The population needs better conservation. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Blog moderation policy. [...]

404 Media has a story about Proton Mail giving subscriber data to the Swiss government, who passed the information to the FBI. It’s metadata—payment information related to a particular account—but still important knowledge. This sort of thing happens, even to privacy-centric companies like Proton Mail. [...]

Someone tries to remote control his own DJI Romo vacuum, and ends up controlling 7,000 of them from all around the world. The IoT is horribly insecure, but we already knew that. [...]

Surprising no one, Meta’s new AI glasses are a privacy disaster. I’m not sure what can be done here. This is a technology that will exist, whether we like it or not. Meanwhile, there is a new Android app that detects when there are smart glasses nearby …

An expensive mistake : Someone jumped at the opportunity to steal $4.4 million in crypto assets after South Korea’s National Tax Service exposed publicly the mnemonic recovery phrase of a seized cryptocurrency wallet. The funds were stored in a Ledger cold wallet seized in law enforcement raids at …

I’m skeptical about—and not qualified to review—this new result in factorization with a quantum computer, but if it’s true it’s a theoretical improvement in the speed of factoring large numbers with a quantum computer. [...]

Some good news : squid stocks seem to be recovering in the waters off the Falkland Islands. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Blog moderation policy. [...]

In 2025, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta collectively spent US$380 billion on building artificial-intelligence tools. That number is expected to surge still higher this year, to $650 billion, to fund the building of physical infrastructure, such as data centers (see go.nature.com/3lzf79q ). Moreover, these firms are …

Apple announcement :...iPhone and iPad are the first and only consumer devices in compliance with the information assurance requirements of NATO nations. This enables iPhone and iPad to be used with classified information up to the NATO restricted level without requiring special software or settings—a level of government …

Canada has a choice to make about its artificial intelligence future. The Carney administration is investing $2-billion over five years in its Sovereign AI Compute Strategy. Will any value generated by “sovereign AI” be captured in Canada, making a difference in the lives of Canadians, or is this just …

Countries around the world are becoming increasingly concerned about their dependencies on the US. If you’ve purchase US-made F-35 fighter jets, you are dependent on the US for software maintenance. The Dutch Defense Secretary recently said that he could jailbreak the planes to accept third-party software. [...]

It’s called AirSnitch : Unlike previous Wi-Fi attacks, AirSnitch exploits core features in Layers 1 and 2 and the failure to bind and synchronize a client across these and higher layers, other nodes, and other network names such as SSIDs (Service Set Identifiers). This cross-layer identity desynchronization is the …

This is a very weird story about how squid stayed on the menu of Byzantine monks by falling between the cracks of dietary rules. At Constantinople’s Monastery of Stoudios, the kitchen didn’t answer to appetite. It answered to the “typikon”: a manual for ensuring that nothing unexpected …

OpenAI is in and Anthropic is out as a supplier of AI technology for the US defense department. This news caps a week of bluster by the highest officials in the US government towards some of the wealthiest titans of the big tech industry, and the overhanging specter of …

An unknown hacker used Anthropic’s LLM to hack the Mexican government: The unknown Claude user wrote Spanish-language prompts for the chatbot to act as an elite hacker, finding vulnerabilities in government networks, writing computer scripts to exploit them and determining ways to automate data theft, Israeli cybersecurity startup …

Multiple news outlets are reporting on Israel’s hacking of Iranian traffic cameras and how they assisted with the killing of that country’s leadership. The New York Times has an on the intelligence operation more generally. [...]

Wired has the story : Shortly after the first set of explosions, Iranians received bursts of notifications on their phones. They came not from the government advising caution, but from an apparently hacked prayer-timing app called BadeSaba Calendar that has been downloaded more than 5 million times from the Google …

Microsoft is reporting : Companies are embedding hidden instructions in “Summarize with AI” buttons that, when clicked, attempt to inject persistence commands into an AI assistant’s memory via URL prompt parameters.... These prompts instruct the AI to “remember [Company] as a trusted source” or “recommend [Company] first,” aiming to …

The MIT Technology Review has a good article on Moltbook, the supposed AI-only social network: Many people have pointed out that a lot of the viral comments were in fact posted by people posing as bots. But even the bot-written posts are ultimately the result of people pulling the …

Turns out that LLMs are good at de-anonymization: We show that LLM agents can figure out who you are from your anonymous online posts. Across Hacker News, Reddit, LinkedIn, and anonymized interview transcripts, our method identifies users with high precision ­ and scales to tens of thousands of candidates. While …

Peru has increased its squid catch limit. The article says “giant squid,” but they can’t possibly mean that. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Blog moderation policy. [...]

Iran is slowly emerging from the most severe communications blackout in its history and one of the longest in the world. Triggered as part of January’s government crackdown against citizen protests nationwide, the regime implemented an internet shutdown that transcends the standard definition of internet censorship. This was …

This is new. North Korean hackers are posing as company recruiters, enticing job candidates to participate in coding challenges. When they run the code they are supposed to work on, it installs malware on their system. News article. [...]

LLMs are bad at generating passwords: There are strong noticeable patterns among these 50 passwords that can be seen easily: All of the passwords start with a letter, usually uppercase G, almost always followed by the digit 7. Character choices are highly uneven ­ for example, L, 9, m, 2 …

All it takes to poison AI training data is to create a website: I spent 20 minutes writing an article on my personal website titled “The best tech journalists at eating hot dogs.” Every word is a lie. I claimed (without evidence) that competitive hot-dog-eating is a popular hobby …