Backdrifting: An intersection of social system design, cybernetics, and hacking
Model Collapse Posted 5/29/2026 I’ve heard many people talk about model collapse recently, especially regarding Large Language Models. This is a phenomenon where training a machine learning model on the outputs of itself or other machine learning models can often degrade performance and magnify errors. In this post I want to talk a little about the phenomenon and its implications for the future of…
The Journalist/Academic Leaked Data Divide Posted 3/13/2026 I am presently flying back from a workshop where academics, journalists, and NGOs discussed how to build collaborations between the three when studying leaked documents, and particularly when studying leaked financial data. Here I’m sharing some of my takeaways. There were many parties at this workshop, but under the Chatham House Rule I…
A Machine Learning Crash Course Posted 2/28/2026 I am currently teaching a masters level course on network science. We spent one afternoon on a rapid survey of machine learning to introduce students to concepts and tools that can expand their skill sets. I thought it’d make for a good self-contained blog post, so I’ve repurposed the lecture below. What is Machine Learning? Machine learning…
Bayesian Network Science Posted 1/26/2026 I am currently teaching masters students to perform statistical network analysis, especially predicting the structure of a network from observational data, calibrating network models to real-world data, and rejecting hypotheses about the structure of networks. This post repurposes my recent lecture for a more general audience. It is more math-heavy than…
Section 230: A Primer Posted 12/13/2025 Senator Whitehouse (D, RI) announced that he’s moving to file a bill to repeal Section 230, the singly most important piece of Internet legislation, which goes on the chopping block a few times a year. While Section 230 is flawed, repealing it without any transition plan in place would be a civil rights disaster. Many have written articles about it. This one…
RPI’s Vaccine-Autism Study Posted 9/23/2025 The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention intend to award a no-bid contract to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to study whether childhood vaccination induces autism. I studied at RPI through my bachelors and masters degrees, and like many alumni, I am incensed. On September 15th I wrote the following letter in protest: Dear Dr. Schmidt, Board of…
Word Prominence: A Primer Posted 6/9/2025 A common task in natural language processing is determining what a text (a book, speech, tweet, email) is about. At its simplest, we may start by asking what words appear most prominently in a text, in the hope that they’ll be topic key-words. Here “prominence” is when a word appears disproportionately in this text compared to others. For example, “the,”…
Academic Funding on Fire Posted 5/17/2025 I’m now a postdoc involved in applying for research funding, and have more insight into the process than I did as a graduate student. Given horrifying cuts to funding throughout academia, I wanted to share my perspective with non-academic readers. Where Does Research Funding Come From? In corporate research and development, funding comes from the business’…
Dungeon Generation with Binary Space Partitioning Posted 5/11/2025 It’s a lazy Sunday afternoon, and I’ve been thinking about procedural dungeon generation. This is a challenge where we build algorithms to create maps suitable for video- or tabletop-games, such that the maps are random enough to provide some surprise and variety, and constrained enough to produce playable maps with coherent…
What is NP? Why is NP? Posted 12/11/2024 This post is about theoretical computer science. I’ve written it without getting too far into academic vocabulary, but this is a disclaimer that if thinking about Turing machines sounds dry as sand, this will not be the post for you. In computer science we are often interested in how difficult a problem is, defined by how the number of steps required to…
Open Academic Publication Posted 10/28/2023 I’m currently at a workshop on open practices across disciplines, and one topic of discussion is how to change the academic publishing process to be more accessible to both authors and readers. I’ve also had a few friends outside of academia ask me how publishing research papers works, so it’s a good opportunity to write a post about the messy world of…
When is a network “decentralized enough?” Posted 08/08/2023 I’ve submitted a new paper! Here’s the not-peer-reviewed pre-print. This post will discuss my work for non-network-scientist audiences. There is broad disillusionment regarding the influence major tech companies have over our online interactions. Social media is largely governed by Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp), Google (YouTube),…
