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🚨 The Conservatives (EPP) are at­tempt­ing to force a new vote on Thursday (26th), seek­ing to re­verse Parliament’s NO on in­dis­crim­i­nate scan­ning. This is a di­rect at­tack on democ­racy and bla­tant dis­re­gard for your right to pri­vacy. No means no. Take ac­tion now!

Tesla runs a bug bounty pro­gram that in­vites re­searchers to find se­cu­rity vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties in their ve­hi­cles. To par­tic­i­pate, I needed the ac­tual hard­ware, so I started look­ing for Tesla Model 3 parts on eBay. My goal was to get a Tesla car com­puter and touch­screen run­ning on my desk, boot­ing the car’s op­er­at­ing sys­tem.

The car com­puter con­sists of two parts - the MCU (Media Control Unit) and the au­topi­lot com­puter (AP) lay­ered on top of each other. In the car, the com­puter is lo­cated in front of the pas­sen­ger seat, roughly be­hind the glove­box. The part it­self is the size of an iPad and the thick­ness of a ~500 page book and is cov­ered in a wa­ter-cooled metal cas­ing:

By search­ing for “Tesla Model 3 MCU” on Ebay, I found quite a lot of re­sults in the $200 - $300 USD price range. Looking at the list­ings, I found that many of these sell­ers are “salvaging” com­pa­nies who buy crashed cars, take them apart, and list all parts for sale in­di­vid­u­ally. Sometimes, they even in­clude a photo of the orig­i­nal crashed car and a way to fil­ter their list­ings for parts ex­tracted from the same ve­hi­cle.

To boot the car up and in­ter­act with it, I needed a few more things:

* The dis­play ca­ble to con­nect them to­gether

For the power sup­ply, I went with an ad­justable 0-30V model from Amazon. There was a 5 am­pere and a 10A ver­sion avail­able, at the time, I fig­ured it’s safer to have some head­room and went with the 10A ver­sion — it was a very good de­ci­sion, as it later turned out, the full setup could con­sume up to 8A at peak times. The Model 3 screens were sur­pris­ingly ex­pen­sive on Ebay, I as­sume that is be­cause it is a pop­u­lar part to re­place. I found a pretty good deal for 175 USD.

The last and most dif­fi­cult part to or­der was the ca­ble which con­nects the MCU to the screen. I needed this be­cause both the com­puter and a screen were be­ing sold with the ca­bles cut a few cen­time­ters af­ter the con­nec­tor (interestingly most sell­ers did that, in­stead of just un­plug­ging the ca­bles).

This is when I dis­cov­ered that Tesla pub­lishes the wiring “Electrical Reference” for all of its cars pub­licly. On their ser­vice web­site, you can look up a spe­cific car model, search for a com­po­nent (such as the dis­play), and it will show you ex­actly how the part should be wired up, what ca­bles/​con­nec­tors are used, and even what the dif­fer­ent pins are re­spon­si­ble for in­side a sin­gle con­nec­tor:

Turns out the dis­play uses a 6-pin ca­ble (2 for 12V and ground, 4 for data) with a spe­cial Rosenberger 99K10D-1D5A5-D con­nec­tor. I soon dis­cov­ered that un­less you are a car man­u­fac­turer or­der­ing in bulk, there is no way you are buy­ing a sin­gle Rosenberger ca­ble like this. No Ebay list­ings, noth­ing on Aliexpress, es­sen­tially no search re­sults at all.

After dig­ging around a bit, I found that this ca­ble is very sim­i­lar to a more widely used au­to­mo­tive ca­ble called “LVDS”, which is used to trans­fer video in BMW cars. At first sight, the con­nec­tors looked like a per­fect match to my Rosenberger, so I placed an or­der:

The com­puter ar­rived first. To at­tempt to power it on, I looked up which pin of which con­nec­tor I needed to at­tach 12V and ground to us­ing the Tesla schemat­ics & the few pic­tures on­line of peo­ple do­ing the same desk-MCU setup. Since the com­puter in­cluded the shortly cut ca­bles, I was able to strip the rel­e­vant wires and at­tach the power sup­ply’s clips to the right ones:

I saw a cou­ple of red LEDs start flash­ing, and the com­puter started up! Since I had no screen yet, there were not many ways to in­ter­act with the car. Reading @lewurm’s pre­vi­ous re­search on GitHub I knew that, at least in older car ver­sions, there was a net­work in­side the car, with some com­po­nents hav­ing their own web­server. I con­nected an Ethernet ca­ble to the port next to the power con­nec­tor and to my lap­top.

This net­work does not have DHCP, so you have to man­u­ally set your IP ad­dress. The IP you se­lect has to be 192.168.90. X/24, and should be higher than 192.168.90.105 to not con­flict with other hosts on the net­work. On Reddit, I found the con­tents of an older /etc/hosts file from a car which shows the hosts that are nor­mally as­so­ci­ated with spe­cific IPs:

@lewurm’s blog men­tioned that SSH on port :22 and a web­server on :8080 was open on 192.168.90.100, the MCU. Was this still the case on newer mod­els? Yes!

I had al­ready found 2 ser­vices to ex­plore on the MCU:

* An SSH server which states “SSH al­lowed: ve­hi­cle parked” - quite funny given the cir­cum­stances

This SSH server re­quires spe­cially signed SSH keys which only Tesla is sup­posed to be able to gen­er­ate.

Interestingly, Tesla of­fers a “Root ac­cess pro­gram” on their bug bounty pro­gram. Researchers who find at least one valid “rooting” vul­ner­a­bil­ity will re­ceive a per­ma­nent SSH cer­tifi­cate for their own car, al­low­ing them to log in as root and con­tinue their re­search fur­ther. — A nice perk, as it is much eas­ier to find ad­di­tional vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties once you are on the in­side.

* This SSH server re­quires spe­cially signed SSH keys which only Tesla is sup­posed to be able to gen­er­ate.

* Interestingly, Tesla of­fers a “Root ac­cess pro­gram” on their bug bounty pro­gram. Researchers who find at least one valid “rooting” vul­ner­a­bil­ity will re­ceive a per­ma­nent SSH cer­tifi­cate for their own car, al­low­ing them to log in as root and con­tinue their re­search fur­ther. — A nice perk, as it is much eas­ier to find ad­di­tional vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties once you are on the in­side.

* A REST-like API on :8080 which re­turned a his­tory of “tasks”

This ser­vice is called “ODIN” (On-Board Diagnostic Interface Network), and is in­ten­tion­ally ex­posed to be used by Tesla’s di­ag­nos­tics tool “Toolbox”.

* This ser­vice is called “ODIN” (On-Board Diagnostic Interface Network), and is in­ten­tion­ally ex­posed to be used by Tesla’s di­ag­nos­tics tool “Toolbox”.

Around this time, I also re­moved the metal shield­ing to see ex­actly what the boards look like in­side. You can see the two dif­fer­ent boards which were stacked on top of each other:

Once the screen and the BMW LVDS ca­ble ar­rived, it un­for­tu­nately be­came clear that the con­nec­tor is not go­ing to fit. The BMW con­nec­tor was much thicker on the sides and it was not pos­si­ble to plug it into the screen. This led to some su­per sketchy im­pro­vised at­tempts to strip the two orig­i­nal “tail” ca­bles from the MCU and the screen and con­nect the in­di­vid­ual wires to­gether. The wires were re­ally sen­si­tive and thin. The setup worked for a cou­ple of sec­onds, but caused wire de­bris to fall on the PCB and short it, burn­ing one of the power con­troller chips:

It was ex­tremely hard to find the name/​model of the chip that got burned, es­pe­cially since part of the text printed on it had be­come un­read­able due to the dam­age. To be able to con­tinue with the pro­ject, I had to or­der a whole other car com­puter.

