The vampire squid ( Vampyroteuthis infernalis ) has the largest cephalopod genome ever sequenced: more than 11 billion base pairs. That’s more than twice as large as the biggest squid genomes. It’s technically not a squid: “The vampire squid is a fascinating twig tenaciously hanging onto the cephalopod family …
A new anonymous phone service allows you to sign up with just a zip code. [...]
In his 2020 book, “ Future Politics, ” British barrister Jamie Susskind wrote that the dominant question of the 20th century was “How much of our collective life should be determined by the state, and what should be left to the market and civil society?” But in the early decades of …
This is crazy. Lawmakers in several US states are contemplating banning VPNs, because...think of the children! As of this writing, Wisconsin lawmakers are escalating their war on privacy by targeting VPNs in the name of “protecting children” in A.B. 105 / S.B. 130. It’s an age …
A meter-long flying neon squid ( Ommastrephes bartramii ) was found dead on an Israeli beach. The species is rare in the Mediterranean. [...]
In a new paper, “ Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models,” researchers found that turning LLM prompts into poetry resulted in jailbreaking the models: Abstract : We present evidence that adversarial poetry functions as a universal single-turn jailbreak technique for Large Language Models (LLMs). Across …
This quote is from House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company. “Long before anyone had heard of Ren Zhengfei or Huawei, Wan Runnan had been China’s star entrepreneur in the 1980s, with his company, the Stone Group, touted as “China’s IBM.” Wan …
Democracy is colliding with the technologies of artificial intelligence. Judging from the audience reaction at the recent World Forum on Democracy in Strasbourg, the general expectation is that democracy will be the worse for it. We have another narrative. Yes, there are risks to democracy from AI, but there …
The International Association of Cryptologic Research—the academic cryptography association that’s been putting conferences like Crypto (back when “crypto” meant “cryptography”) and Eurocrypt since the 1980s—had to nullify an online election when trustee Moti Yung lost his decryption key. For this election and in accordance with the …
I did not know Adidas sold a sneaker called “ Squid.” 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. [...]
It’s been a month since Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship was published. From what we know, sales are good. Some of the book’s forty-three chapters are available online: chapters 2, 12, 28, 34, 38, and 41. We need more reviews—six …
From Anthropic : In mid-September 2025, we detected suspicious activity that later investigation determined to be a highly sophisticated espionage campaign. The attackers used AI’s “agentic” capabilities to an unprecedented degree—using AI not just as an advisor, but to execute the cyberattacks themselves. The threat actor—whom we …
Google has filed a complaint in court that details the scam : In a complaint filed Wednesday, the tech giant accused “a cybercriminal group in China” of selling “phishing for dummies” kits. The kits help unsavvy fraudsters easily “execute a large-scale phishing campaign,” tricking hordes of unsuspecting people into “disclosing …
Kendra Albert gave an excellent talk at USENIX Security this year, pointing out that the legal agreements surrounding vulnerability disclosure muzzle researchers while allowing companies to not fix the vulnerabilities—exactly the opposite of what the responsible disclosure movement of the early 2000s was supposed to prevent. This is …
Social media has been a familiar, even mundane, part of life for nearly two decades. It can be easy to forget it was not always that way. In 2008, social media was just emerging into the mainstream. Facebook reached 100 million users that summer. And a singular candidate was …
The next three in this series on online events highlighting interesting uses of AI in cybersecurity are online: #4, #5, and #6. Well worth watching. [...]
Short-finned pilot wales ( Globicephala macrorhynchus ) eat at lot of squid: To figure out a short-finned pilot whale’s caloric intake, Gough says, the team had to combine data from a variety of sources, including movement data from short-lasting tags, daily feeding rates from satellite tags, body measurements collected via …
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: My coauthor Nathan E. Sanders and I are speaking at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, DC at noon ET on November 17, 2025. The event is hosted by the POPVOX Foundation and the …
As AI capabilities grow, we must delineate the roles that should remain exclusively human. The line seems to be between fact-based decisions and judgment-based decisions. For example, in a medical context, if an AI was demonstrably better at reading a test result and diagnosing cancer than a human, you …
The Business of Secrets: Adventures in Selling Encryption Around the World by Fred Kinch (May 24, 2004) From the vantage point of today, it’s surreal reading about the commercial cryptography business in the 1970s. Nobody knew anything. The manufacturers didn’t know whether the cryptography they sold was …
Former DoJ attorney John Carlin writes about hackback, which he defines thus: “A hack back is a type of cyber response that incorporates a counterattack designed to proactively engage with, disable, or collect evidence about an attacker. Although hack backs can take on various forms, they are—by definition …
This is why AIs are not ready to be personal assistants: A new attack called ‘CometJacking’ exploits URL parameters to pass to Perplexity’s Comet AI browser hidden instructions that allow access to sensitive data from connected services, like email and calendar. In a realistic scenario, no credentials or …
Encryption can protect data at rest and data in transit, but does nothing for data in use. What we have are secure enclaves. I’ve written about this before: Almost all cloud services have to perform some computation on our data. Even the simplest storage provider has code to …
The second season of the Netflix reality competition show Squid Game: The Challenge has dropped. (Too many links to pick a few—search for it.) As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Blog …
Over the past few decades, it’s become easier and easier to create fake receipts. Decades ago, it required special paper and printers—I remember a company in the UK advertising its services to people trying to cover up their affairs. Then, receipts became computerized, and faking them required …