AntNet: Networks from Ant Colonies Posted 08/07/2023 Ant nests look kind of like networks - they have rooms, and tunnels between the rooms, analogous to vertices and edges on a graph. A graph representation of a nest might help us answer questions about different ant species like: Do some species create more rooms than others? Do some species have different room layouts, such as a star with a…
Geolocating Users via Text Messages Posted 7/28/2023 A recent research paper, Freaky Leaky SMS: Extracting User Locations by Analyzing SMS Timings (PDF) , purports to geolocate phone numbers by texting them and analyzing response times. This is creepy, interesting, and hopefully a warning that can perhaps help phone companies to better protect their customers’ privacy in the future. Today I’m…
We don’t need ML, we have gzip! Posted 7/15/2023 A recent excellent paper performs a sophisticated natural language processing task, usually solved using complicated deep-learning neural networks, using a shockingly simple algorithm and gzip. This post will contextualize and explain that paper for non-computer scientists, or for those who do not follow news in NLP and machine learning. What is…
Bloom Filters Posted 4/8/2023 Sticking with a theme from my last post on HyperLogLog I’m writing about more probabilistic data structures! Today: Bloom Filters. What are they? Bloom filters track sets: you can add elements to the set, and you can ask “is this element in the set?” and you can estimate the size of the set. That’s it. So what’s the big deal? Most languages have a set in their…
HyperLogLog: Counting Without Counters Posted 3/20/2023 I recently learned about HyperLogLog , which feels like cursed counter-intuitive magic, so I am eager to share. The Task We want to count unique items, like “how many unique words appear across all books at your local library?” or “how many unique Facebook users logged in over the past month?” For a small set of unique tokens, like counting…
Algorithmic Complexity Posted 3/6/2023 This is a post about Big-O notation and measuring algorithmic complexity; topics usually taught to computer science undergraduates in their second to fourth semester. It’s intended for curious people outside the field, or new students. There are many posts on this subject, but this one is mine. In computer science we often care about whether an algorithm is…
Hex Grids and Cube Coordinates Posted 2/10/2023 I recently needed to make a graph with a hex lattice shape, like this: I needed to find distances and paths between different hexagonal tiles, which proved challenging in a cartesian coordinate system. I tried a few solutions, and it was a fun process, so let’s examine each option. Row and Column (Offset) Coordinates The most “obvious” way to index…
Image Dithering in Color! Posted 1/17/2023 In my last post I demonstrated how to perform image dithering to convert colored images to black and white. This consists of converting each pixel to either black or white (whichever is closer), recording the amount of “error,” or the difference between the original luminoscity and the new black/white value, and propagating this error to adjoining pixels…
Image Dithering Posted 1/16/2023 Dithering means intentionally adding noise to a signal to reduce large artifacts like color banding. A classic example is reducing a color image to black and white. Take this magnificent photo of my neighbor’s cat: To trivially convert this image to black and white we can take each pixel, decide which color it’s closest to, and set it to that: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10…
SQL for Scientists Posted 12/03/2022 My lab group recently asked me to give a tutorial on using SQL databases in science. While we are all complex systems scientists, my background is in computer science and STS, and many of my colleagues come from physics, mathematics, and philosophy, so we learn a great deal from one another. I’ve turned my slides into a blog post here, like my last lab talk on…
Torrent Health Monitoring Posted 8/21/2022 Distributed Denial of Secrets publishes most of our datasets via torrent. This minimizes infrastructural requirements for us: every time someone downloads a release, if they leave their torrent client running, they help us upload to other interested people. Once many people have mirrored our release it can remain available even if we stop seeding,…
Distinguishing In-Groups from Onlookers by Language Use Posted 6/8/2022 This post is a non-academic summary of my most recent paper, which can be found here . It’s in a similar theme as a previous paper , which I discussed here , but this post can be read on its own. An enormous thank you to my fantastic co-authors Josh Minot, Sam Rosenblatt, Guillermo de Anda Jáuregui, Emily Moog, Briane Paul V.…
Git and Code Versioning for Scientists Posted 5/10/2022 I recently gave a talk to the Joint Lab on using git to write code collaboratively with other scientists. I’m going to recycle that talk in blog form, in case anyone else would like a quick crash-course. This post assumes that you’ve used git a few times before, and are trying to get a better handle on it. My examples use the command line and…
