According to ethernodes.org, there are roughly 7,000 synced full Ethereum nodes discoverable today.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the vast majority of full Ethereum nodes are… not running in your average person’s living room. So where are they running?

Between Amazon, Alibaba, Microsoft, and Google, 50% of our collective memory of the blockchain’s history is in the hands of the tech giants.

What about the exchanges?

First, let me caveat by saying that a website’s public DNS data rarely presents a full picture of what’s happening behind the scenes. It’s still insightful nonetheless.

Based on CoinMarketCap’s ranking data, here’s where the top 10 exchanges are hosted:

1. Binance - AWS

2. Huobi - AWS

3. Coinbase - Cloudflare

4. Kraken - Cloudflare

5. Bithumb - Cloudflare

6. Bitfinex - Cloudflare

7. ZB.com - Alibaba

8. BitFlyer - Akamai

9. UpBit - Cloudflare

10. Bittrex - Cloudflare

I didn’t go digging any deeper than that, but I would bet that a good number of the exchanges behind Cloudflare are likely AWS customers as well.

What about the DEXes?

While DEXes (“decentralized exchanges”) are frequently set up with the stated goal of fostering permissionless trading, many of their entry points rely on Big Tech as well.

1. Bisq.network - Cloudflare

2. Uniswap - AWS

3. 1inch.exchange - Cloudflare

4. Curve.fi - AWS

5. IDEX - Cloudflare

6. DyDx - Cloudflare

Will the show still go on for these sites, even if Cloudflare and AWS go down? Probably. Will it be massively disruptive if AWS decides it’s no longer in the cryptocurrency hosting business? You bet.

What about the rest of DeFi?

A non-exhaustive list of other major parts of the decentralized finance ecosystem hosted with Big Tech:

• MyEtherWallet - Cloudflare

• MyCrypto - AWS

• Tornado.cash - AWS

• CryptoScamDB - AWS

• Infura.io - AWS

• Blockchain.com - Cloudflare

• EtherScan - Cloudflare

• BTC.com - Alibaba (with AWS Route53 DNS)

• Bitcoin.com - AWS Route53 DNS

Conclusion

There’s nothing inherently malicious about using AWS or Cloudflare. For many development teams, that’s more often than not the right decision from a security and scalability perspective. It does, however, mean that a decentralized future is heavily reliant on the goodwill of two companies. We should be thoughtful about the implications of that.

Recently though, these scammers have pivoted to YouTube:

At first glance, YouTube would appear to be the ideal scam distribution platform. It supports content virality and discovery in ways that Twitter doesn’t (just look at the suggested scam videos in the “Up Next” portion of the screenshot above.)

Fortunately, we can reapply some of the same methods that we use for scam-hunting on Twitter to surface accounts, videos, and thumbnails that are likely to be distributing trust-trading scams.

The same obfuscation techniques that scammers use to evade detection also make it much harder for a victim to find the content organically, and understand what to do with it* — while still leaving telltale signatures that distinguish it from legitimate content.

Here are some of the YouTube scam addresses I’ve found while putting together a detector in my personal time: https://gist.github.com/themullinator/a06a197152dd0b7f34e282617fa0a228

*A similar evolution is occurring in the sextortion email industry. Spam filters have gotten so good at detection extortion emails that the actors have resorted to doing complicated things like sending the victim an email in Russian with instructions to load it into Google Translate, and then piece together fragments of the extortion destination address.

I don’t think I have much expertise to add to the debate, except to say that as someone who plays InfoSec defense for a living, I gleaned most of my current knowledge by playing around with red team tools.

Would I publish one? Probably not, if I’m being honest. Would I feel differently about this topic if I was tasked with defending a Windows 2012 environment, that wasn’t scheduled to be patched or upgraded for months? Probably.

Playing tennis against a wall doesn’t increase your skill as fast as playing against an adversary. Personally I’m grateful for the democratization of offensive security tools as a free crash course in becoming better at my job.

