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Geography Is Destiny
Article URL: https://lindynewsletter.beehiiv.com/p/geography-is-destiny
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43657431
Points: 2
# Comments: 0
Book Review: How the War Was Won
Article URL: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-how-the-war-was
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43657427
Points: 1
# Comments: 0
Florida’s New Social Media Bill Says the Quiet Part Out Loud and Demands an Encryption Backdoor
At least Florida’s SB 868/HB 743, “Social Media Use By Minors” bill isn’t beating around the bush when it states that it would require “social media platforms to provide a mechanism to decrypt end-to-end encryption when law enforcement obtains a subpoena.” Usually these sorts of sweeping mandates are hidden behind smoke and mirrors, but this time it’s out in the open: Florida wants a backdoor into any end-to-end encrypted social media platforms that allow accounts for minors. This would likely lead to companies not offering end-to-end encryption to minors at all, making them less safe online.
Encryption is the best tool we have to protect our communication online. It’s just as important for young people as it is for everyone else, and the idea that Florida can “protect” minors by making them less safe is dangerous and dumb.
The bill is not only privacy-invasive, it’s also asking for the impossible. As breaches like Salt Typhoon demonstrate, you cannot provide a backdoor for just the “good guys,” and you certainly cannot do so for just a subset of users under a specific age. After all, minors are likely speaking to their parents and other family members and friends, and they deserve the same sorts of privacy for those conversations as anyone else. Whether social media companies provide “a mechanism to decrypt end-to-end encryption” or choose not to provide end-to-end encryption to minors at all, there’s no way that doesn’t harm the privacy of everyone.
If this all sounds familiar, that’s because we saw a similar attempt from an Attorney General in Nevada last year. Then, like now, the reasoning is that law enforcement needs access to these messages during criminal investigations. But this doesn’t hold true in practice.
In our amicus brief in Nevada, we point out that there are solid arguments that “content oblivious” investigation methods—like user reporting— are “considered more useful than monitoring the contents of users’ communications when it comes to detecting nearly every kind of online abuse.” That remains just as true in Florida today.
Law enforcement can and does already conduct plenty of investigations involving encrypted messages, and even with end-to-end encryption, law enforcement can potentially access the contents of most messages on the sender or receiver’s devices, particularly when they have access to the physical device. The bill also includes measures prohibiting minors from accessing any sort of ephemeral messaging features, like view once options or disappearing messages. But even with those features, users can still report messages or save them. Targeting specific features does nothing to protect the security of minors, but it would potentially harm the privacy of everyone.
SB 868/HB 743 radically expands the scope of Florida’s social media law HB 3, which passed last year and itself has not yet been fully implemented as it currently faces lawsuits challenging its constitutionality. The state was immediately sued after the law’s passage, with challengers arguing the law is an unconstitutional restriction of protected free speech. That lawsuit is ongoing—and it should be a warning sign. Florida should stop coming up with bad ideas that can't be implemented.
Weakening encryption to the point of being useless is not an option. Minors, as well as those around them, deserve the right to speak privately without law enforcement listening in. Florida lawmakers must reject this bill. Instead of playing politics with kids' privacy, they should focus on real, workable protections—like improving consumer privacy laws to protect young people and adults alike, and improving digital literacy in schools.
Classifying Ways of Thinking About Interpretability Research
Article URL: https://eamag.me/2025/Notes-On-Classifying-Interpretability-Research
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43657401
Points: 1
# Comments: 0
MCP Commander: Monitor, Debug, and Secure Your MCP Servers
Article URL: https://mcpcommander.com/
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43657396
Points: 1
# Comments: 1
Mark Klein, a Whistleblower Who Revealed Domestic Spying, Dies at 79
Article URL: https://www.wsj.com/us-news/mark-klein-whistleblower-dies-73f434c7
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43657377
Points: 18
# Comments: 4
Open source self-hosted bookmarking app Hoarder changes its name to Karakeep
Article URL: https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1js667o/hoarder_is_rebranding_to_karakeep/
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43657069
Points: 1
# Comments: 0
Show HN: First AI Game Master that can run combat on a battlemap
Here's a demo video I made for our AI game master who can now generate a battlemap and run combat! Franz (our AI GM), can now generate character voices, move tokens around the map, update/track everything, and more. We also added voice input/output!
I don't want to toot my own horn too much but I just think it's so fricken cool that this is possible now.