What is Distributed Denial of Secrets? Posted 4/10/2022 Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets) is a transparency collective. We’ve seen some questions and confusion recently as to what that means, so I’d like to elaborate. See also our about page , our Wikipedia page , and articles here and here . When whistleblowers within an organization, or hackers that have gained access to files, want to…
Predicting Friendships from SMS Metadata Posted 3/30/2022 We know that metadata is incredibly revealing; given information about who you talk to, we can construct a social graph that shows which social circles you’re in and adjacent to, we can predict your politics, age, and a host of other attributes. But how does social graph prediction work? How do you filter out noise from “real” social…
The Distributed Denial of Service at Distributed Denial of Secrets Posted 10/9/2021 A few days ago, the Distributed Denial of Secrets website went down under a distributed denial of service attack. We set up Cloudflare and brought the site back up, but since none of us are professional sysadmins and we’re all volunteers with other time commitments, it took us a couple days to work through the…
Dimensional Analysis, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Reverse-Engineered the Bomb Posted 10/5/2021 I’m in a Complex Systems and Data Science PhD program. In one of my classes we’ve been performing dimensional analysis , used to derive equations describing how different parts of a system relate to one another. This is a pretty empowering technique, and I wanted to walk through an example…
Communal Ownership Online Posted 7/30/2021 We often think of online communities as a “shared digital commons”. A forum or subreddit or chatroom where people meet and talk. An open source project, where a collection of developers build something together. A wiki, where people gather and organize knowledge. These are online spaces made up by communities of people, serving those same communities. But…
The Efficacy of Subreddit Bans Posted 7/1/2021 Deplatforming is a moderation technique where high profile users or communities are banned from a platform in an effort to inhibit their behavior. It’s somewhat controversial, because while the intention is usually good (stopping the spread of white supremacy, inciting of violence, etc), the impacts aren’t well understood: do banned users or groups…
Tor with VPNs (Don’t!) Posted 6/26/2021 I see a lot of questions on forums by people asking how to “use Tor with a VPN” for “added security”, and a lot of poor advice given in response. Proposals fall in two categories: The first is useless and unnecessary, the second is catastrophically harmful. Let’s dig in. Using a VPN to connect to Tor In the first case, users want to connect to Tor through a…
Reimagine the Internet Day 5: New Directions in Social Media Research Posted 5/14/2021 This week I’m attending the Reimagine the Internet mini-conference, a small and mostly academic discussion about decentralization from a corporate controlled Internet to realize a more socially positive network. This post is a collection of my notes from the fifth day of talks, following my previous post .…
Reimagine the Internet Day 4: Building Defiant Communities Posted 5/13/2021 This week I’m attending the Reimagine the Internet mini-conference, a small and mostly academic discussion about decentralization from a corporate controlled Internet to realize a more socially positive network. This post is a collection of my notes from the fourth day of talks, following my previous post . Today’s session…
Reimagine the Internet Day 3: Adversarial Interoperability / Competitive Compatibility Posted 5/12/2021 This week I’m attending the Reimagine the Internet mini-conference, a small and mostly academic discussion about decentralization from a corporate controlled Internet to realize a more socially positive network. This post is a collection of my notes from the third day of talks, following my…
Reimagine the Internet Day 2: Misinformation, Disinformation, and Media Literacy in a Less-Centralized Social Media Universe Posted 5/11/2021 This week I’m attending the Reimagine the Internet mini-conference, a small and mostly academic discussion about decentralization from a corporate controlled Internet to realize a more socially positive network. This post is a collection of my notes from the…
Reimagine the Internet Day 1: Pioneering Alternative Models for Community on the Internet Posted 5/10/2021 This week I’m attending the Reimagine the Internet mini-conference, a small and mostly academic discussion about decentralization from a corporate controlled Internet to realize a more socially positive network. This post is a collection of my notes from the first day of talks. The full…
