Excited to announce @intheopencc 🌱 A new privacy initiative for open technology, and digital autonomy. Technology is changing rapidly around us. Its a fundamental part of our identity, work, relationships and how we communicate, but new systems for identity verification, biometric monitoring, message scanning and other surveillance infrastructure are creeping into our daily life, and reshaping our digital rights. With this newsletter, I’ll help you keep track, share the most important developments, wins, tools, resources, and events. Beyond the newsletter, the goal is to build open-source tools, models, research, and find ways to take back control. Get in touch if you’d like to get involved!

The first known cryptography is roughly 4,000 years old. Around 1900 BCE a scribe carved hieroglyphs in the tomb of an Egyptian nobleman named Khnumhotep II. In a few places he swapped standard symbols for unusual ones. Scholars don't think this was real secret-keeping. More likely it was for dignity, mystery, or to impress educated visitors. It is the oldest known instance of the technique that would later become cryptography.

Paperweight update v0.2.3 ✨ - Improved onboarding with more email providers (Apple and Proton) and default IMAP configs ( - Expanded SMTP support to enable mailto unsubscribes. Also first step to further managing GDPR requests - Google OAuth temporarily disabled. Going through CASA Verification - Refined GDPR-related app data/templates and shared app-side privacy logic for clearer data-request workflows. ✌️

I've been running and over the past 5-6 years. Traffic has been declining as the gas landscape has evolved, but still decent traffic, organic SEO, domain authority + small subscriber base. Potential for account/gas abstraction, paymasters, and intent-based protocols. I'm exploring selling domains, incl. assets/code to a team who can actually give it attention. DM me if interested or ping your favorite gas guzzlers

Quick monthly recap of my first full month of indie hacking 📊 1) Biggest focus was on Paperweight - 1,200 unique visitors (+494% vs March) - $256 revenue / $430 all-time - Built a new SEO/content engine on data breaches 2) Ukulala - launched on iOS - 335 total installs, 153 MAU - 4.9 stars across iOS and Android - Runs mostly hands-off / for fun 3) Present - a new, Dutch app for people living alone - Pending App store reviews. Will share more soon™️ Onwards 🚀

The Music Stage returns for Devcon 8 🇮🇳 We’re opening the call to artists and musicians from India and around the world. Want to be part of it? Share your ideas or join the current proposal 👇

I believe self custody of assets with private keys is legitimately one of the most powerful tools for sovereignty we have ever devised but the industry has completely bastardized this term to the point of uselessness. The original notion (in my mind at least) of self custody was having a string of letters and numbers or 12 words that unlock your assets. “Self-custody” when interacting with smart contracts and defi has become virtually meaningless at this point, encumbering coins with layers and layers of risks and dependencies, incredibly misleading A lot of this narrative was ostensibly for regulatory reasons: “we don’t take custody of your assets, you deposit them in this pool or contract with self-executing code” but that’s so obviously not true at this point it’s an insult to our lived experience. Or, if it is “true” in the literal sense that the code technically always does what it is allowed to do, the “self-custody” component is very far down the list of what is actually important with these systems, a red herring really. Clearly Drift depositors didn’t (don’t) have “self-custody” of their funds. And the common retort is “well Drift doesn’t really either.” ok but North Korea does now. At this point I liken self-custody in the context of defi to saying that you are the only one with the keys to the front door of a bank vault but there’s another door on the other side of the vault that criminals (or regulators, who knows) can enter with impunity and take your assets. Is it really that relevant that you’re the only one with a key to the front door? The reason this is jading is because truly securing your wealth with private keys if you choose is a 0 to 1 unlock for some people (maybe the only real 0 to 1 unlock in this space) but that was conflated with all of these systems that have multisigs, upgrade keys, oracle dependencies, layers upon layers, turtles all the way down, often times with very obvious single points of failure. What is the value of self custody when a multisig can reorg your assets out of existence? The whole thing is very disillusioning

rant time: people are so fucking obsessed with building more tools, more products, more services, more "security" layers. are you guys all fucking insane?? every single thing you add is more complexity. and complexity is exactly what makes systems _dangerous_. you don't get safer by stacking abstractions on top of abstractions. you just increase the attack surface and pray the whole dependency chain doesn't collapse (hint: it will collapse!!). now you depend on 10, 50, 100 moving parts. all needing updates, all with their own bugs, all potential supply chain failures and we call that "security" like fucking retards. dude, it's the fucking opposite. we're not building safer systems. we're building systems so complex nobody actually understands them anymore. and almost nobody is asking the obvious question: **what can we remove?** everyone wants to add. nobody wants to reduce. that's how you end up in a nightmare system (hint: we're already in that nightmare). not because of one big failure. but because of thousands of tiny dependencies you never should have had in the first place.