ICMS has been busy and buzzing this week with attendees from the Foundations and Applications of Lattice-based Cryptography workshop, both in-person... #cryptography #maths

This was good fun! Thanks to all who attended, spoke, and to my co-organisers Dr Rachel Player and @erin__hales.

Rant incoming! Please don't cite "Foo et al.", especially please don't use "Albrecht et al." Commonly in our field authors are listed in alphabetical order and thus the person centrally responsible for pushing a project across the finish line may be swallowed in "et al."

To echo this -- use a profiler! I recently achieved a 10x speedup by changing an environment variable (!!) -- I _never_ would have found the source without using a (stack sampling) profiler. They're worth their weight in gold.

Mucked up? So the Holocaust was a sort of whoops-a-daisy political moment? Oh.

I guess our advertisements worked too well. We're in dire need of additional evaluators, due to a record high number of registrations. If you or someone in your group is eager to join the team, please fill out the self-nomination form before the weekend: forms.gle/wp5XpF5EmHJEZP…

Joint statement from more than 300 scientists from 32 countries warning against the EU proposal for regulation to detect Child Sexual Abuse Material tinyurl.com/CSAScientistsL…… The technologies it puts forward are inadequate to solve the problem and bring huge societal risks 🧵

68 (UK affiliated) researchers working on security and privacy have raised alarms about provisions in the UK #OnlineSafetyBill: "our concern is that surveillance technologies are deployed in the spirit of providing online safety." Read our letter here: haddadi.github.io/UKOSBOpenlette…

📎 Congratulations to our own Erin Hales, Sean Murphy, Tabitha Ogilvie, and Rachel Player, and coauthors Anamaria Costache and Benjamin R. Curtis, whose paper "On the Precision Loss in Approximate Homomorphic Encryption" is accepted to SAC 2023 ➡️ sac-workshop.github.io/sac-2023/accep…

OK, real talk. Telegram Messenger makes big proclamations about free speech and privacy, but their promises are mostly marketing. The app collects a huge amount of data. And like all Big Tech, when actually pressed by governments, they ultimately comply. techcrunch.com/2023/08/14/ira…

The Online Safety Bill will have its third reading in the House of Lords on Wednesday. From what I can gather, it is expected to pass. This is quite worrying for online safety. A thread.

Call for papers for the new IACR journal is out.. cic.iacr.org/callforpapers Please support this journal. It is the outcome of a many year community led effort to improve the publication process in cryptography.

Not just me, but 70+ of us¹: haddadi.github.io/UKOSBOpenlette… ¹ established researchers and scientists working in the fields of information security and cryptography

Ok, shaking my Twitterverse network. I'm organising the Performance track for QCon London next year, and I want to make sure I don't bias the track construction too much. If you do performance work, please reply to this tweet or DM me :-) - would love to hear about you!

Rikke Bjerg Jensen wrote an ethnography focused announcement blog post: rikkebjerg.gitlab.io/me/post/2023-1… and Martin R. Albrecht wrote a cryptography focused one: martinralbrecht.wordpress.com/2023/12/14/soc…

Registration of interest for CrossFryre 2024 is open!! sites.google.com/view/crossfyre… Official registration goes through Eurocrypt website, but if you are interested in attending, giving a 15min Talk or a 5min Lightening talk, please fill the form!

We are looking for an ethnography postdoc (2 years) to work with us on the EPSRC-funded Social Cryptography project (…foundations-of-cryptography.gitlab.io). Closing date is 15 February 2024. Based at Royal Holloway University of London. More information here: jobs.royalholloway.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx?r…