In the mean­time, my friend Yasser (@n3r0li) some­how pulled off the im­pos­si­ble and iden­ti­fied it as the “MAX16932CATIS/V+T” step-down con­troller, re­spon­si­ble for con­vert­ing power down to lower volt­ages. We or­dered the chip and took the board to a lo­cal PCB re­pair shop, where they suc­cess­fully re­placed it and fixed the MCU. Now I had two com­put­ers to work with.

So I re­ally did need that Rosenberger ca­ble, there was no get­ting around it.

After hav­ing no luck find­ing it on­line and even vis­it­ing a Tesla ser­vice cen­ter in London (an odd en­counter, to say the least), I had to ac­cept what I had been try­ing to avoid: buy­ing an en­tire Dashboard Wiring Harness.

Back in the Tesla Electrical Reference, in ad­di­tion to the con­nec­tors, one can find every part num­ber. Looking at the ca­ble which con­nects the MCU to the screen, the num­ber 1067960-XX-E shows. Searching for it on Ebay brings up this mon­stros­ity:

Turns out that ac­tual cars don’t have in­di­vid­ual ca­bles. Instead they have these big “looms”, which bun­dle many ca­bles from a nearby area into a sin­gle har­ness. This is the rea­son why I could not find the in­di­vid­ual ca­ble ear­lier. They sim­ply don’t man­u­fac­ture it. Unfortunately I had no other choice but to buy this en­tire loom for 80 USD.

Despite how bulky it was, the loom worked per­fectly. The car booted, the touch screen started up, and I had a work­ing car com­puter on my desk, run­ning the car’s op­er­at­ing sys­tem!

Having the sys­tem run­ning, I can now start play­ing with the user in­ter­face, in­ter­act­ing with the ex­posed net­work in­ter­faces, ex­plor­ing the CAN buses, and per­haps even at­tempt­ing to ex­tract the firmware.

Last year, I vis­ited my grand­moth­er’s house for the first time af­ter the pan­demic and came across a cup­board full of loose old pho­tos. I counted 1,351 of them span­ning all the way from my grand­par­ents in their early 20s, my mom as a baby, to me in mid­dle school, just around the time when we got our first smart­phone and all pho­tos since then were backed up on­line.

Everything was all over the place so I spent some time go­ing through them in­di­vid­u­ally and or­ga­niz­ing them into groups. Some of the ini­tial groups were based on the phys­i­cal at­trib­utes of the pho­to­graph like sim­i­lar as­pect ra­tios or film stock. For ex­am­ple, there was a group of black/​white 32mm square pic­tures that were taken around the time when my grand­fa­ther was in his mid 20s.

As I got done with group­ing all of them, I was able to see flashes of sto­ries in my head, but they were ephemeral and frag­ile. For in­stance, there was a group of pho­tos that looked like it was taken dur­ing my grand­par­ents’ wed­ding but I did­n’t know the chrono­log­i­cal or­der they were taken be­cause EXIF meta­data did­n’t ex­ist around that time.

So I sat down with my grand­mother and asked her to re­order the pho­tos and tell me every­thing she could re­mem­ber about her wed­ding. Her face lit up as she nar­rated the back­story be­hind the oc­ca­sion, go­ing from photo to photo, resur­fac­ing de­tails that had been dor­mant for decades. I wrote every­thing down, recorded the names of peo­ple in some of the pho­tos, some of whom I rec­og­nized as younger ver­sions of my un­cles and aunts.

After the “interview”, I had mul­ti­ple pages of notes con­nect­ing the pho­tos to events that hap­pened 50 years ago. Since the ac­count was his­tor­i­cal, as an in­side joke I wanted to see if I could clean it up and pre­sent it as a page on Wikipedia so I could print it and give it to her. So I cloned MediaWiki, spun up a lo­cal in­stance, and be­gan my ed­i­to­r­ial work. I used the 2011 Royal Wedding as ref­er­ence and drafted a page start­ing with the clas­sic in­fobox and the lead para­graph.

I split up the rest of the con­tent into sec­tions and filled them with every­thing I could ver­ify like dates, names, places, who sat where. I scanned all the pho­tos and spent some time fig­ur­ing out what to place where. For every photo place­ment, there was a fol­low up to in­clude a de­scrip­tive cap­tion too.

Whenever I men­tioned a per­son, I linked them to an empty stub page. After I found out I could also link to the real Wikipedia, I was able to link things to real pages that pro­vided wider con­text to things like venues, rit­u­als, and the po­lit­i­cal cli­mate around that time, like for in­stance a le­gal amend­ment that was rel­e­vant to the wed­ding cer­e­mony.

In two evenings, I was able to doc­u­ment a full back­story for the pho­tos into a neat ar­ti­cle. These two evenings also made me re­al­ize just how pow­er­ful en­cy­clo­pe­dia soft­ware is to record and pre­serve me­dia and knowl­edge that would’ve oth­er­wise been lost over time.

This was so much fun that I spent the fol­low­ing months writ­ing pages to ac­count for all the pho­tos that needed to be stitched to­gether.

I got help from r/​ge­neal­ogy about how to ap­proach record­ing oral his­tory and I was given re­sources to bet­ter con­duct in­ter­views, shoutout to u/​stem­ma­tis! I would get on calls with my grand­mother and peo­ple in the fam­ily, ask them a cou­ple of ques­tions, and then write. It was also around this time that I be­gan us­ing au­dio tran­scrip­tion and lan­guage mod­els to make the ed­i­to­r­ial process eas­ier.

Over time, I man­aged to write a lot of pages con­nect­ing peo­ple to dif­fer­ent life events. The en­cy­clo­pe­dia for­mat made it easy to con­nect dots I would have never found on my own, like dis­cov­er­ing that one of the singers at my grand­par­ents’ wed­ding was the same nurse who helped de­liver me.

After find­ing all the sto­ries be­hind the phys­i­cal pho­tos, I started to work on dig­i­tal pho­tos and videos that I had stored on Google Photos. The won­der­ful thing about dig­i­tal pho­tos is that they come with EXIF meta­data that can re­veal ex­tra in­for­ma­tion like date, time, and some­times ge­o­graph­i­cal co­or­di­nates.

This time, with­out any in­ter­views, I wanted to see if I could use a lan­guage model to cre­ate a page based on just brows­ing through the pho­tos. As my first ex­per­i­ment, I cre­ated a folder with 625 pho­tos of a fam­ily trip to Coorg back in 2012.

I pointed Claude Code at the di­rec­tory and asked it to draft a wiki page by brows­ing through the im­ages. I hinted at us­ing ImageMagick to cre­ate con­tact sheets so it would help with brows­ing through mul­ti­ple pho­tos at once.

After a few min­utes and a cou­ple of to­kens later, it had cre­ated a com­pelling draft with a de­tailed ac­count of every­thing we did dur­ing the trip by time of day. The model had no lo­ca­tion data to work with, just time­stamps and vi­sual con­tent, but it was able to iden­tify the places from the pho­tos alone, in­clud­ing ones that I had for­got­ten by now. It picked up de­tails on the modes of trans­porta­tion we used to get be­tween places just from what it could see.

