Imagine a future in which AIs automatically interpret—and enforce—laws. All day and every day, you constantly receive highly personalized instructions for how to comply with the law, sent directly by your government and law enforcement. You’re told how to cross the street, how fast to drive …
Obituary. [...]
The Atlantic Council released a detailed commentary on the White House’s new “Implementation Plan for the 2023 US National Cybersecurity Strategy.” Lots of interesting bits. So far, at least three trends emerge: First, the plan contains a (somewhat) more concrete list of actions than its parent strategy, with …
Gandalf is an interactive LLM game where the goal is to get the chatbot to reveal its password. There are eight levels of difficulty, as the chatbot gets increasingly restrictive instructions as to how it will answer. It’s a great teaching tool. I am stuck on Level 7 …
You can disable a self-driving car by putting a traffic cone on its hood: The group got the idea for the conings by chance. The person claims a few of them walking together one night saw a cone on the hood of an AV, which appeared disabled. They weren …
Interesting forensics in connection with a serial killer arrest: Investigators went through phone records collected from both midtown Manhattan and the Massapequa Park area of Long Island—two areas connected to a “burner phone” they had tied to the killings. (In court, prosecutors later said the burner phone was …
Masayoshi Matsumoto is a “master balloon artist,” and he made a squid (and other animals). 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. [...]
The first Republican primary debate has a popularity threshold to determine who gets to appear: 40,000 individual contributors. Now there are a lot of conventional ways a candidate can get that many contributors. Doug Burgum came up with a novel idea: buy them : A long-shot contender at the …
The French police are getting new surveillance powers : French police should be able to spy on suspects by remotely activating the camera, microphone and GPS of their phones and other devices, lawmakers agreed late on Wednesday, July 5. [...] Covering laptops, cars and other connected objects as well as phones …
No surprise, but Google just changed its privacy policy to reflect broader uses of all the surveillance data it has captured over the years: Research and development : Google uses information to improve our services and to develop new products, features and technologies that benefit our users and the public …
The Washington Post has an article about popular printing services, and whether or not they read your documents and mine the data when you use them for printing: Ideally, printing services should avoid storing the content of your files, or at least delete daily. Print services should also communicate …
In my latest book, A Hacker’s Mind, I wrote about hacks as loophole exploiting. This is a great example: The Wisconsin governor used his line-item veto powers—supposedly unique in their specificity—to change a one-year funding increase into a 400-year funding increase. He took this wording: Section …
Pretty : A mysterious squid-like cosmic cloud, this nebula is very faint, but also very large in planet Earth’s sky. In the image, composed with 30 hours of narrowband image data, it spans nearly three full moons toward the royal constellation Cepheus. Discovered in 2011 by French astro-imager Nicolas …
For four decades, Alaskans have opened their mailboxes to find checks waiting for them, their cut of the black gold beneath their feet. This is Alaska’s Permanent Fund, funded by the state’s oil revenues and paid to every Alaskan each year. We’re now in a different …
Here’s a fascinating tax hack from Belgium (listen to the details here, episode #484 of “No Such Thing as a Fish,” at 28:00). Basically, it’s about a music festival on the border between Belgium and Holland. The stage was in Holland, but the crowd was in …
I have mixed feelings about this class-action lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming that it “scraped 300 billion words from the internet” without either registering as a data broker or obtaining consent. On the one hand, I want this to be a protected fair use of public data. On …
Amusing parody of password rules. BoingBoing : For example, at a certain level, your password must include today’s Wordle answer. And then there’s rule #27: “At least 50% of your password must be in the Wingdings font.” [...]
Police are already using self-driving car footage as video evidence: While security cameras are commonplace in American cities, self-driving cars represent a new level of access for law enforcement and a new method for encroachment on privacy, advocates say. Crisscrossing the city on their routes, self-driving cars capture a …
Doryteuthis opalescens is known as the market squid, and was critical in the recent squid RNA research. 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. [...]
The Washington Post is reporting that the US is spying on the UN Secretary General. The reports on Guterres appear to contain the secretary general’s personal conversations with aides regarding diplomatic encounters. They indicate that the United States relied on spying powers granted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance …
We have learned this lesson again : As part of the FTC v. Microsoft hearing, Sony supplied a document from PlayStation chief Jim Ryan that includes redacted details on the margins Sony shares with publishers, its Call of Duty revenues, and even the cost of developing some of its games …
The stalkerware company LetMeSpy has been hacked : TechCrunch reviewed the leaked data, which included years of victims’ call logs and text messages dating back to 2013. The database we reviewed contained current records on at least 13,000 compromised devices, though some of the devices shared little to no …
Don’t do it : Recently, the manager of the Harvard Med School morgue was accused of stealing and selling human body parts. Cedric Lodge and his wife Denise were among a half-dozen people arrested for some pretty grotesque crimes. This part is also at least a little bit funny …
In this detailed article about academic plagiarism are some interesting details about how to do data forensics on Excel files. It really needs the graphics to understand, so see the description at the link. (And, yes, an author of a paper on dishonesty is being accused of dishonesty. There …
Giggling Squid is a Thai chain in the UK. 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. [...]