Two links on how to properly clean squid. I learned a few years ago, in Spain, and got pretty good at it. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Read my blog posting …
Claude (Anthropic’s LLM) was given this prompt: Please summarize the themes and arguments of Bruce Schneier’s book Beyond Fear. I’m particularly interested in a taxonomy of his ethical arguments—please expand on that. Then lay out the most salient criticisms of the book. Claude’s reply …
Interesting article on technologies that will automatically identify people: With technology like that on Mr. Leyvand’s head, Facebook could prevent users from ever forgetting a colleague’s name, give a reminder at a cocktail party that an acquaintance had kids to ask about or help find someone at …
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at swampUP 2023 in San Jose, California, on September 13, 2023 at 11:35 AM PT. The list is maintained on this page. [...]
Google removed fake Signal and Telegram apps from its Play store. An app with the name Signal Plus Messenger was available on Play for nine months and had been downloaded from Play roughly 100 times before Google took it down last April after being tipped off by security firm …
Make sure you update your iPhones : Citizen Lab says two zero-days fixed by Apple today in emergency security updates were actively abused as part of a zero-click exploit chain (dubbed BLASTPASS) to deploy NSO Group’s Pegasus commercial spyware onto fully patched iPhones. The two bugs, tracked as CVE-2023-41064 …
A new Mozilla Foundation report concludes that cars, all of them, have terrible data privacy. All 25 car brands we researched earned our *Privacy Not Included warning label—making cars the official worst category of products for privacy that we have ever reviewed. There’s a lot of details …
The robot revolution began long ago, and so did the killing. One day in 1979, a robot at a Ford Motor Company casting plant malfunctioned—human workers determined that it was not going fast enough. And so twenty-five-year-old Robert Williams was asked to climb into a storage rack to …
Here’s a fantastic video of Taonius Borealis, a glass squid, from NOAA. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here. [...]
Last March, just two weeks after GPT-4 was released, researchers at Microsoft quietly announced a plan to compile millions of APIs—tools that can do everything from ordering a pizza to solving physics equations to controlling the TV in your living room—into a compendium that would be made …
The new site 404 Media has a good article on how hackers are cheaply getting personal information from credit bureaus: This is the result of a secret weapon criminals are selling access to online that appears to tap into an especially powerful set of data: the target’s credit …
The cryptocurrency fintech startup Prime Trust lost the encryption key to its hardware wallet—and the recovery key—and therefore $38.9 million. It is now in bankruptcy. I can’t understand why anyone thinks these technologies are a good idea. [...]
Interesting research : Shedding Light on CVSS Scoring Inconsistencies: A User-Centric Study on Evaluating Widespread Security Vulnerabilities Abstract: The Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) is a popular method for evaluating the severity of vulnerabilities in vulnerability management. In the evaluation process, a numeric score between 0 and 10 is calculated …
Is this a good idea? The transparent squid is a genetically altered version of the hummingbird bobtail squid, a species usually found in the tropical waters from Indonesia to China and Japan. It’s typically smaller than a thumb and shaped like a dumpling. And like other cephalopods, it …
A Brazilian spyware app vendor was hacked by activists: In an undated note seen by TechCrunch, the unnamed hackers described how they found and exploited several security vulnerabilities that allowed them to compromise WebDetetive’s servers and access its user databases. By exploiting other flaws in the spyware maker …
A used government surveillance van is for sale in Chicago: So how was this van turned into a mobile spying center? Well, let’s start with how it has more LCD monitors than a Counterstrike LAN party. They can be used to monitor any of six different video inputs …
Interesting story of an Apple Macintosh app that went rogue. Basically, it was a good app until one particular update...when it went bad. With more official macOS features added in 2021 that enabled the “Night Shift” dark mode, the NightOwl app was left forlorn and forgotten on many …
Interesting story : Napoleon Gonzalez, of Etna, assumed the identity of his brother in 1965, a quarter century after his sibling’s death as an infant, and used the stolen identity to obtain Social Security benefits under both identities, multiple passports and state identification cards, law enforcement officials said. [...] A …
Turns out that it’s easy to broadcast radio commands that force Polish trains to stop:...the saboteurs appear to have sent simple so-called “radio-stop” commands via radio frequency to the trains they targeted. Because the trains use a radio system that lacks encryption or authentication for those commands …
China imposed a “pilot program banning fishing in parts of the south-west Atlantic Ocean from July to October, and parts of the eastern Pacific Ocean from September to December.” However, the conservation group Oceana analyzed the data and figured out that the Chinese weren’t fishing in those areas …
This article talks about new Mexican laws about food labeling, and the lengths to which food manufacturers are going to ensure that they are not effective. There are the typical high-pressure lobbying tactics and lawsuits. But there’s also examples of companies hacking the laws: Companies like Coca-Cola and …
The Guardian is reporting about microchips in wheels of Parmesan cheese as an anti-forgery measure. [...]
Imagine that we’ve all—all of us, all of society—landed on some alien planet, and we have to form a government: clean slate. We don’t have any legacy systems from the US or any other country. We don’t have any special or unique interests to …
License plate scanners aren’t new. Neither is using them for bulk surveillance. What’s new is that AI is being used on the data, identifying “suspicious” vehicle behavior: Typically, Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) technology is used to search for plates linked to specific crimes. But in this …
At Black Hat last week, the White House announced an AI Cyber Challenge. Gizmodo reports : The new AI cyber challenge (which is being abbreviated “AIxCC”) will have a number of different phases. Interested would-be competitors can now submit their proposals to the Small Business Innovation Research program for evaluation …