Dan Ballard

Decentralization and privacy dev. He/Him.

Works on Tor Browser (The Tor Project (npub1vwv…cqgs))

Board @ Open Privacy Research Society ([@openprivacy](https://hachyderm.io/@openprivacy ) ) & developer on Cwtch.im (Cwtch (npub1w58…w8vf) )

Cwtch: 67ckzss7drn64k4z4lpcnyn2ivvmkeuho2yucqcgglw3ozcrmez2k3yd
Site: https://danballard.com
Donate: https://openprivacy.ca/donate/

Public Key

npub1alz3eepzhe2yc2jpvf2hm0d6sysx33g3j0ugmefppgrryyuwfqjsq64kr9

NIP-05 Address

dan_ballard_at_kolektiva.social@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqswl3guus3tu4zv9fqky4tahkagzgrgc5ge87ydu5ss5p3jzw8ysfgpzemhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuurjd9kkzmpwdejhgqgdwaehxw309ahx7uewd3hkcuxfdjz

Publishing to

relay.primal.net

nos.lol

relay.damus.io

Author Public Key

npub1alz3eepzhe2yc2jpvf2hm0d6sysx33g3j0ugmefppgrryyuwfqjsq64kr9

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Last Notes

2026-08-07 12:55:49 UTC

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they were having so much fun and doing great work with limited cpu rendering. The any shape themes allowed delightful things. And their faux terminal transparency was awesome for its time (just grabbed the wallpaper and rendered it's relative portion with the configured color mask) 👍

2026-07-10 22:37:32 UTC

RE: https://fosstodon.org/@cwtch/116898036909989089
It's been a really productive Cwtch hack week, landed updated Tor and then a massive ~year Flutter update (3.29 to 3.44), which brought in a decent amount of changes and improvements, and breakage. Spent a lot of the week upgrading dependencies in Flutter, and Android, the latter of which really modernized, and got everything building except Windows, needs a little in person care still. Lot of great maintenance, keeping modern and current, and needed tech debt paying off work that helps keep Cwtch healthy, including a ton of infrastructure updates to build then newer code.
Meanwhile the rest of the team tore into our new managed groups work and I cannot convey how excited we all are to launch in the future. Been brewing for a long time.
Excellent progress was made, designs hashed out, plans made, and also importantly, momentum gained. Very excited about Cwtch in the next while 💜
#note10p0…sfxh

2026-04-29 17:10:59 UTC

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OMG I forgot about the show!!! i had caught bits of it on our local sci fi channel back in the day lol

2026-04-29 17:02:15 UTC

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lol yeah, i enjoyed it a bunch for the few years it ran, it had a bunch of earnestness, and the fact the did it international with i think 6 countries represented per year including sets of per country/language announcers, was really... fun? and it was also super camp.
Sadly no guy talking to animals, i guess quite disconnected from the 80s venture with a similar name 😆

2026-04-29 16:59:10 UTC

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did you ever see and how did you find netflix's Ultimate Beastmaster?

2026-03-25 17:45:06 UTC

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haha wow, haven't heard this in a minute. I had the first 2 or 3 Enigma albums on tape as a kid 🤣 Was certainly a fun and different vibe. You a fan? or just wandering around 90s music finding stuff?

2026-03-25 17:43:41 UTC

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I've always loved it! I only found out about this version of the video in the last year or two, and felt robbed, I'd only seen the US/MTV alternate on TV as a kid. and it's fine, but i def like this one better!

2026-03-10 17:30:58 UTC

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I kinda feel this has been going on for over a decade in various places. For me watching a "new" crowd who clearly like their interpretation of OSX's strong opinions and less options take over Gnome in the 2010-2012 time frame and start Gnome3 and kick off with just years and years of feature removals was... sad and tiring.

2026-03-08 17:32:37 UTC

Apparently it needs explicitly stating to my audience, trans women are women, there's no debate, please unfollow me if you'd want to "debate"

2026-01-12 04:28:58 UTC

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was there anything in particular? I just had a high level synopsis

2026-01-12 04:28:33 UTC

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I didn't hear good things and had already given up in season 4. Read the synopsis on Wikipedia a while ago and lol wow. Yeaaaah. Disappointing shame

2026-01-11 05:13:43 UTC

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"only the heir to the throne to the kingdom of idiots..."
https://youtu.be/aCE-vzEtbaQ?si=9XEw-XDQy8PE9KjW

2025-12-19 18:43:58 UTC

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do you have any recommendations about where these slightly more grounded than SciFi talks might be happening now?

2025-12-19 04:37:26 UTC

> She-Ra and The Princesses of Power will Leave Netflix on February 21, 2026
this is embarrassing and fury making. this is a great show, a "netflix original", and it sounds like they got what they wanted from it and just don't want to repay the licensing so are letting it lapse and presumably a great show will just vanish and be no where.
There's only one logical response 🏴‍☠️ everything.
https://comicbook.com/anime/news/she-ra-and-the-princesses-of-power-creator-talks-netflix-removal/

2025-11-22 02:44:21 UTC

I am beyond impressed with the work Igalia is doing here across the linux stack (in part funded by valve). Working on x86 to arm emulators, kernel vulkan drivers, and even a new CPU scheduler. Incredible stuff cross stack stuff that everyone is going to benefit massively from 👏
https://www.igalia.com/2025/11/helpingvalve.html

2025-08-17 23:26:19 UTC

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P2P distributed solutions have always been an interest and focus of mine and it only seems more important and urgent as time goes on.

2025-08-17 23:25:42 UTC

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This is exactly the kind of niche an anachro syndaclist tech solution (if I'm not way off base on parsing what I'm reading) might be just a wee bit better suited to fill.

