Skechers is making a line of kid’s shoes with a hidden compartment for an AirTag. [...]

An Arizona woman was sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in prison for her role helping North Korean workers infiltrate US companies by pretending to be US workers. From an article : According to court documents, Chapman hosted the North Korean IT workers’ computers in her own home between October 2020 and …

What scientists thought were squid fossils were actually arrow worms. [...]

Airportr is a service that allows passengers to have their luggage picked up, checked, and delivered to their destinations. As you might expect, it’s used by wealthy or important people. So if the company’s website is insecure, you’d be able to spy on lots of wealthy …

Peter Gutmann and Stephan Neuhaus have a new paper —I think it’s new, even though it has a March 2025 date—that makes the argument that we shouldn’t trust any of the quantum factorization benchmarks, because everyone has been cooking the books: Similarly, quantum factorisation is performed …

“Who’s winning on the internet, the attackers or the defenders?” I’m asked this all the time, and I can only ever give a qualitative hand-wavy answer. But Jason Healey and Tarang Jain’s latest Lawfare piece has amassed data. The essay provides the first framework for metrics …

Looks serious. [...]

Bluesky thread. