And suddenly I'm glad that I'm not going to defcon this year. I have no issue waiting and watching the talks to avoid shit like this. How it started: "The Electronic Frontier Foundation was formed in 1990 by John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor. The foundation was a response to concerns that law enforcement and policymakers lacked sufficient knowledge about the internet to make decisions or policies that respected people's rights." How it's going: "get your purple beard done, and let's talk about compliance at fedcon".

#OPSEC365 145/365 Office building visitor logs create permanent records of who you met with. Sign-in sheets, badge issuance systems, and lobby cameras all document visitors. Security keeps these records indefinitely in some buildings. The person who signed you in has documented that you visited their floor on that date. Building security logs document every visitor, including ones who were never suspected of anything. #OPSEC365

The government cannot tell you how many federal laws exist. The Justice Department spent two years trying and stopped. You are not following all of them.

You don't need their permission to store or send your own wealth anymore and that terrifies them.

#OPSEC365 144/365 Valet parking gives strangers complete access to your vehicle. Your car contains registration documents with your address, garage door openers, house keys if you leave them on the ring, and anything stored in the console or glove box. The valet has unsupervised access to all of it. Before you valet park, consider what's accessible inside your car and who's about to have the keys. #OPSEC365

The scary "Monero deanonymized over Tor" story needs an attacker running a chunk of the Tor network itself to ever reach your IP. I break down what the paper actually proves versus what happens to you, on real nodes in an isolated lab. #NewVideo

#OPSEC365 143/365 Two-factor authentication backup codes are just passwords you might have written down somewhere. Those recovery codes printed out during setup, stored in a notes app, or saved in a text file give the same access as the password they bypass. Anyone who finds them can access your account without your second factor. Find where you stored your 2FA backup codes and decide if those locations are secure enough. #OPSEC365

Nobody broke Monero's cryptography. They found a node that talked too much, and the devs fixed it in December 2024.

Mining Monero on your CPU is the most accessible way to acquire coins without touching a KYC exchange.

#OPSEC365 142/365 Photo metadata stripping varies by platform, and you should never assume. Twitter and Facebook strip EXIF from images served on their CDN. Discord strips it from most upload paths as of recent testing. Email attachments preserve everything. Slack, Telegram, and many smaller platforms vary by file type and by whether the image is sent or attached. Test each platform yourself by uploading a photo and downloading it back to see what survives. #OPSEC365

#OPSEC365 141/365 In 1992, NYNEX alone processed 25,510 subpoenas. Scaled nationally, Ross Anderson estimated roughly half a million Americans have phone records seized each year. Metadata is collected on perhaps 100x as many people as are wiretapped. This is surveillance as routine administrative process. The infrastructure existed before you were a person of interest.

They deserve it.

#OPSEC365 140/365 Phones in gym locker rooms are recording devices everyone ignores. People scroll their phones while changing, and those phones have cameras. Gym mirror selfies often capture other people in the background. The social norm against locker room recording doesn't prevent it from happening constantly. Be aware of who has a phone out when you're in spaces where you expect privacy. #OPSEC365

IMSI catchers and fake cell tower attacks. "Mobile phones will connect to any base station with the strongest signal, enabling surveillance and interception." Practical Attacks Against Privacy and Availability in 4G/LTE Mobile Communication Systems by Altaf Shaik et al. (2015) https://arxiv.org/pdf/1510.07563.pdf

When one XMR hits six figures, you'll be pricing things in nanoneros and the math will still work.