2025-08-17 23:24:43 UTC

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A great example of capital working while apeing this are things like "poshmark" and other "resale" apps. They wear the skin of small local economies, of sharing and reusing, of second hand markets. But they are centralized, they control the platform, the algorithms, what you see, and how. and they are just... not kind, and appear to incentivize some really toxic and draining behaviour. They seem happy to have folks pass the same items around in a circle while they take a cut each time...

2025-08-17 23:18:12 UTC

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built on top or with those we need new protocols and apps to sue them in all kinds of new ways.

2025-08-17 23:17:49 UTC

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Just bouncing around my head while reading it seems like we need new P2P distribution methods for all kinds of material and speeds, from ideas and communication to higher bandwidth things that might be video education/knowledge, or possible "product" like things from streaming, entertainment etc.

2025-08-17 23:16:09 UTC

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For second: reading about putting things like Syndicalism into practice 100 years ago, already there's huge logistical problems to be worked out, and it sounds like on smaller to medium scale at times they were. But if we're talking about starting that work now in this ever more complex world, it sure sounds like p2p distributed logistical tools could really help facilitate folks taking baby steps here and there getting off centralized dependancy

2025-08-17 23:14:31 UTC

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For one, creating new social spaces to think and organize that aren't shaped by profit seeking, and censored heavily would probably be helpful

2025-08-17 23:13:52 UTC

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If tech folks who are also into anarchism, syndicalism, socialism, communism and etc are want to be more serious about putting these into practice in the real world, we might want to start with software. For a whole host of reasons.

2025-08-17 23:12:12 UTC

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Anyways getting away from the point: centralized clouds of all shapes and sizes and kinds is just another power grab by those with to charge rent and enforce their power on those without.

2025-08-17 23:11:02 UTC

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But again, they've been somewhat end run around by now with KYC regulation at all cash in/out points is starting to put a strangle hold on the use case of financial censorship circumvention while still leaving it open for just investment. :/

2025-08-17 23:04:17 UTC

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Very belatedly I have at least seen a few folks opine: "wait is this what bitcoin was for and trying to solve?"
Which, yeah, in theory, it, and others like ZCash and Monero were looking to do distributed payment in part to circumvent financial censorship.

2025-08-17 23:03:01 UTC

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The next problem after distribution/bandwidth, is getting paid, and we're seeing some great examples of the bottlenecks there with Mastercard, paypal and stripe chocking that and deploying now increasingly open anti queer censorship.

2025-08-17 23:01:52 UTC

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Different forms of distribution at scale seem to be the problem that corporate cloud hosting is filling out and offering "the solution" to but with such increasing restrictions and limitations.

2025-08-17 23:00:46 UTC

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It continues onto social media and discourse from reddit to discord to X, bluesky etc.

2025-08-17 23:00:00 UTC

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We're organizing, planning, educating, all on owned platforms.
So so so many of the problems folks are looking to alleviate these days are lack of streaming power: can't send enough emails, can't distribute enough live or big video. So folks are all cramming into giant corporate owned clouds from youtube to twitch to substack etc. And then all getting censored to shit.

2025-08-17 22:57:35 UTC

Been dabbling in doing "some reading" while on vacation while having mental capacity for more than only fiction...
And all I'm thinking is that ~100 year old arguments about means of production and no centralized ownership... well we've both really shat the bed and let the capitalist and power hungry folk do a rug pull setting up corporate digital cloud after corporate digital cloud.
It seems P2P software design and anarchism, syndaclism, even socialism or communism are just matches made in heaven and yet there's so little right now.

2025-08-01 15:41:25 UTC

So wikipedia is looking at having to pull out of the UK, newgrounds is being snarky but essentially going paid access only there, and everyone else is shutting down their sites and going to discord or facebook groups. The Uk sure looks like they've finished killing off their open web. and a whole lotta other govs are looking at age verification laws pretty enthusiastically...

2025-07-25 04:27:10 UTC

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ah cool

2025-07-25 04:25:09 UTC

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wait you aren't even live tooting the resolution ep to last season's cliffhanger? This is like ep 3 and another dumb gorn war ep?

2025-07-25 04:23:24 UTC

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another problem I have is strange new worlds seems to hate their captain? On his own he's fine and a nice dad to the crew but any time kirk gets near him he has to be shit on and suck by comparison. The finale of s2 made me laugh cus he's a seasoned captain but the gorn are attacking and he's just frozen up with near panic on his face as the crew beg for commands. And it just held on it comically a bit too long. Just trashing their lead captain. Meanwhile when Riker was left in charge of the enterprise in TNG when Picard got Borged, that finale ended a beat later with him confidently giving the order to fire. Cus they didn't hate him. And that was the cliffhanger, not brain fall out panic.

2025-07-25 04:06:49 UTC

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haha so I take it strange new worlds season 3 is starting to drop? 😅

2025-06-04 19:12:11 UTC

If you like privacy in canada, you might want to catch up on the Liberal gov's first major bill. It's a bummer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxWy6aIC2es&ab_channel=SteveBoots

2025-03-08 02:51:52 UTC

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yeah NORAD is another agreement we and the us are in with minimal obligations. NATO is the big one but not sure it was designed with signatories invading each other in mind...

2025-03-08 02:47:12 UTC

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embarrassing
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogdensburg_Agreement

2025-01-29 01:23:06 UTC

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someone pointed out recently that part of gadget culture has kinda died cus everything now is just a near similar vessel for a service and software heavy. Hardware gadgets that do things on their own aren't as common or much anymore?