After I had clar­i­fied who some of the peo­ple in the pic­tures were, it went on to iden­tify them au­to­mat­i­cally in the cap­tions. Now that I had a de­tailed out­line ready, the page still only had con­tent based on the avail­able data, so to fill in the gaps I shared a list of anec­dotes from my point of view and the model in­serted them into places where the nar­ra­tive called for them.

The Coorg trip only had pho­tos to work with. My trip to Mexico City in 2022 had a lot more. I had taken 291 pho­tos and 343 videos with an iPhone 12 Pro that in­cluded ge­o­graph­i­cal co­or­di­nates as part of the EXIF meta­data.

On top of that, I ex­ported my lo­ca­tion time­line from Google Maps, my Uber trips, my bank trans­ac­tions, and Shazam his­tory. I would ask Claude Code to start with the pho­tos and then grad­u­ally give it ac­cess to the dif­fer­ent data ex­ports.

Here are some of the things it did across mul­ti­ple runs:

It cross-ref­er­enced my bank trans­ac­tions with lo­ca­tion data to as­cer­tain the restau­rants I went to.

Some of the pho­tos and videos showed me in at­ten­dance at a soc­cer match, how­ever, it was un­known which teams were play­ing. The model looked up my bank trans­ac­tions and found a Ticketmaster in­voice with in­for­ma­tion about the teams and name of the tour­na­ment.

It looked up my Uber trips to fig­ure out travel times and ex­act lo­ca­tions of pickup and drop.

It used my Shazam tracks to write about the kinds of songs that were play­ing at a place, like Cuban songs at a Cuban restau­rant.

In a fol­low-up, I men­tioned re­mem­ber­ing an evening din­ner with a gui­tarist play­ing in the back­ground. It fil­tered my me­dia to evening cap­tures, found a frame in a video with the gui­tarist, up­loaded it, and ref­er­enced the mo­ment in the page.

The MediaWiki ar­chi­tec­ture worked well with the ed­its, since for every new data source it would make amend­ments like a real Wikipedia con­trib­u­tor would. I leaned heav­ily on fea­tures that al­ready ex­isted. Talk pages to clar­ify gaps and con­sol­i­date re­search notes, cat­e­gories to group pages by theme, re­vi­sion his­tory to track how a page evolved as new data came in. I did­n’t have to build any of this, it was all just there.

What started as me help­ing the model fill in gaps from my mem­ory grad­u­ally in­verted. The model was now sur­fac­ing things I had com­pletely for­got­ten, cross-ref­er­enc­ing de­tails across data sources in ways I never would have done man­u­ally.

So I started point­ing Claude Code at other data ex­ports. My Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp archives held around 100k mes­sages and a cou­ple thou­sand voice notes ex­changed with close friends over a decade.

The model traced the arc of our friend­ships through the mes­sages, pulled out the life episodes we had talked each other through, and wove them into mul­ti­ple pages that read like it was writ­ten by some­one who knew us both. When I shared the pages with my friends, they wanted to read every sin­gle one.

This is when I re­al­ized I was no longer work­ing on a fam­ily his­tory pro­ject. What I had been build­ing, page by page, was a per­sonal en­cy­clo­pe­dia. A struc­tured, brows­able, in­ter­con­nected ac­count of my life com­piled from the data I al­ready had ly­ing around.

I’ve been work­ing on this as whoami.wiki. It uses MediaWiki as its foun­da­tion, which turns out to be a great fit be­cause lan­guage mod­els al­ready un­der­stand Wikipedia con­ven­tions deeply from their train­ing data. You bring your data ex­ports, and agents draft the pages for you to re­view.

A page about your grand­moth­er’s wed­ding works the same way as a page about a royal wed­ding. A page about your best friend works the same way as a page about a pub­lic fig­ure.

Oh and it’s gen­uinely fun! Putting to­gether the en­cy­clo­pe­dia felt like the early days of Facebook time­line, brows­ing through fin­ished pages, fol­low­ing links be­tween peo­ple and events, and stum­bling on a de­tail I for­got.

But more than the tech­nol­ogy, it’s the sto­ries that stayed with me. Writing about my grand­moth­er’s life sur­faced things I’d never known, her years as a sin­gle mother, the de­ci­sions she had to make, the re­silience it took. She was a stronger woman than I ever re­al­ized. Going through my friend­ships, I found mo­ments of en­dear­ment that I had nearly for­got­ten, the days friends went the ex­tra mile to be good to me. Seeing those mo­ments laid out on a page made me pick up the phone and call a few of them. The en­cy­clo­pe­dia did­n’t just or­ga­nize my data, it made me pay closer at­ten­tion to the peo­ple in my life.

Today I’m re­leas­ing whoami.wiki as an open source pro­ject. The en­cy­clo­pe­dia is yours, it runs on your ma­chine, your data stays with you, and any model can read it. The pro­ject is early and I’m still fig­ur­ing a lot of it out, but if this sounds in­ter­est­ing, you can get started here and tell me what you think!

This is a heav­ily in­ter­ac­tive web ap­pli­ca­tion, and JavaScript is re­quired. Simple HTML in­ter­faces are pos­si­ble, but that is not what this is.

Learn more about Bluesky at bsky.so­cial and at­proto.com. You did it! 🥳

European Parliament just de­cided that Chat Control 1.0 must stop.

This means on April 6, 2026, Gmail, LinkedIn, Microsoft and other Big Techs must stop scan­ning your pri­vate mes­sages in the EU. #PrivacyWins 💪

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ARC-AGI-3 is an in­ter­ac­tive rea­son­ing bench­mark which chal­lenges AI agents to ex­plore novel en­vi­ron­ments, ac­quire goals on the fly, build adapt­able world mod­els, and learn con­tin­u­ously.

A 100% score means AI agents can beat every game as ef­fi­ciently as hu­mans.

Instead of solv­ing sta­tic puz­zles, agents must learn from ex­pe­ri­ence in­side each en­vi­ron­ment—per­ceiv­ing what mat­ters, se­lect­ing ac­tions, and adapt­ing their strat­egy with­out re­ly­ing on nat­ural-lan­guage in­struc­tions.

Why do I file bug re­ports with Apple Feedback Assistant? I plead in­san­ity. Or per­haps ad­dic­tion. I see­saw be­tween phases of ab­sti­nence and falling off the wagon. I’ve even tried or­ga­niz­ing a pub­lic boy­cott of Feedback Assistant, with a list of de­mands to im­prove the ex­pe­ri­ence for users, but the boy­cott never caught on with other de­vel­op­ers. Regardless, an in­cen­tive still ex­ists to file bug re­ports, be­cause Apple ac­tu­ally fixes some of my bugs. My main com­plaint about the bug re­port­ing process is not the un­fixed bugs but rather the dis­re­spect for bug re­ports and the peo­ple who file them. Apple in­ten­tion­ally wastes our time with no re­grets, as if our time had no value, as if we had some kind of duty to serve Apple.

In March 2023, I filed FB12088655 “Privacy: Network fil­ter ex­ten­sion TCP con­nec­tion and IP ad­dress leak.” I men­tioned this bug re­port at the time in a blog post, which in­cluded the same steps to re­pro­duce and ex­am­ple Xcode pro­ject that I pro­vided to Apple. In the three years since I filed the bug re­port, I re­ceived no re­sponse what­so­ever from Apple… un­til a cou­ple of weeks ago, when Apple asked me to “verify” the is­sue with ma­cOS 26.4 beta 4 and up­date my bug re­port.

