All of the charging documents are in the references, as well as local and national news reporting. I took your first comment as sarcasm but it’s worth noting it.

I’m describing a very low bar, since all of the people accused of taking Epstein’s money seem to have failed to clear it. This bar is literally inches from the ground.

A fucking *14 year old* with accusations of dozens more.

Even squinting at this, you can’t make it out as a mistake.

(Scott’s story is not a vague “ick” feeling, by the way. He says someone in his family did the very straightforward Google search, discovered that Epstein was convicted of abusing a child and accused of trafficking others, and told him to run away. Thank god for family.)

I’m posting this based on a comment by Scott Aaronson on his blog. Now to be clear: Scott A. did the Google search and declined Epstein’s money! He’s fine on this. But his view is that nobody would have turned down this guy’s money for moral reasons. Are you kidding me!?

By the time you’re directly communicating with Epstein and soliciting funding, visiting him in prison, visiting his island, flying on his plane — then “I didn’t know” stops working as an excuse. You didn’t take the literally five minutes it requires to Google him? Really!?

There are circumstances where I guess you could get funding from Epstein at a distance (say, he funds a conference and you don’t interact with him directly.) I’m always forgiving of clueless busy academic researchers, because I am one. But come on.

The nice thing about numeric phone passcodes *on iOS* is that they’ll display a numeric keypad. You might have to enter the code initially on an ugly full keyboard, but you’ll see a numeric pad when you unlock.

If you’re worried about your devices: a few basic thoughts.

1. Pick good passcodes. I recommend a 10-digit numeric *random* passcode on your phone. This seems hard to remember, but with a couple of days’ practice it will be effortless.

What is the New York Times app doing with 2GB of data on my phone, exactly? Running a CDN?

It’s 2026 and these concerns have been known for years. Microsoft’s inability to secure critical customer keys is starting to make it an outlier from the rest of the industry.

But more broadly, this highlights a fundamental weakness of Microsoft’s design. If MS can easily produce this to law enforcement, then anyone who compromises their cloud infrastructure (and customer service infrastructure, or can forge a plausible LE request) can potentially access that data.

Once upon a time you could assume (mostly) that any Federal law enforcement agency doing this would be operating within the bounds of the law. Nowadays, who knows. I sure wouldn’t want to be a journalist relying on Bitlocker. www.cnn.com/2026/01/21/m...

The problem with this is that these recovery keys aren’t encrypted end-to-end in a way that Microsoft can’t access. So if law enforcement wants to access your encrypted drive (even without knowing your password) they can just ask Microsoft for the key. And Microsoft will hand it over.

For those who don’t have context, Bitlocker is the built-in hard drive encryption supplied in Windows. This is supposed to protect the data on your machine from being accessed without authorization. In many configurations, Windows will upload a recovery key to your Microsoft cloud account.