Here are some notes that you guys might find interesting: - The main turn loop is a workflow, but parts of it are agentic. For example, npc turns are agentic. See https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-effective-age... for more info about workflow vs agentic - Most of the decision making is handled by LLMs, but more mechanical aspects are handled programmatically and then given to the LLM as context. For example, damage calculations are done programmatically. The hardest part about building this was deciding what to let the LLM do and what to do via code. - This would not have been possible a year ago without advancements in token speed and quality, especially with tool calling! - We use gemini-2.0-flash mostly
Happy to answer any questions about how we built this
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43657047
Points: 2
# Comments: 0
NOAA Scientists Clean Bathrooms, Reconsider Lab Experiments as Contracts Expire
Article URL: https://www.propublica.org/article/noaa-contracts-seattle-lab
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43657042
Points: 5
# Comments: 0
Who's in and Who's Out at the Naval Academy's Library?
Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/11/us/politics/naval-academy-banned-books.html
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43657041
Points: 1
# Comments: 0
SIM: Open-source AI Agent workflow builder
Article URL: https://github.com/simstudioai/sim
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43657039
Points: 1
# Comments: 0
D CK
Article URL: https://youhavebeenhacked.com/
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43657027
Points: 1
# Comments: 0
Tesla stops taking orders in China for two models imported from US
Article URL: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/apr/11/tesla-stops-taking-orders-in-china-for-two-models-imported-from-us
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43657016
Points: 5
# Comments: 1
Show HN: ToyWithRaylib, compile and run raylib games on the browser
Some months ago, I created https://toywithraylib.com/, a little project that uses emception (https://github.com/jprendes/emception)
It allows you to build and run raylib projects entiretly on the browser (It is compiled and run entirely locally!)
It has raylib 5.6, rlImGui and box2d included! It can be used to run any C++ project, allowing configuring the build options using python (which also runs entirely in the website)
Once you are finished testing, you can download the code or download the game in order to share, which will be stored in a single-file HTML file, it also has basic link-sharing capabilities but I don't expect them to work with large examples since it is url-based.
The project is opensourced, I just wanted to hack it to get it working, but if somebody wants to improve it or fork it, is more than welcomed to do so :)
Project link: https://github.com/Rucadi/emception_raylib
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43657009
Points: 1
# Comments: 0
The Camera Grant Program 2.0 with OpenStreetMap US
Article URL: https://blog.mapillary.com/update/2025/04/10/announcing-camera-grant-program-v2?_fb_noscript=1
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43656983
Points: 1
# Comments: 0
Expectation Maximization in Cryo-EM
Article URL: https://guide.cryosparc.com/expectation-maximization-in-cryo-em
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43656970
Points: 1
# Comments: 0
Playing in the Creek
Article URL: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/rLucLvwKoLdHSBTAn/playing-in-the-creek
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43656905
Points: 1
# Comments: 0
Cybersecurity Community Must Not Remain Silent On Executive Order Attacking Former CISA Director
Cybersecurity professionals and the infosec community have essential roles to play in protecting our democracy, securing our elections, and building, testing, and safeguarding government infrastructure. It is critically important for us to speak up to ensure that essential work continues and that those engaged in these good faith efforts are not maligned by an administration that has tried to make examples of its enemies in many other fields.
President Trump has targeted the former Director of the government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Chris Krebs, with an executive order cancelling the security clearances of employees at SentinelOne, where Krebs is now the CIO, and launching a probe of his work in the White House. President Trump had previously fired Krebs in 2020 when, in his capacity as CISA Director, Krebs released a statement calling that election, which Trump lost, "the most secure in American history.”
The executive order directed a review to “identify any instances where Krebs’ or CISA’s conduct appears to be contrary to the administration’s commitment to free speech and ending federal censorship, including whether Krebs’ conduct was contrary to suitability standards for federal employees or involved the unauthorized dissemination of classified information.” Krebs was, in fact, fired for his public stance.
We’ve seen this playbook before: In March, Trump targeted law firm Perkins Coie for its past work on voting rights lawsuits and its representation of the President’s prior political opponents in a shocking, vindictive, and unconstitutional executive order. After that order, many in the legal profession, including EFF, pushed back, issuing public statements and filing friend of the court briefs in support of Perkins Coie, and other law firms challenging executive orders against them. This public support was especially important in light of the fact that a few large firms capitulated to Trump rather than fight the orders against them.
It is critical that the cybersecurity community now join together to denounce this chilling attack on free speech and rally behind Krebs and SentinelOne rather than cowering because they fear they will be next.
The White House must not be given free reign to turn cybersecurity professionals into political scapegoats. EFF regularly defends the infosec community, protecting researchers through education, legal defense, amicus briefs, and involvement in the community with the goal of promoting innovation and safeguarding their rights, and we call on its ranks to join us in defending Chris Krebs and SentinelOne. An independent infosec community is fundamental to protecting our democracy, and to the profession itself.
US President endorses bill to lock the clocks in current Daylight Savings Time
Article URL: https://flvoicenews.com/trump-endorses-rick-scotts-bill-to-lock-the-clocks-in-current-daylight-savings-time/
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43656890
Points: 5
# Comments: 0