I in­stall the WWDC be­tas every year in June but don’t run OS be­tas af­ter September when the ma­jor OS up­dates are re­leased. I don’t have enough time or in­deed enough Apple de­vices to be an un­paid tester year round. Thus, ver­i­fy­ing is­sues in be­tas is a has­sle for me. I’ve been burned by such re­quests in the past, asked by Apple to ver­ify is­sues in be­tas that were not fixed, so I asked Apple di­rectly whether beta 4 fixed the bug: they should al­ready know, since they have my steps to re­pro­duce! However, their re­sponse was eva­sive, never di­rectly an­swer­ing my ques­tion. Moreover, they threat­ened to close my bug re­port and as­sume the bug is fixed if I did­n’t ver­ify within two weeks! Again, this is af­ter Apple silently sat on my bug re­port for three years.

Although I did­n’t in­stall the beta my­self, I spoke to the de­vel­op­ers of Little Snitch, who do run the ma­cOS be­tas, and they kindly in­formed me that in their test­ing, they could still re­pro­duce my is­sue with ma­cOS 26.4 beta 4. It was no sur­prise, then, that when I up­dated to ma­cOS 26.4, re­leased to the pub­lic yes­ter­day by Apple, I could still re­pro­duce the bug with my in­struc­tions and ex­am­ple pro­ject. It ap­pears that Apple know­ingly sent me on a wild goose chase, de­mand­ing that I “verify” a bug they did noth­ing to fix, per­haps pray­ing that the bug had mag­i­cally dis­ap­peared on its own, with no ef­fort from Apple.

By the way, a few weeks ago I pub­lished a blog post about an­other bug, FB22057274 “Pinned tabs: slow-load­ing tar­get=“_blank” links ap­pear in the wrong tab,” which is also 100% re­pro­ducible but nonethe­less was marked by Apple with the res­o­lu­tion “Investigation com­plete - Unable to di­ag­nose with cur­rent in­for­ma­tion.” On March 9, I up­dated the bug re­port, ask­ing what ad­di­tional in­for­ma­tion Apple needs from me—they never asked for more in­for­ma­tion—but I’ve yet to re­ceive a re­sponse.

I can only as­sume that some bo­zos in Apple lead­er­ship in­cen­tivize un­der­lings to close bug re­ports, no mat­ter whether the bugs are fixed. Out of sight, out of mind. Apple’s in­ter­nal met­rics prob­a­bly tell them that they have no soft­ware qual­ity prob­lem, be­cause the num­ber of open bug re­ports is kept lower ar­ti­fi­cially.

Ironically, the iPa­dOS 26.4 be­tas in­tro­duced a Safari crash­ing bug that I re­ported a month ago, but Apple failed to fix the bug be­fore the pub­lic re­lease. What’s the pur­pose of be­tas? As far as I can tell, the pur­pose is just to an­noy peo­ple who file bugs, with­out do­ing any­thing use­ful.

Shortly af­ter this blog post hit the front page of Hacker News yes­ter­day, my “Investigation com­plete - Unable to di­ag­nose with cur­rent in­for­ma­tion” Feedback FB22057274 was up­dated by Apple. What an amaz­ing co­in­ci­dence! Unfortunately, the up­date was not help­ful, be­cause Apple re­quested a sys­di­ag­nose. For a user in­ter­face is­sue! This was pre­cisely the fear I ex­pressed in my ear­lier blog post:

I hon­estly don’t know what ad­di­tional in­for­ma­tion Apple needs to di­ag­nose it. I in­cluded not only steps to re­pro­duce but also mul­ti­ple screen record­ings to il­lus­trate. I have a sus­pi­cion that Apple did not even read my bug re­port, be­cause I did not at­tach a sys­di­ag­nose re­port. But a pri­vacy-vi­o­lat­ing sys­di­ag­nose would not be use­ful in this case!

The only trick in my bug re­port is that I used Little Snitch to sim­u­late a slow load­ing link. This was just the eas­i­est way I could think of to re­li­ably re­pro­duce the bug. There are of course other ways to sim­u­late a slow load­ing link; if Apple Safari en­gi­neers of all peo­ple some­how can’t fig­ure that out, then they aren’t qual­i­fied for their jobs. Again, how­ever, the more likely ex­pla­na­tion is that my feed­back was ig­nored be­cause it did not in­clude a pro forma sys­di­ag­nose, but who knows, be­cause Apple did not re­quest more in­for­ma­tion of any kind from me.

Here is my re­sponse this morn­ing to Apple’s re­quest:

You should­n’t need a sys­di­ag­nose, and I don’t know how a sys­di­ag­nose would pos­si­bly be help­ful for a user in­ter­face bug.

I found an easy way to re­pro­duce the is­sue with­out Little Snitch: use the Network Link Conditioner pref­er­ence pane from the Xcode Additional Tools down­load, and cre­ate a pro­file with Uplink Delay 3000 ms.

The Xcode Additional Tools, which in­clude a num­ber of use­ful util­i­ties, can be found in the Apple Developer Downloads (sign-in re­quired).

There is a dis­tinct, vis­ceral kind of pain in watch­ing an oth­er­wise bril­liant en­gi­neer hold down the Backspace key for six con­tin­u­ous sec­onds to fix a typo at the be­gin­ning of a line.

We’ve all been there. We learn ls, cd, and grep, and then we sort of… stop. The ter­mi­nal be­comes a place we live in-but we rarely bother to arrange the fur­ni­ture. We ac­cept that cer­tain tasks take forty key­strokes, com­pletely un­aware that the shell au­thors solved our ex­act frus­tra­tion some­time in 1989.

Here are some tricks that aren’t ex­actly se­cret, but aren’t al­ways taught ei­ther. To keep the peace in our ex­tended Unix fam­ily, I’ve split these into two camps: the uni­ver­sal tricks that work on al­most any POSIX-ish shell (like sh on FreeBSD or ksh on OpenBSD), and the qual­ity-of-life ad­di­tions spe­cific to in­ter­ac­tive shells like Bash or Zsh.

These tricks rely on stan­dard ter­mi­nal line dis­ci­plines, generic Bourne shell be­hav­iors, or POSIX fea­tures. If you SSH into an em­bed­ded router from 2009, a fresh OpenBSD box, or a min­i­mal Alpine con­tainer, these will still have your back.

Why shuf­fle char­ac­ter-by-char­ac­ter when you can tele­port? These are stan­dard Emacs-style line-edit­ing bind­ings (via Readline or sim­i­lar), en­abled by de­fault in most mod­ern shells.

CTRL + W: You’re typing /var/log/nginx/ but you ac­tu­ally meant /var/log/apache2/. You have two choices: hold down Backspace un­til your soul leaves your body, or hit CTRL + W to in­stantly delete the word be­fore the cur­sor. Once you get used to this, hold­ing Backspace feels like dig­ging a hole with a spoon.

CTRL + U and CTRL + K: You typed out a beau­ti­fully crafted, 80-char­ac­ter rsync com­mand, but sud­denly re­al­ize you need to check if the des­ti­na­tion di­rec­tory ac­tu­ally ex­ists first. You don’t want to delete it, but you don’t want to run it. Hit CTRL + U to cut every­thing from the cur­sor to the be­gin­ning of the line. Check your di­rec­tory, and then hit CTRL + Y to paste (“yank”) your mas­ter­piece right back into the prompt. (CTRL + K does the same thing, but cuts from the cur­sor to the end of the line.)

CTRL + A and CTRL + E: Jump in­stantly to the be­gin­ning (A) or end (E) of the line. Stop reach­ing for the Home and End keys; they are miles away from the home row any­way.