Confession: I love the news. I love news feeds. I love analyzing events as they’re happening and being the first to lean over to my coworkers at nearby desks (or these days, post a message in Slack) to tell them about the latest breaking story.

I’ve never felt more overwhelmed.

We no longer live in an information economy, but an attention economy. If you have the top dozen news apps on your phone, you‘ll probably receive close to 100 notifications per day about stories ranging from car crashes to Donald Trump’s latest tweet — and then another notification from Twitter about that same tweet as well.

I can’t keep up with that deluge of information. You can’t either. Nobody can. So we make choices about what we pay attention to in real time, which inadvertently creates a feedback loop incentivizing news organizations to publish the most provocative headlines they can, as fast as they can.

Social media, especially Facebook, incentivize even worse behavior. Meme pages thrive on virality, which means at best posting inflammatory zingers stripped of nuance, and at worst sharing deliberately provocative falsehoods.

We’re creating a world where we don’t know what we can believe or who we can trust, and the information that we do believe just gives us anxiety about the state of the human condition.

I recently decided it was time to re-evaluate my relationship with the news and how I kept myself informed about what’s going on with the world. Here’s what I did:

1. Cut out all sources of breaking news and notifications.

No CNN app, no news channels, no push notifications. This one felt counterintuitive to me at first, because what if something important happened and I missed it? Isn’t it my duty to stay informed about what’s going on in the world?

And then I realized that CNN has never caused me to drop everything and immediately change what I was doing. Not once. Sure, what’s happening in Washington DC is often important, but it’s rarely urgent.

That little adrenaline rush of learning bad news — another mass shooting, protests in France, you name it — adds to my sense of anxiety about the world, without adding to my understanding of it.

To be clear, I’m absolutely not saying that we should blinker ourselves to what’s going on in the world. But do I need to know about it right now, in this exact second? Almost certainly not.

2. Prefer print and long-form journalism to audiovisual and short-form formats.

Very few issues can be meaningfully understood through an infographic, caption on a meme, 30-second news segment, and so forth. I’ve developed a routine of saving articles from my various digest subscriptions (Medium and Longreads) as well as curated articles shared on Twitter by journalists and trusted subject matter experts to Pocket.

Once a day, I take 30–60 minutes to read articles and essays in Pocket. Giving myself a dedicated time-bound segment of my day to catch up on the state of the world — while still maintaining some objectivity and distance from it — allows more of an opportunity to analyze the stories, make notes about what topics I should learn more about, and so forth. Context is always key, and I just can’t get it by skimming headlines.

3. Stop engaging on Facebook.

I used to post fairly frequently on political topics, and would jump into conversations any time one appeared in my feed. I just can’t bring myself to do it anymore, even if I see a meme posted by one of my more politically-aligned friends and do a mental “oh snap, you tell them!”

I say Facebook specifically because I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s the most toxic place for political discourse on the internet other than Twitter, but at least everyone joins Twitter expecting to be insulted by eggs. Life is way better without NowThis and article headlines telling me I won’t believe what happens next.

4. Invest my time in books and audiobooks instead.

I’ve dramatically increased the number of non-fiction books I’ve been reading and/or listening to through the magic of Audible. What I didn’t expect was the corollary benefit to my attention span and cognitive processing abilities. Concentrating on a printed page (and I mean an actual printed page, not a Kindle or iPad) has dramatically increased my ability to focus for long periods of time, and also (weirdly) made me less impatient overall.

As for audiobooks, they’re an amazing commute-filler. I spend an hour a day commuting to and from work — that’s an average of 20 hours a month that I’ve been filling with mostly histories and biographies. Beto O’Rourke’s senate campaign was an exciting journey to follow, but one made contextually-richer by understanding Lyndon Johnson’s path through Texas decades ago.

In summary.

Time is our most precious resource. Since I’ve made it a practice to be more deliberate and intentional about the news and data I consume, I’ve actually felt more informed, not less, and way less unhealthy stress to boot. I’m generally of the opinion that we’d all be better off slowing down and taking the time to understand, and not just react.

