Notices by Anil Dash (anildash@me.dm)

One-man off Broadway show where I perform 1200 classic Vines back-to-back over two hours

We believe in the rule of law. We believe in workers' rights. We believe in privacy. And we are going to fight. I'm glad @eff.org is stepping up when it's needed most. https://www.theverge.com/news/609990/eff-doge-privacy-lawsuit-opm-trump-musk

Ahead of Kendrick’s performance today, here’s a look back at the greatest halftime show ever, including the political, cultural & social messages Prince sent through his choice of songs and the story he was telling about Black music, ownership and creative control. https://anildash.com/2021/02/05/how-prince-won-the-super-bowl/

@mgs I’ve always built dev tools. I am going to have to play ball with Microsoft’s monopoly on that space whether I want to or not, if I ever want to build in that market again. And there is _zero_ chance the Trump administration is allowing any winners in any Musk-adjacent markets through any mechanism other than corruption. It’s textbook strongman authoritarianism. Same goes for anti-competes, any worker rights are already being gutted. (And unions, though that’s not Khan’s purvey.)

@mgs think you’re off on this, and misreading some of this stuff in a way that only VCs seem to be doing. Zuck spent an hour on Rogan arguing that the government won’t let him innovate on AI, you say it’s very easily possible to make new AI startups right now. She’s countering his bullshit. Maybe you’re mad at him, not her? The industry is not better for every market being pre-decided by which big player can spend the most, either hyper-investing or tying & bundling.

Drop what you are doing and read this incredible story from Wired, if you can. After that, come back here.

https://www.wired.com/story/edward-coristine-tesla-sexy-path-networks-doge/

It mentions that a 19 y/o man who's assisting Musk's team and who has access to sensitive government systems is Edward Coristine. Wired said Coristine, who apparently goes by the nickname "Big Balls," runs a number of companies, including one called Tesla.Sexy LLC

"Tesla.Sexy controls dozens of web domains, including at least two Russian-registered domains. One of those domains, which is still active, offers a service called Helfie, which is an AI bot for Discord servers targeting the Russian market.While the operation of a Russian website would not violate US sanctions preventing Americans doing business with Russian companies, it could potentially be a factor in a security clearance review."

The really interesting part for me is Coristine's work history at a company called Path Networks, which Wired describes generously as a company "known for hiring reformed black-hat hackers."

"At Path Network, Coristine worked as a systems engineer from April to June of 2022, according to his now-deleted LinkedIn resume. Path has at times listed as employees Eric Taylor, also known as Cosmo the God, a well-known former cybercriminal and member of the hacker group UGNazis, as well as Matthew Flannery, an Australian convicted hacker whom police allege was a member of the hacker group LulzSec. It’s unclear whether Coristine worked at Path concurrently with those hackers, and WIRED found no evidence that either Coristine or other Path employees engaged in illegal activity while at the company."

The founder of Path is a young man named Marshal Webb. I wrote about Webb back in 2016, in a story about a DDoS defense company he co-founded called BackConnect LLC. Working with Doug Madory, we determined that BackConnect had a long history of hijacking Internet address space that it didn't own.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/09/ddos-mitigation-firm-has-history-of-hijacks/

Incidentally, less than 24 hours after that story ran, my site KrebsOnSecurity.com was hit with the biggest DDoS attack the Internet had ever seen at the time. That sustained attack kept my site offline for nearly 4 days.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/09/krebsonsecurity-hit-with-record-ddos/

Here's the real story behind why Coristine only worked at Path for a few months. He was fired after Webb accused him of making it known that one of Path's employees was Curtis Gervais, a serial swatter from Canada who was convicted of perpetrating dozens of swattings and bomb threats -- including at least two attempts on our home in 2014. [BTW the aforementioned Eric Taylor was convicted of a separate (successful) swatting against our home in 2013.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/09/canadian-man-gets-9-months-detention-for-serial-swattings-bomb-threats/

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/02/men-who-sent-swat-team-heroin-to-my-home-sentenced/

In the screenshot here, we can see Webb replying to a message from Gervais stating that "Edward has been terminated for leaking internal information to the competitors."

Wired cited experts saying it's unlikely Coristine could have passed a security clearance needed to view the sensitive government information he now has access to.

Want to learn more about Path? Check out the website https://pathtruths.com/

@jkap this is really kind, thank you!

@jalefkowit please, a new type of 737 with software written by geniuses from DOGE

@benbrown happy birthday!

@celesteh different systems have different design goals? Like… I don’t know why we’re still doing this kind of thing.

Hey! If you care deeply about the open web, I hope you’ll consider joining our team at Fastly. We get to support open source and good internet projects ranging from Scratch to Kubernetes, Watch Duty to Mastodon, Python to Perl, Ruby to Rust, and many, many more. We’ve committed nearly $100M in resources to making the Internet better, and helping to build healthy, sustainable communities. And we haven’t wavered one bit in our inclusive hiring policies. https://www.fastly.com/about/jobs/apply?gh_jid=6523073

@timbray yeah, I’m skeptical of that too. But I think planting a flag in the ground on the larger goals is interesting and useful, and the larger sense of there being many projects pushing these parallel goals forward is great.

@jwz @codinghorror @SonnyBonds 🫡

@RnDanger Because it's an open, interoperable platform with millions of users and interesting apps being built on top of it

This is a monumental day for the future of the social web, though it might not be obvious for a while. Mastodon matures its governance model with a great, solid non-profit https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/01/the-people-should-own-the-town-square/ and a coalition of independents push to open up Bluesky's AT Protocol: https://freeourfeeds.com/ These two moves together put the most credible players on solid ground for years to come — and set up the open platforms to enable lots of innovation just when it's needed most.

We’ve been watching the Watch Duty team do absolutely *unbelievable* technical work all week (they’re members of the Fast Forward open source program that my team at Fastly works on), handling a surge of millions of people trying to see where the LA fires are in real time. Amidst the hopelessness of the fires causing so much destruction, there’s hope in seeing people taking care of each other in this way. There are still people who do such good on the internet. https://gizmodo.com/watch-duty-hits-1-on-apple-app-store-as-wildfires-rage-in-california-2000547740

I’m delighted to see @codinghorror step up to be a thing that’s sorely needed in tech right now: a leader. He actually *gives* half of his current net worth (it’s not just a pledge — he already cut the checks) to 8 organizations that are helping the most vulnerable. https://blog.codinghorror.com/stay-gold-america/ It’s an powerful move, right when it matters most. Over the years, I’ve called Jeff a friend, a huge pain the in ass, a sharp technical mind, and now it’s great to call him an inspiration.

@CrucialTK yeah I knew the lowest bidder part was reductive, and a couple of folks pointed out the GSA error. I’ll update soon! Thanks.

@CuriousMagpie and dogecoin predates Musk’s interest in that currency by years, fwiw

@CuriousMagpie I literally cover that in the second paragraph of the piece.