ALT + B and ALT + F: Move back­ward (B) or for­ward (F) one en­tire word at a time. It’s the ar­row key’s much faster, much cooler sib­ling. (Mac users: you usu­ally have to tweak your ter­mi­nal set­tings to use Option as Meta for this to work).

re­set (or stty sane): While strictly more of a ter­mi­nal re­cov­ery tip than an in­ter­ac­tive shell trick, it be­longs here. We’ve all done it: you meant to cat a text file, but you ac­ci­den­tally cat a com­piled bi­nary or a com­pressed tar­ball. Suddenly, your ter­mi­nal is spit­ting out an­cient runes and Wingdings, and your prompt is com­pletely il­leg­i­ble. Instead of clos­ing the ter­mi­nal win­dow in shame, type re­set (even if you can’t see the let­ters you’re typ­ing) and hit en­ter. Your ter­mi­nal will heal it­self.

CTRL + C: Cancel the cur­rent com­mand im­me­di­ately. Your emer­gency exit when a com­mand hangs, or you re­al­ize you’re tail­ing the wrong log file.

CTRL + D: Sends an EOF (End of File) sig­nal. If you’re typ­ing in­put to a com­mand that ex­pects it, this closes the stream. But if the com­mand line is empty, it logs you out of the shell com­pletely-be care­ful where you press it.

CTRL + L: Your ter­mi­nal is clut­tered with stack traces, com­piler spaghetti, and pure dig­i­tal noise. Running the clear com­mand works, but what if you’re al­ready halfway through typ­ing a new com­mand? CTRL + L wipes the slate clean, throw­ing your cur­rent prompt right up to the top with­out in­ter­rupt­ing your train of thought.

cd -: The clas­sic chan­nel-flip­per. You’re deep down in /usr/local/etc/postfix and you need to check some­thing in /var/log. You type cd /var/log, look at the logs, and now you want to go back. Instead of typ­ing that long path again, type cd -. It switches you to your pre­vi­ous di­rec­tory. Run it again, and you’re back in logs. Perfect for tog­gling back and forth.

pushd and popd: If cd - is a tog­gle switch, pushd is a stack. Need to jug­gle mul­ti­ple di­rec­to­ries? pushd /etc changes to /etc but saves your pre­vi­ous di­rec­tory to a hid­den stack. When you’re done, type popd to pop it off the stack and re­turn ex­actly where you left off.

> file.txt: This emp­ties a file com­pletely with­out delet­ing and recre­at­ing it. Why does this mat­ter? It pre­serves file per­mis­sions, own­er­ship, and does­n’t in­ter­rupt processes that al­ready have the file open. It’s much cleaner than echo “” > file.txt (which ac­tu­ally leaves a new­line char­ac­ter) or rm file && touch file.

$_: In most shells, $_ ex­pands to the last ar­gu­ment of the pre­vi­ous com­mand-es­pe­cially use­ful in­ter­ac­tively or in sim­ple scripts when you need to op­er­ate on the same long path twice:

No more re-typ­ing paths or de­clar­ing tem­po­rary vari­ables to en­ter a di­rec­tory you cre­ated a sec­ond ago.

If you are writ­ing shell scripts, put these at the top im­me­di­ately af­ter your she­bang. It will save you from de­ploy­ing chaos to pro­duc­tion.

* set -e: Exit on er­ror. Very use­ful, but no­to­ri­ously weird with edge cases (especially in­side con­di­tion­als like if state­ments, while loops, and pipelines). Don’t rely on it blindly as it can cre­ate false con­fi­dence. (Pro-tip: consider set -euo pipefail for a more ro­bust safety net, but learn its caveats first.)

* set -u: Treats ref­er­enc­ing an un­set vari­able as an er­ror. This pro­tects you from cat­a­strophic dis­as­ters like rm -rf /usr/local/${MY_TYPO_VAR}/* ac­ci­den­tally ex­pand­ing into rm -rf /usr/local/*.

If you’re on a Linux box or us­ing a mod­ern in­ter­ac­tive shell, these are the tools that make the CLI feel less like a rusty bi­cy­cle and more like some­thing that ac­tu­ally re­sponds when you steer.

CTRL + R: Reverse in­cre­men­tal search. Stop press­ing the up ar­row forty times to find that one awk com­mand you used last Tuesday. Press CTRL + R, start typ­ing a key­word from the com­mand, and it mag­i­cally pulls it from your his­tory. Press CTRL + R again to cy­cle back­wards through matches.

!!: This ex­pands to the en­tirety of your pre­vi­ous com­mand. Its most fa­mous use case is the “Permission de­nied” walk of shame. You con­fi­dently type sys­tem­ctl restart ng­inx, hit en­ter, and the sys­tem laughs at your lack of priv­i­leges. Instead of re­typ­ing it, run:

It’s your way of telling the shell, “Do what I said, but this time with au­thor­ity.”

CTRL + X, then CTRL + E: You start typ­ing a quick one-liner. Then you add a pipe. Then an awk state­ment. Soon, you’re edit­ing a four-line mon­ster in­side your prompt and nav­i­ga­tion is get­ting dif­fi­cult. Hit CTRL + X fol­lowed by CTRL + E (in Bash; in Zsh, this needs con­fig­ur­ing). This drops your cur­rent com­mand into your de­fault text ed­i­tor (like Vim or Nano). You can edit it with all the power of a proper ed­i­tor, save, and exit. The shell then ex­e­cutes the com­mand in­stantly.

fc: The highly portable, tra­di­tional sib­ling to CTRL+X CTRL+E. Running fc opens your pre­vi­ous com­mand in your $EDITOR. It works across most shells and is a fan­tas­tic hid­den gem for fix­ing com­plex, multi-line com­mands that went wrong.

ESC + . (or ALT + .): Inserts the last ar­gu­ment of the pre­vi­ous com­mand right at your cur­sor. Press it re­peat­edly to cy­cle fur­ther back through your his­tory, drop­ping the ex­act file­name or pa­ra­me­ter you need right into your cur­rent com­mand.

!$: The non-in­ter­ac­tive sib­ling of ESC + .. Unlike ESC + . (which in­serts the text live at your cur­sor for you to re­view or edit), !$ ex­pands blindly at the ex­act mo­ment you hit en­ter.

(Pro-Tip: For script­ing or stan­dard sh, use the $_ vari­able men­tioned ear­lier in­stead!)

Brace ex­pan­sion is pure magic for avoid­ing repet­i­tive typ­ing, es­pe­cially when do­ing quick back­ups or re­names.

The Backup Expansion: Need to edit a crit­i­cal con­fig file and want to make a quick backup first?

This ex­pands to mv file­name.txt file­name.md. Fast, el­e­gant, and makes you look like a wiz­ard.

Need mul­ti­ple di­rec­to­ries? mkdir -p pro­ject/{​src,tests,docs} cre­ates all three at once.

: Treats the out­put of a com­mand as if it were a file. Say you want to diff the sorted ver­sions of two files. Traditionally, you’d sort them into tem­po­rary files, diff those, and clean up. Process sub­sti­tu­tion skips the mid­dle­man:

** (Globstar): find is a great com­mand, but some­times it feels like overkill. If you run shopt -s glob­star in Bash (it’s en­abled by de­fault in Zsh), ** matches files re­cur­sively in all sub­di­rec­to­ries. Need to find all JavaScript files in your cur­rent di­rec­tory and every­thing be­neath it?

CTRL + Z, then bg, then dis­own: You started a mas­sive, hour-long data­base im­port task, but you for­got to run it in tmux or screen. It’s ty­ing up your ter­mi­nal, and if your SSH con­nec­tion drops, the process dies. Panic sets in.