If the name of Judge Aaron Persky doesn’t ring a bell for you, the name of Brock Turner might. Turner was convicted of sexually assaulting a woman behind a dumpster on the campus of Stanford University, and was only stopped after two passersby saw him and intervened. The case received international attention, but the reason the controversy has continued is primarily due to the sentence that Judge Persky handed down: a mere 6 months in county jail. The ensuing outrage sparked an initiative to have Judge Persky recalled from office, and the recall vote will be on the ballot for June 2018.

This recall vote comes at a unique time, which is one of the reasons why I was drawn to learn more about it. As a supporter of both the #MeToo movement and the criminal justice reform movement, what on earth am I supposed to think about a judge who gives a short sentence for a violent sexual assault? Are these two causes in conflict here? Of equal importance, what are the larger implications if the recall vote succeeds?

To answer these questions, I want to first look at the underlying case itself. We’ll then take a quick detour into judicial discipline in California before diving back into the specific arguments both for and against the recall of Judge Persky, and what they could mean over the long term. American law is built on precedent — in other words, decisions made in the past can and do impact decisions made in the future.

Whichever side you end up on, this is about much more than one judge and one case.

A quick refresher on the Brock Turner case

In March 2016, Brock Turner was convicted on 3 counts of sexual assault. In any type of criminal case, there are a lot of steps between the actual criminal act occurring, and the resulting punishment. First, a prosecutor must decide whether or not the evidence can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that (a) a crime occurred and (b) the person being charged actually committed the crime. This is what makes sexual assault cases a lot trickier to handle in our legal system than, say, homicide. The act of killing someone is unambiguous: either they’re dead, or they’re not. The difference between rape and non-criminal sex is consent: the act itself doesn’t change, so the prosecutor typically has to rely on more circumstantial evidence to prove their case.

Here, though, the facts were clear enough that a 12-member jury unanimously convicted Brock Turner. Once a defendant has been convicted of a crime, the case goes back to the judge for sentencing (in general, juries don’t decide the punishment for a crime unless the death penalty is involved). How does a judge decide the sentence? Well, there are a few factors are involved.

First, there may be mandatory sentences: that is, the legislature decided that if you violate Law X, you will receive Punishment Y. No exceptions.

Second, there may be sentencing ranges: these typically prescribe the maximum punishment (and sometimes the minimum punishment) for a particular statutory violation. These typically read something like “a person who commits a violation of this law shall be sentenced to not less than 6 months and not more than 6 years in prison.” Under California sentencing laws, judges may sentence someone to parole instead of prison, even if the text of the statute says the punishment is X number of years in prison.

Given that there’s a certain amount of discretion granted to judges, the local Probation Department will generally write up a sentencing recommendation that factors in the nature of the crime, the specific circumstances of the case, and so forth. The judge isn’t required to to follow this recommendation, however.

In this case, the Santa Clara County Probation Department recommended a short period of time in the county jail, and a period of probation. Ultimately, Judge Persky followed the department’s recommendations (rather than the 6 years in prison requested by the prosecutor) and sentenced Turner to 6 months in county jail, plus 3 years of probation, random alcohol testing, and registration as a sex offender.

In other words, while people can disagree about whether the sentence was appropriate, there’s no question that it was legal. Judge Persky didn’t bypass the law or create an exception for Turner — he acted precisely within the boundaries of what the law allows.

A theory of justice

Why are judges given such a wide latitude to determine sentences? Wouldn’t it be more fair and just if everyone was automatically given the same punishment for a violation of the law? Maybe, and maybe not — it depends on how you define “justice.” Our system of laws (generally) tries to punish people in proportion to their moral culpability. As a simple example of that, the sentence for murder (intentionally killing someone else) is a lot harsher than the sentence for manslaughter (unintentionally killing someone else). We want to punish people based on their intentions.

