Notices by Martin Kleppmann (martin@nondeterministic.computer)

Our university deployed a mail filter that rewrites URLs in emails to redirect them via a service that checks for bad websites. Somebody clever worked out that PGP-signed emails are exempt from the rewrite rule, so now people are starting their emails with "BEGIN PGP MESSAGE" even though they haven't used PGP at all, just to fool the filter 😂

Anybody sending malware links has probably also worked out that trick by now, thereby rendering the entire filter pointless

@pettter That's correct – all posts in Bluesky are public (you can choose to hide them from logged-out web interface users, but they are still available to logged-in users and via the API). Blocking someone can never totally stop them from reading your posts because they could just log in to a different account to read your posts.

I helped the Bluesky team write a paper explaining the underlying architecture and the reasons why it works the way it does. Releasing the paper today to celebrate that you no longer need an invite code to sign up for a Bluesky account: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03239

The first Ink&Switch newsletter is out, covering experiments in programmable documents and making software development faster: https://www.inkandswitch.com/newsletter/dispatch-001/

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