Type bg to let it re­sume run­ning in the back­ground. Your prompt is free!

Type dis­own to de­tach it from your shell en­tirely. You can safely close your lap­top, grab a cof­fee, and the process will sur­vive.

com­mand |& tee file.log: Standard pipes (|) only catch stan­dard out­put (std­out). If a script throws an er­ror (stderr), it skips the pipe and bleeds di­rectly onto your screen, miss­ing the log file. |& pipes both std­out and stderr (it’s a help­ful short­hand for 2>&1 |).

Throw in tee, and you get to watch the out­put on your screen while si­mul­ta­ne­ously sav­ing it to a log file. It’s the equiv­a­lent of watch­ing live TV while record­ing it to your DVR.

The shell is a tool­box, not an ob­sta­cle course. You don’t need to mem­o­rize all of these to­day. Pick just one trick, force it into your daily habits for a week, and then pick an­other. Stop let­ting the ter­mi­nal push you around, and start re­ar­rang­ing the fur­ni­ture. It’s your house now.

I’ve just started to mi­grate some repos­i­to­ries from GitHub to Codeberg. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time but have stalled on it be­cause I per­ceived Codeberg as not be­ing ready and the mi­gra­tion process as be­ing a lot of (boring) work.

It turns out that is only par­tially true and wildly de­pends on your pro­ject. If you’re in a sim­i­lar po­si­tion as me, hope­fully these notes serve as mo­ti­va­tion and start­ing point. These so­lu­tions are not what I might stick around with long-term, but aimed at what I think is

eas­i­est to get started with when mi­grat­ing from GitHub.

First, there’s the mi­gra­tion of is­sues, pull re­quests and re­leases along with their ar­ti­facts. This is ac­tu­ally the eas­i­est part since Codeberg of­fers repos­i­tory im­port from GitHub that just works, and all these fea­tures have a UI nearly iden­ti­cal to GitHub’s. The im­port pre­serves is­sue num­bers, la­bels, au­thor­ship. The user ex­pe­ri­ence is very much a step above the ex­tremely awk­ward hacks that peo­ple use to im­port from other is­sue track­ers into GitHub.

If you’re us­ing GitHub Pages you can use code­berg.page. There’s a warn­ing about it not of­fer­ing any up­time SLO, but I haven’t no­ticed any down­time at all, and for now it’s fine. You push your HTML to a branch, very much like the old GitHub Pages. Update

2025-09-22: Alternatively you may try https://​grebedoc.dev or https://​www.sta­ti­chost.eu/

The by far nas­ti­est part is CI. GitHub has done an ex­cel­lent job lur­ing peo­ple in with free ma­cOS run­ners and in­fi­nite ca­pac­ity for pub­lic re­pos . You will have to give up on both of those things. I rec­om­mend look­ing into cross-com­pi­la­tion for your pro­gram­ming lan­guage, and to self-host a run­ner for

Forgejo Actions, to solve those prob­lems re­spec­tively.

Why Forgejo

Actions and not Woodpecker CI, is­n’t Woodpecker on Codeberg more

sta­ble? Yes, ab­solutely, in fact the

doc­u­men­ta­tion for Forgejo Actions on Codeberg is out of date right

now, but Forgejo Actions will just feel way more fa­mil­iar com­ing from GitHub Actions. The UI and YAML syn­tax is al­most iden­ti­cal, and the ex­ist­ing ac­tions ecosys­tem mostly works as-is on Codeberg. For ex­am­ple, where my GitHub Actions work­flow would say

uses: dtol­nay/​rust-tool­chain, my Forgejo Actions work­flow would just change to

uses: https://​github.com/​dtol­nay/​rust-tool­chain.

If you ab­solutely need ma­cOS run­ners I’d rec­om­mend stick­ing with GitHub Actions on the GitHub repos­i­tory, mir­ror­ing all com­mits from Codeberg to GitHub and us­ing Forgejo Actions to poll the GitHub API and sync the CI sta­tus back to Codeberg. I haven’t tried this one yet, but I have tried some other CI providers of­fer­ing ma­cOS builds and I don’t think they’re eas­ier or cleaner to in­te­grate into Codeberg than GitHub Actions.

Finally, what to do with the old repo on GitHub? I’ve just up­dated the README and archived the repo.

You could tell Codeberg to push new com­mits to GitHub, but this al­lows users to still file PRs and com­ment on is­sues and com­mits . Some folks have dealt with this by dis­abling is­sues on the GitHub repo, but that is a re­ally de­struc­tive ac­tion as it will 404 all is­sues, and pull re­quests can­not be dis­abled. Some re­pos like lib­virt/​lib­virt have writ­ten a GitHub Action that au­to­mat­i­cally closes all pull re­quests.

The con­tro­ver­sial mass sur­veil­lance of pri­vate mes­sages in Europe is com­ing to an end. After the European Parliament had al­ready re­jected the in­dis­crim­i­nate and blan­ket Chat Control by US tech com­pa­nies on 13 March, con­ser­v­a­tive forces at­tempted a de­mo­c­ra­t­i­cally highly ques­tion­able ma­neu­ver yes­ter­day to force a re­peat vote to ex­tend the law any­way.

However, in a true vot­ing thriller to­day, the Parliament fi­nally pulled the plug on this sur­veil­lance ma­nia: With a ra­zor-thin ma­jor­ity of just a sin­gle vote, the Parliament first re­jected the au­to­mated as­sess­ment of un­known pri­vate pho­tos and chat texts as “suspicious” or “unsuspicious”. In the sub­se­quent fi­nal vote, the amended re­main­ing pro­posal clearly failed to reach a ma­jor­ity.

This means: As of 4 April, the EU dero­ga­tion will ex­pire for good. US cor­po­ra­tions like Meta, Google, and Microsoft must stop the in­dis­crim­i­nate scan­ning of the pri­vate chats of European cit­i­zens. The dig­i­tal pri­vacy of cor­re­spon­dence is re­stored!

This does not cre­ate a le­gal vac­uum—quite the op­po­site. Ending in­dis­crim­i­nate mass scan­ning clears the path for mod­ern, ef­fec­tive child pro­tec­tion. Fearmongering that in­ves­ti­ga­tors will be “flying blind” is un­war­ranted: Recently, only 36% of sus­pi­cious ac­tiv­ity re­ports from US com­pa­nies orig­i­nated from the sur­veil­lance of pri­vate mes­sages any­way. Social me­dia and cloud stor­age ser­vices are be­com­ing in­creas­ingly rel­e­vant for in­ves­ti­ga­tions. Targeted telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions sur­veil­lance based on con­crete sus­pi­cion and a ju­di­cial war­rant re­mains fully per­mis­si­ble, as does the rou­tine scan­ning of pub­lic posts and hosted files. User re­port­ing also re­mains fully in­tact.

Digital free­dom fighter and for­mer Member of the European Parliament Patrick Breyer (Pirate Party) com­mented on to­day’s his­toric vic­tory:

“This his­toric day brings tears of joy! The EU Parliament has buried Chat Control — a mas­sive, hard-fought vic­tory for the un­prece­dented re­sis­tance of civil so­ci­ety and cit­i­zens! The fact that a sin­gle vote tipped the scales against the ex­tremely er­ror-prone text and im­age search shows: Every sin­gle vote in Parliament and every call from con­cerned cit­i­zens counted!