Secondly, there’s the question of why we punish people in the first place. Is it to specifically deter that one person from committing a crime in the future? Is it to generally deter everyone from committing that crime? Do we just want to punish people in proportion to the pain they’ve caused (an eye for an eye, the “retributive” theory of justice), or do we want to try to make them better people who can be productive members of society in the future (the “utilitarian” theory of justice)?

There’s no right answer to this, of course. Most people will lean more towards one end of the spectrum or the other, and that will influence what you think the correct punishment should be. Typically, conservatives favor retributive/general deterrence models, while progressives favor utilitarian/specific deterrence models.

Do we automatically want to give out harsh penalties without considering individual circumstances? Personally, I don’t think so. That sort of mentality is what led to the creation of California’s 3-strikes sentencing law, and the disproportionate number of minorities serving life sentences for minor crimes like possession of marijuana.

The truth is, as usual, complicated

In researching the facts around Judge Persky’s recall (and I’ll link to everything I read so you can do it too, if you’d like), the one thing I kept running up against was this feeling of “yes, but…”

Is it true that Turner’s sentence was lighter than other sexual assault cases that Persky has presided over? Yes, but…

Is it true that the California Council on Judicial Performance, which cleared Judge Persky of wrongdoing, has an “F” grade for judicial accountability? Yes, but…

So I decided to walk through the main points put forward by the Recall Persky campaign to see how strongly the data supported them.

Judicial discipline in California

First, let’s talk about the Council on Judicial Performance. After Judge Persky handed down Brock Turner’s sentence, the council was flooded with ethics complaints, leading to an investigation and report by the CJP that ultimately found no wrongdoing on Judge Persky’s part. The recall campaign cited the CJP’s “record of protecting judges and lack of transparency” as a reason to initiate a recall vote vs. filing a formal complaint.

And this is where I started to become concerned about cherrypicked facts. While it’s absolutely true that the Center for Public Integrity gave California’s judiciary an overall “F” grade, it still awarded the state a 100/100 score for its judicial discipline process.

By the same token, when you look at the types of actions that get judges sanctioned, everything from “misuse of a court credit card” to “Bias/appearance of bias toward a particular class” have gotten judges disciplined. (In one instance, a judge was censured because he told a Hispanic public defender that he “loved her accent” and “wasn’t planning on having her deported.”)

After getting a flavor for the types of offenses that get judges disciplined, I tend to agree that the CJP isn’t the right venue for handling concerns about Judge Persky’s decision here. That said, it’s not because I think the CJP is corrupt, just that we can’t really address “privilege bias” — the primary complaint of the recall campaign — through our existing judicial discipline process.

Is Judge Persky really bad enough to recall?

If Judge Persky had said “I’m sentencing Brock Turner to 6 months in jail because he comes from a respectable white family,” this would be a pretty cut-and-dried case. But that’s really not what happened. If Judge Persky had a long-running history of giving minority defendants the maximum possible sentence (regardless of Probation Department recommendations) and white defendants the minimum possible sentence, that would also be a clear example of bias. But we also don’t see that here either.

In a review of Judge Persky’s other cases, the Associated Press found plenty of examples of lenient sentences for minorities, strict sentences for white defendants, and a general pattern of Persky following the Probation Department’s recommendations.

You can disagree with Judge Persky’s decision, but I believe his words deserve consideration: “As a prosecutor, I fought vigorously for victims. As a judge, my role is to consider both sides. California law requires every judge to consider rehabilitation and probation for first-time offenders. It’s not always popular, but it’s the law, and I took an oath to follow it without regard to public opinion.”

At the end of the day, what I see is a judge who is generally pushing in a direction of leniency, not “throwing the book” at defendants, and in general evoking a utilitarian theory of justice. Maybe you look at those same facts and come down on the opposite side, but hopefully you’ll at least concede that it’s not as black and white as a single “yes/no” recall vote.

What are the implications of a recall vote succeeding?