OurTube: Distributed Labor as Alternative to Advertisement Posted 5/5/21 Social media companies, particularly YouTube, have been called out for using suggestion algorithms that lead to radicalization . The premise is that YouTube suggestions (or auto-play functionality) prompt users with increasingly extreme political content in an effort to increase engagement. The longer you stay on the…
Hosting Under Duress Posted 3/26/21 I have an article in the latest issue of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly , writing on behalf of Distributed Denial of Secrets . It’s reproduced below: Hosting Under Duress By Milo Trujillo (illegaldaydream@ddosecrets) On June 19th, Distributed Denial of Secrets published BlueLeaks, approximately 270 gigabytes of internal documents from U.S. local-LEA/federal-agency…
Color Filter Array Forensics Posted 2/1/21 Digital Image Forensics is a field concerned with identifying whether images are original or have been edited, and if the latter, what kinds of edits have been made. I haven’t experimented much with digital forensics, but there’s overlap with steganography and neat encoding tricks like halftone QR codes . I’ve been reading about some forensic techniques…
Peer-to-Peer Network Models and their Implications Posted 11/21/20 Let’s take the following as a given: Mainstream social media is harmful because it puts a single company in control of the human social experience and places them in the role of cultural censor If you agree and want to get on with addressing the problem, skip ahead to the next section. How We Got Here When we say “control of the…
RAIDs: Combining Hard Drives for Fun and Profit Posted 10/22/20 After writing about decentralized data storage and torrents , I’ve had data storage on my mind. I drafted this post while setting up a RAID for the MeLa research group today, and built RAIDs for DDoSecrets a few weeks ago, so there’s a ton of “data storage” in my life right now and it only seems natural to quickly write up how large…
Distributed Hash Tables and Decentralized Data Storage Posted 10/21/20 This post is mostly theoretical computer science (data structures, distributed systems) leading up to future posts that can talk about the design of decentralized communities with an emphasis on social theory (self-governance, trust, responsibility for content) I’m at the (virtual) computer-supported collaborative work…
Network Science for Social Modeling Posted 9/24/20 This post is meant to be very approachable and an academic background is not expected. However, it has an academic flavor and deals with applied theory, in the same vein as previous posts on lambda calculus and parallel computing . This is a post about graphing social relationships. These techniques are used for advertisement, propaganda,…
What is a Supercomputer? Posted 8/19/20 This will be another introductory academic post like the last post explaining how torrents work. We’ve all seen references to “supercomputers” in popular culture, run by institutions like NASA, the Chinese government, Bond villains, and other nefarious groups. But what is a supercomputer, and what distinguishes one from a “normal” computer? Surprisingly,…
Torrents: Decentralized Data Storage Posted 8/13/20 This post is explanatory in the vein of past posts on memory allocation and lambda calculus , rather than introducing new social or technical theory Torrents allow your computer to download files from many computers simultaneously rather than from a single web or file server. BitTorrent is frequently associated with piracy, but is on its own a…
Trustless Pursuance: Decentralized Architecture Posted 7/7/20 In a rapid series of events, Distributed Denial of Secrets was banned from Twitter for our BlueLeaks release , along with any links to our website, the leaked documents in question, or magnet links to the leaked documents in question (including blocking URL-shortened links, forwarding domains, and a ROT13-encoded version of the magnet…
Information Paradigms and Radical Interfaces Posted 6/16/20 One of my non-social-org interests is the design of interfaces for viewing and interacting with information that can change our perception and thought-processes surrounding that information. I haven’t written much on this subject yet (except tangentially when discussing Halftone QR Codes to create dual-purpose links/images), so this post…
Alternative Social-Media Platforms Posted 6/12/20 This post is an informal discussion related to a research project I’ve been involved in and the broader context of alternative media platforms, deplatforming, and community building. This is not peer-reviewed academic work; see the paper for that. Background Mainstream social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) have been under public…
Splintering a Pursuance Posted 5/22/20 The primary goal of the Pursuance Project that differentiates it from any other group-based task-management software is the emphasis on organic collaboration, and the trivial creation of new Pursuances that allow complex information flow and rapid organization. That’s buzzwordy, so in a practical sense “it’s really easy to make new organizations and working…