We have stopped a bro­ken and il­le­gal sys­tem. Once our in­ves­ti­ga­tors are no longer drown­ing in a flood of false and long-known sus­pi­cion re­ports from the US, re­sources will fi­nally be freed up to hunt down or­ga­nized abuse rings in a tar­geted and covert man­ner. Trying to pro­tect chil­dren with mass sur­veil­lance is like des­per­ately try­ing to mop up the floor while leav­ing the faucet run­ning. We must fi­nally turn off the tap! This means gen­uine child pro­tec­tion through a par­a­digm shift: Providers must tech­ni­cally pre­vent cy­ber­groom­ing from the out­set through se­cure app de­sign. Illegal ma­te­r­ial on the in­ter­net must be proac­tively tracked down and deleted di­rectly at the source. That is what truly pro­tects chil­dren.

But be­ware, we can only cel­e­brate briefly to­day: They will try again. The ne­go­ti­a­tions for a per­ma­nent Chat Control reg­u­la­tion are con­tin­u­ing un­der high pres­sure, and soon the planned age ver­i­fi­ca­tion for mes­sen­gers threat­ens to end anony­mous com­mu­ni­ca­tion on the in­ter­net. The fight for dig­i­tal free­dom must go on!”

The Next Battle: The Return of Chat Control and Mandatory ID

Despite to­day’s vic­tory, fur­ther pro­ce­dural steps by EU gov­ern­ments can­not be com­pletely ruled out. Most of all, the tri­logue ne­go­ti­a­tions on a per­ma­nent child pro­tec­tion reg­u­la­tion (Chat Control 2.0) are con­tin­u­ing un­der se­vere time pres­sure. There, too, EU gov­ern­ments con­tinue to in­sist on their de­mand for “voluntary” in­dis­crim­i­nate Chat Control.

Furthermore, the next mas­sive threat to dig­i­tal civil lib­er­ties is al­ready on the agenda: Next up in the on­go­ing tri­logue, law­mak­ers will ne­go­ti­ate whether mes­sen­ger and chat ser­vices, as well as app stores, will be legally obliged to im­ple­ment age ver­i­fi­ca­tion. This would re­quire users to pro­vide ID doc­u­ments or sub­mit to fa­cial scans, ef­fec­tively mak­ing anony­mous com­mu­ni­ca­tion im­pos­si­ble and se­verely en­dan­ger­ing vul­ner­a­ble groups such as whistle­blow­ers and per­se­cuted in­di­vid­u­als.

Background: What ex­actly ex­pires on 3 April

An EU in­terim reg­u­la­tion (2021/1232), set to ex­pire on 3 April, cur­rently per­mits US cor­po­ra­tions such as Meta to carry out in­dis­crim­i­nate mass scan­ning of pri­vate mes­sages on a vol­un­tary ba­sis. Three types of chat con­trol are au­tho­rised: scan­ning for al­ready known im­ages and videos (so-called hash scan­ning, which gen­er­ates over 90% of re­ports); au­to­mated as­sess­ment of pre­vi­ously un­known im­ages and videos; and au­to­mated analy­sis of text con­tent in pri­vate chats.

The AI-based analy­sis of un­known im­ages and texts is ex­tremely er­ror-prone. But the in­dis­crim­i­nate mass scan­ning for known ma­te­r­ial is also highly con­tro­ver­sial, too: be­yond the un­re­li­a­bil­ity of the al­go­rithms doc­u­mented by re­searchers, these scans rely on opaque for­eign data­bases rather than European crim­i­nal law. The al­go­rithms are blind to con­text and lack of crim­i­nal in­tent (e.g. con­sen­sual sex­ting be­tween teenagers). As a re­sult, vast num­bers of pri­vate but crim­i­nally ir­rel­e­vant chats are ex­posed.

The fact that to­day’s de­ci­sion by the EU Parliament was also tech­ni­cally im­per­a­tive is proven by a newly pub­lished sci­en­tific study. Renowned IT se­cu­rity re­searchers an­a­lyzed the stan­dard al­go­rithm “PhotoDNA”, which is used by tech com­pa­nies for Chat Control. Their damn­ing ver­dict: The soft­ware is “unreliable”. The re­searchers proved that crim­i­nals can ren­der il­le­gal im­ages in­vis­i­ble to the scan­ner through min­i­mal al­ter­ations (e.g., adding a sim­ple bor­der), while harm­less im­ages can be eas­ily ma­nip­u­lated so that in­no­cent cit­i­zens are falsely re­ported to the po­lice.

The Hard Facts: Why Chat Control Has Failed Spectacularly

The EU Commission’s 2025 eval­u­a­tion re­port on Chat Control reads like an ad­mis­sion of com­plete fail­ure:

* Data Giant Monopoly: Roughly 99% of all chat re­ports to po­lice in Europe come from a sin­gle US tech cor­po­ra­tion: Meta. US com­pa­nies acted as a pri­vate aux­il­iary po­lice force—with­out ef­fec­tive European over­sight.

* Massive Police Overload from Junk Data: The German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) re­ports that a stag­ger­ing 48% of the dis­closed chats are crim­i­nally ir­rel­e­vant. This flood of junk data ties up re­sources that are ur­gently needed for tar­geted in­ves­ti­ga­tions.

* Criminalization of Minors: According to crime sta­tis­tics, around 40% of in­ves­ti­ga­tions in Germany tar­get teenagers who thought­lessly share im­ages (e.g., con­sen­sual sex­ting).

* An Obsolete Model Due to Encryption: Because providers are in­creas­ingly tran­si­tion­ing to end-to-end en­cryp­tion for pri­vate mes­sages, the num­ber of chats re­ported to the po­lice has al­ready dropped by 50% since 2022.

* Failure in Child Protection: According to the Commission’s re­port, there is no mea­sur­able cor­re­la­tion be­tween the mass sur­veil­lance of pri­vate mes­sages and ac­tual con­vic­tions.

During the leg­isla­tive process, for­eign-funded lobby groups and au­thor­i­ties tried to pres­sure the Parliament through fear­mon­ger­ing. A com­par­i­son of their claims with re­al­ity:

Disinformation 1: “The European Parliament is to blame for the col­lapse of the tri­logue ne­go­ti­a­tions.”

(Claimed by the lobby al­liance ECLAG and US tech com­pa­nies)

* Fact: It was the EU Council of Ministers that de­lib­er­ately let the ne­go­ti­a­tions fail. Leaked Council ca­bles re­veal that EU mem­ber states showed no will­ing­ness to com­pro­mise, fear­ing that any con­ces­sion could set a prece­dent for the per­ma­nent Chat Control 2.0 reg­u­la­tion. Parliament’s lead ne­go­tia­tor, Birgit Sippel, sharply crit­i­cized the Council: “With their lack of flex­i­bil­ity, Member States have de­lib­er­ately ac­cepted that the in­terim reg­u­la­tion will ex­pire.”

Disinformation 2: “Without in­dis­crim­i­nate Chat Control, law en­force­ment will be fly­ing blind.”

(Claimed by au­thor­i­ties in­clud­ing BKA President Holger Münch)

* Fact: Targeted sur­veil­lance re­mains al­lowed. The real prob­lem for au­thor­i­ties is their own re­fusal to re­move ma­te­r­ial from the in­ter­net. The Federation of German Criminal Investigators (BDK) warns that this mass sur­veil­lance pro­duces “a flood of tips… of­ten with­out any ac­tual in­ves­tiga­tive lead.” Meanwhile, the BKA sys­tem­at­i­cally re­fuses to proac­tively have abuse ma­te­r­ial re­moved from the in­ter­net, as in­ves­tiga­tive re­port­ing by ARD has re­vealed.