As I said at the beginning of this post, a recall vote isn’t just about one judge in one case. Recalling Judge Persky sends a message to the rest of the California judiciary that “we need to be harsher in our sentencing in general.”

To me, this feels like a very blunt and un-nuanced way to address a highly complex and nuanced issue. If we don’t like what the law allows, we should change the law — and in fact, legislators have already started doing that in response to this case.

Popular override of judicial rule can swing both ways, too. Let’s not forget the sham “justice” that was dispensed to black defendants in the American south not too long ago. For every case where we might want a judge to give a longer sentence, I’m confident we can find another where we think it’s ridiculous that someone would be convicted of laughing at Jeff Sessions. Do we really want that judge to feel like they have to give a democratic protester the maximum possible sentence?

Some additional thoughts and questions

Socioeconomic inequality in sentencing: When the Probation Department assesses the risk and sentencing of a particular offender, one of the things they take into account are the community resources and family support that a defendant has available to them. It’s pretty easy to see how systematic bias would creep into sentencing here. Obviously a Stanford student from a well-to-do family will have more support and resources than an indigent homeless person. And we know that, due to socioeconomic inequality, that Stanford student is more likely to be white. So the real question (which I don’t have an answer to) is, how do we address that issue more generally?

US sentencing is pretty harsh already, too: When we look at prison sentences and how harsh they’ve gotten (in no small part due to the War on Drugs), we sometimes forget that the US has significantly longer sentences and higher incarceration rates than just about any other country in the developed world already. And let’s not forget that that the time spent in prison is often just the start of a lifetime of punishment — for a registered sex offender and convicted felon, Brock Turner will have difficulty finding work (or even just existing in society) for the rest of his life. Do I say that to generate sympathy for him? Certainly not. I just raise the point to say that, whether he’s in jail or not, he’s going to have to live with the stigma for the years to come. Again, it’s one of those things that raises larger social questions like “given how difficult life is for anyone getting out of jail, regardless of the nature of the offense, how should we be thinking about sentencing?

Where can I learn more?

I don’t think I’ve more than scratched the surface with this blog post — this case highlights the complicated interactions between criminal justice reform and addressing rape culture. Not all of the underlying social issues can be addressed by the law, and our legal system is woefully unequipped to handle sexual assault cases. So I’ve put together all the source documents and articles I used here: http://notes.mattmuller.info/post/172220787231/notes-from-the-people-v-judge-persky-on-medium

The US election system is flawed in a number of ways. But is it flawed enough to allow 3–5 million ballots to be cast by non-citizens in the 2016 Presidential election without anyone noticing? Donald Trump seems to think so. I disagree.

First though, we need to clarify terminology. Because, while voter fraud is a type of election fraud or election interference, it is not the only type of election fraud.

What voter fraud is NOT:

Being registered to vote in multiple states is not voter fraud.

Deceased individuals remaining on the voter rolls is not voter fraud.

Tampering with election machines is not voter fraud.

Vote suppression is not voter fraud.

A system that makes it easy for someone to commit voter fraud is not, in itself, an act of voter fraud.

Let’s be clear: all of these things that I listed above range from concerning to illegal, because all of them interfere with elections in some way. In fact, even the belief that any of these things are occurring may impact the perceived legitimacy of an election. But they aren’t voter fraud.

What voter fraud IS:

Voting under your own identity multiple times (for example, through being registered to vote in multiple states).

Voting under the name of a deceased individual (because that individual’s name hasn’t been purged from voter rolls).

Impersonating another voter and casting a ballot on their behalf.

Registering fictitious identities and voting under those fake names.

Voting in an election that you are not eligible to vote for (for example, you are not a citizen, you are a felon barred from voting, or you attempt to vote in a jurisdiction that you don’t live in.)

Okay, now that we have a general understanding of what voter fraud is, we reach the next logical question:

Does voting fraud occur? If so, how widespread is it?

