what a nice end of a week end! Wout Van Aert wins Paris-Roubaix and Victor Orban concedes defeat, all in the same day!

Our group in Tartu (me, @jannosiim , Roberto Parisella etc) have an opening for up to 3 positions (postdoc or PhD) in ZK. See the link below for more information
crypto.cs.ut.ee/Main/ZKPosit...

A custom meme edited from XKCD #2501 "Average Familiarity". [Ponytail and Cueball are talking. Ponytail has her hand raised, palm up, towards Cueball.] Ponytail: Zero-knowledge is second nature to us cryptographers, so it's easy to forget that the average person probably only knows low-degree extensions and proximity testing. Cueball: And Reed-Solomon, of course. Ponytail: Of course. [Caption below the panel] Even when they're trying to compensate for it, experts in anything wildly overestimate the average person's familiarity with their field.

Oh I like this!

#xckd #xkcd2501 #meme #cryptography #nerd #zkp #zeroknowledge

Great graphic showing cities on a triangle graph showing if they are most oriented to public transit, active mobility or cars.

Have you seen this? This recent study of mode share (the % share of transportation trips that are by car, transit, walking, biking etc) relative to city size and income levels in almost 800 cities in 61 countries. Interesting results. HT @davidzipper.bsky.social
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🙀?

La Silicon Valley vuole accumulare soldi finché si può I CEO del settore tecnologico ipotizzano apertamente che l'AI renderà impossibile arricchirsi in futuro, e si muovono di conseguenza

www.ilpost.it/2026/01/23/a...

Microsoft gave FBI a set of BitLocker encryption keys to unlock suspects' laptops: reports | TechCrunch The FBI served Microsoft a warrant requesting encryption recovery keys to decrypt the hard drives of people involved in an alleged fraud case in Guam.

NEW: Microsoft handed the FBI the recovery keys to decrypt the hard drives of three laptops encrypted with BitLocker.

BitLocker is enabled by default in modern Windows laptops, but Microsoft also prompts users to upload the recovery keys to the company's cloud, which opens up this possibility.

Abstract. Private Set Intersection (PSI) has been widely studied, deployed, and demonstrated through various real-life use cases such as mobile private contact discovery, privacy-preserving contact tracing, etc. Nevertheless, the majority of existing solutions typically assume that the underlying datasets are static and require a fresh execution of PSI at each time the datasets are updated over time. In this work, similar to a recent solution by Badrinaryanan et. al’ (ASIACRYPT 2024), we investigate the problem of designing efficient and secure updatable PSIs in the honest-but-curious model by adopting the approach of executing a small number of PSIs over smaller sets instead of one PSI over the entire, updated sets. We first identify that existing constructions suffer from two privacy leakages and further propose to mitigate them thanks to the use of circuit PSIs, which are variants of PSI protocols that instead of outputting the resulting intersection, output the secret shares of the intersection and nothing more, combined with secure shuffling when needed. We construct a generic framework for PSI over updated sets which can use any circuit-PSI. Additionally, we show that this framework can easily be extended to a protocol that outputs the cardinality of the intersection instead of the intersection, itself. Finally, we provide an in-depth discussion on the feasibility of circuit PSI over updated sets, with the main challenges to overcome and solutions for some particular cases. Our solutions are implemented in Rust and their performance is compared with the state of the art, achieving an improvement of 11× to 40× in updatable PSI and 14× to 107× in updatable cardinality PSI in computation time. The proposed framework is also demonstrated through a real-life use case, namely, a spam detection filter.

Image showing part 2 of abstract.

Updatable Private Set Intersection and Beyond: Efficient Constructions via Circuit Private Set Intersection (Ferran Alborch, Tom Chauvier, Antonio Faonio, Alexandre Fontaine, Ferhat Karakoç, Alptekin Küpçü, Camille Malek, Melek Önen) ia.cr/2025/2147

Cryptographers Held an Election. They Can’t Decrypt the Results.

Look, ma, we are in the News www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/w...

Language Expert Answers Word Origin Questions | Tech Support | WIRED YouTube video by WIRED

TIL that English took vouvoyer to the next level. It came from Franch's domination, decided tutoyer was too impolite to exist, and that is why “you” is both singular and plural: basically so that you cannot tutoyer in English youtu.be/TdmF4kKEqBQ?...

I always use git with overleaf because i’m too old to switch to a web-based text editor. Now I have got another good reason to stay old

viva l’Italia libera dal fascismo! (con sobrietà)

Have you noticed that we added a guide with useful tips about Madrid, for Eurocrypt 25 participants, on the EC25 webpage?

You can find it at eurocrypt.iacr.org/2025/EC25tip...

Here’s my completely unsupported-by-evidence theory: once your body gets used to you being a mid-distance runner, it starts running more efficiently at rest, like is thinking "Who knows when this guy is gonna throw in another 20K? Better be ready."

wait until you try a pair of fancy carbon plate shoes, you’ll be even more surprised!

Spice Girls - Wannabe (in the style of System Of A Down) feat. @macglocky YouTube video by Ten Second Songs

have you ever heard the ten second songs dude on youtube? (for example this youtu.be/KWWBeaqdBas?...) he might be into it, whatever Bibe and Tina is