Disinformation 4: “The de­mand comes pri­mar­ily from vic­tims.”

(Implied by the ECLAG cam­paign)

* Fact: Actual sur­vivors are tak­ing le­gal ac­tion against the sur­veil­lance. Survivor Alexander Hanff writes: “Taking away our right to pri­vacy means fur­ther harm­ing us.” To pre­serve safe spaces for vic­tims, a sur­vivor from Bavaria is cur­rently su­ing Meta. Who truly ben­e­fits was ex­posed in an in­ves­tiga­tive re­port by Balkan Insight: The US or­ga­ni­za­tion Thorn, which sells scan­ning soft­ware, in­vests mas­sively in EU lob­by­ing, while ECLAG mem­bers are funded by tech cor­po­ra­tions.

The European Parliament ad­vo­cates a gen­uine par­a­digm shift for fu­ture leg­is­la­tion, sup­ported by civil so­ci­ety, sur­vivor net­works, and IT se­cu­rity ex­perts:

Strict de­fault set­tings and pro­tec­tive mech­a­nisms (Security by Design) to make cy­ber­groom­ing tech­ni­cally harder from the out­set.

Proactive search by a new EU Child Protection Center and im­me­di­ate take­down oblig­a­tions for providers and law en­force­ment on the open in­ter­net and dark­net — il­le­gal ma­te­r­ial must be de­stroyed di­rectly at the source. There must be an end to law en­force­ment agen­cies de­clar­ing them­selves “not com­pe­tent” for the re­moval of abuse ma­te­r­ial.

During the leg­isla­tive process, the mas­sive, ques­tion­able lob­by­ing ef­forts were ex­posed: The push for Chat Control is heav­ily dri­ven by for­eign-funded lobby groups and tech ven­dors. The US or­ga­ni­za­tion Thorn, which sells the ex­act type of scan­ning soft­ware in ques­tion, spends hun­dreds of thou­sands of eu­ros lob­by­ing in Brussels. The tech in­dus­try of­fi­cially lob­bied side-by-side with cer­tain or­ga­ni­za­tions for a law that does not pro­tect chil­dren, but rather se­cures their own prof­its and data ac­cess.

“Right up to the very end, the US tech in­dus­try and for­eign- or gov­ern­ment-funded lobby groups tried to panic Europe. But flood­ing our po­lice with false pos­i­tives and du­pli­cates from mass sur­veil­lance does­n’t save a sin­gle child from abuse. Today’s de­fin­i­tive fail­ure of Chat Control is a clear stop sign to this sur­veil­lance ma­nia. Negotiators can­not ig­nore this ver­dict in the on­go­ing tri­logue ne­go­ti­a­tions for a per­ma­nent reg­u­la­tion. Indiscriminate mass scan­ning of our pri­vate mes­sages must fi­nally give way to truly ef­fec­tive and tar­geted child pro­tec­tion that re­spects fun­da­men­tal rights.”

Today, we’re an­nounc­ing an up­date on how GitHub will use data to de­liver more in­tel­li­gent, con­text-aware cod­ing as­sis­tance. From April 24 on­ward, in­ter­ac­tion data—specif­i­cally in­puts, out­puts, code snip­pets, and as­so­ci­ated con­text—from Copilot Free, Pro, and Pro+ users will be used to train and im­prove our AI mod­els un­less they opt out. Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise users are not af­fected by this up­date.

Not in­ter­ested? Opt out in set­tings un­der “Privacy.” If you pre­vi­ously opted out of the set­ting al­low­ing GitHub to col­lect this data for prod­uct im­prove­ments, your pref­er­ence has been re­tained—your choice is pre­served, and your data will not be used for train­ing un­less you opt in.

This ap­proach aligns with es­tab­lished in­dus­try prac­tices and will im­prove model per­for­mance for all users. By par­tic­i­pat­ing, you’ll help our mod­els bet­ter un­der­stand de­vel­op­ment work­flows, de­liver more ac­cu­rate and se­cure code pat­tern sug­ges­tions, and im­prove their abil­ity to help you catch po­ten­tial bugs be­fore they reach pro­duc­tion.

Our ini­tial mod­els were built us­ing a mix of pub­licly avail­able data and hand-crafted code sam­ples. This past year, we’ve started in­cor­po­rat­ing in­ter­ac­tion data from Microsoft em­ploy­ees and have seen mean­ing­ful im­prove­ments, in­clud­ing in­creased ac­cep­tance rates in mul­ti­ple lan­guages.

The im­prove­ments we’ve seen by in­cor­po­rat­ing Microsoft in­ter­ac­tion data in­di­cate we can im­prove model per­for­mance for a more di­verse range of use cases by train­ing on real-world in­ter­ac­tion data. Should you de­cide to par­tic­i­pate in this pro­gram, the in­ter­ac­tion data we may col­lect and lever­age in­cludes:

Outputs ac­cepted or mod­i­fied by you

Inputs sent to GitHub Copilot, in­clud­ing code snip­pets shown to the model

This pro­gram does not use:

Interaction data from users who opt out of model train­ing in their Copilot set­tings

Content from your is­sues, dis­cus­sions, or pri­vate repos­i­to­ries at rest. We use the phrase “at rest” de­lib­er­ately be­cause Copilot does process code from pri­vate repos­i­to­ries when you are ac­tively us­ing Copilot. This in­ter­ac­tion data is re­quired to run the ser­vice and could be used for model train­ing un­less you opt out.

The data used in this pro­gram may be shared with GitHub af­fil­i­ates, which are com­pa­nies in our cor­po­rate fam­ily in­clud­ing Microsoft. This data will not be shared with third-party AI model providers or other in­de­pen­dent ser­vice providers.

We be­lieve the fu­ture of AI-assisted de­vel­op­ment de­pends on real-world in­ter­ac­tion data from de­vel­op­ers like you. It’s why we’re us­ing Microsoft in­ter­ac­tion data for model train­ing and will be­gin us­ing in­ter­ac­tion data from GitHub em­ploy­ees as well.

If you choose to help us im­prove our mod­els with your in­ter­ac­tion data, thank you. Your con­tri­bu­tions make a mean­ing­ful dif­fer­ence in build­ing AI tools that serve the en­tire de­vel­oper com­mu­nity. If you pre­fer not to par­tic­i­pate, that’s fine too—you will still be able to take full ad­van­tage of the AI fea­tures you know and love.

Together, we can con­tinue to build AI that ac­cel­er­ates your work­flows and em­pow­ers you to build bet­ter, more se­cure soft­ware faster than ever.

If you have ques­tions, visit our FAQ and re­lated dis­cus­sion.

Mario Rodriguez leads the GitHub Product team as Chief Product Officer. His core iden­tity is be­ing a learner and his pas­sion is cre­at­ing de­vel­oper tools—so much so that he has spent the last 20 years liv­ing that mis­sion in lead­er­ship roles across Microsoft and GitHub. Mario most re­cently over­saw GitHub’s AI strat­egy and the GitHub Copilot prod­uct line, launch­ing and grow­ing Copilot across thou­sands of or­ga­ni­za­tions and mil­lions of users. Mario spends time out­side of GitHub with his wife and two daugh­ters. He also co-chairs and founded a char­ter school in an ef­fort to progress ed­u­ca­tion in rural re­gions of the United States.

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Yes please, I’d like GitHub and af­fil­i­ates to use my in­for­ma­tion for per­son­al­ized com­mu­ni­ca­tions, tar­geted ad­ver­tis­ing and cam­paign ef­fec­tive­ness. See the GitHub Privacy Statement for more de­tails.