Well, the short answer is yes, it does occur (see here, here, here, here, and here). But what can we observe about these instances of documented voter fraud?

First of all, they are all incredibly small-scale. For example, 117 non-citizen voters were discovered in 2011 in Fairfax County, VA who had voted in state and federal elections. By comparison, Fairfax County has a population of 1.1 million people, of whom 522,046 voted in the 2012 Presidential election.

Secondly, incidents of voter fraud are more common at the local and county level than at the state or national level, which makes sense — a single vote carries more weight in a population of 1,000 than of 1,000,000, and local elections are generally less sophisticated.

Lastly, there have absolutely been election results that have been decided by voter fraud. Chicago, New York City, and Miami have all seen these levels of corruption, where the voter fraud is typically perpetrated by an entrenched political machine, and typically perpetrated through ballot stuffing, destruction of ballots, and absentee voting.

Okay, but aren’t we just not finding voter fraud because we’re not looking?

I doubt it.

In a 2014 analysis of in-person voter fraud, only 31 instances of fraud were documented in 14 years, comprising 241 votes out of 1 billion (with a B) ballots cast.

“All available evidence suggests that the 2016 general election was not tainted by fraud or mistake,” according to Donald Trump’s own lawyers who lodged an official protest against performing a recount in Michigan.

Jon Husted, the (Republican) chief election official in Ohio, tweeted “We conducted a review 4 years ago in Ohio & already have a statewide review of 2016 election underway. Easy to vote, hard to cheat.” Ohio, it should be noted, maintained a practice of removing individuals from the voting rolls if they didn’t vote for a few years.

In the infamous 2000 recount in Florida, Republican Party chairman Al Cardenas recalled:

I lived it in 2000. I was party chairman in Florida. We had over 250 lawyers involved and volunteering in the state.

We had over 40 lawsuits. We had election supervisors. We had judges in every single county recounting every vote, tabulating, retabulating the votes, determining whether votes were fairly cast or not. There were challenges being made by lawyers from both parties as to votes that had not been accepted.

The whole process took 37 days, thousands of people, thousands of hours. And not once, not once did we find intent to defraud the process electorally. The press spent millions of dollars after that and went through its own process.

Surely widespread voter fraud in Florida would have been discovered after such an intensive process?

Or there was the intensive investigation by the Bush Administration (which led to the US attorney firing scandal) that, “five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department… turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.”

Or any of these other investigations listed by the Washington Post:

The National Association of Secretaries of State, which represents most of the nation’s top election officials (most of whom happen to be Republican), released a statement Tuesday saying, “We are not aware of any evidence that supports the voter fraud claims made by President Trump.”

In Kansas, the Republican secretary of state examined 84 million votes cast in 22 states to look for cases of duplicate registration. The project yielded 14 prosecutions, representing 0.000017 percent of the votes cast.

A team of Dartmouth researchers undertook a comprehensive statistical investigation of the 2016 results, looking for evidence of abnormal voting patterns. They checked for evidence of noncitizen voting, dead people voting and tampering by election officials. They didn’t find any. “Our findings do strongly suggest, however, that voter fraud concerns fomented by the Trump campaign are not grounded in any observable features of the 2016 presidential election,” they concluded (emphasis theirs). “There is no evidence of millions of fraudulent votes.”

In Conclusion…

We can state with certainty that voter fraud occurs.

I believe we can state with high confidence that actual incidents of voter fraud are incredibly rare, and not just rarely detected.

I believe we can further state with high confidence that voter fraud has not influenced a national election.

We can most likely say that voter fraud rarely impacts local or state elections, but has impacted them in at least a few instances.

Despite how screwed up our voting system is, and despite how many potential risks and flaws there are, everything worked as expected in the 2016 elections…

…unfortunately.

If you’re reading this and we know each other, there’s a very good chance that we met some time after my freshman year of college. So there’s an equally good chance that you met me some time after my view of the world started to transition from extremely conservative to somewhat more progressive. I was vehemently anti-Obama: I absolutely hated his guts; I couldn’t believe what he was doing to our country — to my country.

