'Seasoned' campaigner & computer whisperer. Ecology, democracy & infosec advocate. Doing research & data viz + 🌐 knowledge graphs @ClimateRace 🍉
Tkaronto via Coast Salish
Joined June 2007
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🙃 Ben WΞst 🦋 retweeted
“And we're absolutely committed to our Paris commitments.” This statement is absolutely factually untrue. Canada now has zero chance of meeting its 2030 Paris commitment and has no path to meet net zero by 2050 (and this is before any new oilsands or LNG) climateinstitute.ca/news/can…
Dabrusin defends Canada's climate record in advance of UN climate conference nationalnewswatch.com/2026/1…
🙃 Ben WΞst 🦋 retweeted
Complaining that the Motorola Signature 27 costs €1,899 misses how low-level silicon security works.
People treat phone tiers like a slider: pay less, get a dimmer screen or plastic back. In exploit mitigation, that slider does not exist.
Hardware memory tagging (MTE) is not a luxury finish. It is an ARMv9 primitive. Chipmakers strip MTE and secure element isolation from mid-range dies to save area and margin.
If an SoC cannot enforce hardware memory safety, GrapheneOS loses its core defense against zero-day memory corruption. Shipping on stripped silicon to hit €499 turns the OS into privacy theater.
Breaking the Pixel hardware monopoly required an OEM willing to unlock bootloader attestation on cutting-edge silicon. That overhead hits flagship tiers first.
€1,899 hurts, but building a cheap phone by discarding memory safety primitives is not an alternative. It is snake oil.
Motorola Signature 27 dropping with official GrapheneOS support is the wildest hardware plot twist of the year.
First non-Pixel device to actually allow custom root of trust and verified boot re-locking. Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6. 7,000 mAh battery with 90W charging. Zero Google/carrier telemetry out of the box once flashed.
$1,600 is steep, matching maxed-out iPhone pricing. For a dedicated cold-signing brick, it’s massive overkill—a used Pixel still wins on cost. But as a daily driver with zero-telemetry, hardened malloc, and true hardware freedom? Finally, an uncompromising endgame beast.
Gonna wait a couple months for the stable official builds to roll out before pulling the trigger.
Gonna harden your bonk once in a while.
🙃 Ben WΞst 🦋 retweeted
This is former USN Admiral Eileen Laubacher, I say former because in his purge of senior military ( mostly female) Hegseth fired her.
Yesterday she beat Lauren Boebert in the election and is now in the congress.
She will be on the select committee to interrogate him
🙃 Ben WΞst 🦋 retweeted
Actually, you’re just wasting millions of taxpayer dollars to rip out bike lanes which won't fix congestion but make roads less safe for everyone. All this to feed a culture war. So lame.
🙃 Ben WΞst 🦋 retweeted
Sam Altman thinks RAM sitting in personal computers is a waste when it could be put to better use in data centers.
Weird. I was just thinking that all those billions sitting in billionaires’ bank accounts could be put to much better use in our communities.
🙃 Ben WΞst 🦋 retweeted
#NEW: A tense standoff unfolded in Etobicoke Tuesday night, as roughly 100 protesters gathered around construction equipment being used to remove the protected bike lanes along Bloor Street West. bit.ly/4z5Y3GE
🙃 Ben WΞst 🦋 retweeted
New: the DHS officials who tried to search the man who wiped his GrapheneOS phone lied. They pushed him about having child abuse images. Documents reveal that was a pretext; he wasn't suspected of this at all. He's a Stop Cop City activist 404media.co/dhs-said-they-se…
🙃 Ben WΞst 🦋 retweeted
I cycle to work every day. Toronto to Etobicoke. I was hit by a car that went through a red light. Protections for cyclists is poor. The laws protecting cyclists are ignored by the Toronto police and rarely enforced.
If I drove a car I would be adding to congestion. This is insane. I am off on bicycle to get to work.
🙃 Ben WΞst 🦋 retweeted
I don’t normally post about local politics but have to say something here:
The fact that these bike lanes are actually being removed is so embarrassingly backwards and regressive.
That Brad Bradford, a competitive cyclist and former city planner, supports removal of the lanes is another layer of insanity. Total spineless move. This guy really will say anything to get elected - not the kind of person who should be mayor of our glorious city nation of Toronto.
🙃 Ben WΞst 🦋 retweeted
If this were Iran, or another "enemy" country, it would be the top story in every news outlet on the planet.
#Breaking: European diplomats, including French and Polish representatives, who went to the West Bank to observe the olive harvest, have been violently assaulted by Israeli settlers.
🙃 Ben WΞst 🦋 retweeted
I'm the only Jewish leader of a political party.
I'm a victim of Antisemitism every day and I've made it clear Jewish people are welcome in my party.
You're a Prime Minister who arms a genocide and locks pensioners up for opposing it.
Andy Burnham rules out any partnership between Labour and the Green Party due to their controversial motion declaring "Zionism is racism".
🔗 trib.al/c05KDDg
🙃 Ben WΞst 🦋 retweeted
Thread 🧵
1/ NEW REPORT: Billions of advertising auctions determine in real time which ads we see on websites and in apps every day. Our latest research shows how the same data fueling this advertising ecosystem is being used to profile millions of users and silently infect targets with zero-click mercenary spyware, a novel attack technique we call "Adfection.”
Read the report: citizenlab.ca/research/how-d…
🙃 Ben WΞst 🦋 retweeted
Citizen Lab director @RonDeibert tells @globeandmail how Canada’s lawful access bill “will make it impossible for a large number of invaluable privacy-preserving tools” to operate in the country.
