage on another server and have it live mirror your data. Once a server is mirroring your data...

github.com

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Reposted by Ian Preston

KOJAMF🤘🖤🤘 @kojamf.bsky.social · 14d

Dr. Jane Goodall filmed an interview with Netflix in March 2025 that she understood would only be released after her death.

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Ian Preston @ianopolous.bsky.social · 14d

Yes it has to work. Legally mandate ads to have a little marker in the corner, a bit like Polish ads always start with "reklama". Or maybe darken it to make it not so bright and eye catching.

Ian Preston @ianopolous.bsky.social · 14d

I want an augmented-reality ad blocker. Covers up real physical ads.

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Reposted by Ian Preston

Jake Lazaroff @jakelazaroff.com · 14d

put another way: i don't want your data—not just from an ideological "users should be in control" perspective, but from a pragmatic "this makes my app harder and more expensive to run" perspective

we've been so focused on making it easy to scale up that we've accidentally made it hard to scale down

Jake Lazaroff @jakelazaroff.com · 14d

i like making little web apps for myself/family/friends. the most annoying parts — the parts that drastically increase the scope, from "a bunch of HTML, CSS & JS files" to "a web server and database" — are auth+persistence. so i am very excited about atproto including a user-owned solution for both.

Erlend Sogge Heggen @erlend.sh · 14d

The web can be made personal again.

blog.muni.town/personal-dat...

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Reposted by Ian Preston

MetropleX | GrapheneOS @metroplex.bot · 15d

National Security does not mean security of the nation. The sole purpose of anything done with it as the stated purpose is for the protection and security of the state, it's apparatus and the instruments of enforcing it.

It does not serve you, your freedom, safety or security.

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Reposted by Ian Preston

Signal @signal.org · 16d

We are alarmed by reports that Germany is on the verge of a catastrophic about-face, reversing its longstanding and principled opposition to the EU’s Chat Control proposal which, if passed, could spell the end of the right to privacy in Europe. signal.org/blog/pdfs/ge...

signal.org

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Reposted by Ian Preston

Martin Kleppmann @martin.kleppmann.com · 16d

It took almost two years…! The Fugue paper that @mweidner.bsky.social and I wrote about interleaving in collaborative text editing algorithms was finally accepted by IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems

paywalled: ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/111...
free: arxiv.org/abs/2305.00583

The Art of the Fugue: Minimizing Interleaving in Collaborative Text Editing

Most existing algorithms for replicated lists, which are widely used in collaborative text editors, suffer from a problem: when two users concurrently insert text at the same position in the document,...

arxiv.org

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