I grew up on Cape Cod, MA. It’s a great summer vacation spot, I’m told. Maybe I didn’t appreciate it because I saw Cape Cod year-round, and how the local economy more or less shut down every winter when the tourists left. I saw how most of the career opportunities were in Boston or elsewhere, and that my friends and their families who chose to stay on the Cape were largely limited in their options.

I also saw how the “dangerous” neighborhoods were in downtown Hyannis, the closest thing Cape Cod has to a city. Those neighborhoods also happened to be majority black and hispanic, which I’m sure was a complete coincidence. I saw how recent immigrants were willing to do the entry-level service jobs that primarily drove the Cape Cod economy, but those immigrants didn’t live in my neighborhood. I had exactly one close non-white friend until I was 18.

Not only was I an economic conservative, I was incredibly socially conservative as well. Looking back, I wouldn’t exactly say that I passively adopted these ideas due to my environment, but the homogeneity of my hometown certainly didn’t challenge my perceptions of what “normal” was.

Is this anything like growing up in the rust or Bible belt? Maybe not — in fact, probably not — but it certainly gives me empathy for the average Trump voter. Realistically, I have to admit to myself that if Trump had been running in 2008, I probably would have seen him as an extremely flawed candidate but one who was vastly preferable to a Clinton.

Okay, but I’m not that person anymore. It’s pretty amazing how meeting people who are Not Like You can shatter your theories about how the world works and what’s important. Police abuse is easy to dismiss when it’s never happened to you; it’s a lot harder to dismiss when a good friend with a stellar academic track record tells you that he gets stopped and frisked in his home neighborhood, or when a coworker you respect gets called “boy” by a police officer.

One thing I find interesting is that by and large, population density is highly correlated with voting Republican or Democrat. High population density means more opportunity to interact with people who aren’t like you and find out that they aren’t scary.

I’ve been privileged to have the means and opportunities to get outside of my bubble. But man, did I get complacent over the last 8 years. I’ll admit I was pretty surprised to see Hillary lose the election, which means I’ve replaced one filter bubble with a different one. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that I went from not being able to fathom why anyone would be a Democrat, to not being able to fathom why anyone would be a Republican. No, the irony isn’t lost on me.

(One of) the issues with Trump is that, yes, he is explicitly supported by the alt-right/neo-Nazi/KKK groups that unfortunately still exist in America. It’s a real issue, with real impact on the lives of people I care about. At the same time, I don’t think that 50 million Americans support Trump because of that fact, I think they just place a different weight on the importance of that fact. They can’t place racial hatred in their personal experience — just as I can’t truly place it in mine, having never been discriminated against based on the color of my skin — and they don’t have close friendships with people who can help them understand that experience.

A Trump presidency both lends encouragement to bigots and simultaneously wasn’t decided by bigotry, and it’s possible for both of those things to be true at the same time.

When avid Trump supporters started using slogans like “Hillary for Jail 2016”, “Trump that bitch”, “Lock her up”, “Killary”, etc., it didn’t change my assessment of her one iota. If anything, I felt a sense of defensiveness, like “yeah Hillary might be bad, but she’s not that bad.”

With all the shaming of Trump supporters we’ve seen this election cycle, is it any wonder that people were reticent about admitting that they supported him, even anonymously to pollsters? I’m embarrassed to admit that, with a few exceptions, I refused to ask anyone why they were voting for Trump when I found out that they supported him. That was unproductive. It represents so many lost opportunities to talk about the issues, rather than belittling and talking past each other.

Ultimately, Hillary’s message boiled down to “let’s continue on the path that we’re already on,” and Trump’s message boiled down to “there’s a lot that’s wrong with our country, and you’re not getting a fair deal.” For millions of people, the path we’re on isn’t working. There’s a lot we can point to as to why that’s the case — the dominance of the financial sector driving shareholder value above all else, the jobless recovery, the increasing lack of socioeconomic mobility, and so forth — but ultimately, Bernie and Trump were two different sides of the same coin. I don’t mean that in terms of their personal values or character, just that they both understood that the system isn’t working for most Americans.

I think Glenn Greenwald best encapsulated my sentiment here:

When a political party is demolished, the principle responsibility belongs to one entity: the party that got crushed. It’s the job of the party and the candidate, and nobody else, to persuade the citizenry to support them and find ways to do that. Last night, the Democrats failed, resoundingly, to do that, and any autopsy or liberal think piece or pro-Clinton pundit commentary that does not start and finish with their own behavior is one that is inherently worthless.

Put simply, Democrats knowingly chose to nominate a deeply unpopular, extremely vulnerable, scandal-plagued candidate, who — for very good reason — was widely perceived to be a protector and beneficiary of all the worst components of status quo elite corruption. It’s astonishing that those of us who tried frantically to warn Democrats that nominating Hillary Clinton was a huge and scary gamble — that all empirical evidence showed that she could lose to anyone and Bernie Sanders would be a much stronger candidate, especially in this climate — are now the ones being blamed: by the very same people who insisted on ignoring all that data and nominating her anyway.

So where do we go from here? Ultimately, I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but I know that I need to do everything I can to stand alongside the women, Muslims, LGBTQ, Hispanics, African-Americans, and vulnerable populations that woke up today to discover that they’re living in a much more dangerous place than they thought they were yesterday.

Simultaneously, I need to start doing something I should have done months ago, and that’s reaching out to people I know who voted for Trump. I’ll admit I don’t understand it, but I want to. The toxic scumbags who are enthusiastically using this opportunity to advance the idea of white supremacism can go fuck themselves, but to demonize half the country for not voting for Hillary just doesn’t seem like a productive way to build a coalition of people who just want the average American to have a better life.

To my progressive friends, please don’t interpret this as me dismissing the incredibly valid concerns about racism, homophobia, and xenophobia. My heart breaks over the number of people I know who feel less welcome in America today than they did yesterday.

Ultimately, I yearn for the day when we stop seeing our fellow Americans as Others, whether that Other is a Trump voter or a new green card holder. That process starts with empathy. That process starts with how I choose to behave towards people I disagree with. And that process needs to start today.

The biggest data leak in history exposed the tax shelters and financial machinations of hundreds of high-ranking government officials around the world. Known as the Panama Papers, the leak of 11.5 million files from Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca to journalists shines a spotlight on the secret world of offshore tax havens.

Video Transcript:

If you look at how the Panama Papers were actually provided to the newspapers that brought this scoop [to the] public, they did it all through encrypted means. Encrypted chat, encrypted files, and so on and so forth. So if you have any doubt about the importance of unbreakable encryption, this absolutely shows how valuable it is.

Because there are a lot of high-level government officials across a variety of nations that are implicated in the Panama Papers, and if these governments had the means to break the encryption and see who is leaking the files, then it is possible that the leaker would not have had the courage to actually bring this information forth.

So, in terms of encryption providing value for transparency and government accountability, this right here shows us why we need it.

(Note: this video was originally produced for my company, Inflection, but they’ve kindly given me permission to share it on my personal blog as well.)

At the end of an absolutely amazing trip, I’ve been reflecting on the parts of my life in the US that I so often take for granted.

• I’m grateful that I can drink tap water in my own house without worrying it will make me sick.

• I’m grateful that I don’t have to try and survive on ~$400 USD/month.

• I’m grateful that I can engage in political discourse and criticize my government without fear of arrest.

• I’m grateful for vehicle emissions standards.

One phrase that I heard a lot here was “same-same, but different.” I think it’s an apt metaphor. We are all human, but there is beauty in our differences. At the end of the day, there is something unique about Thai culture that I’ve just realized I’m going to miss a lot. But I’m grateful I had the chance to experience it.

Happy Thanksgiving.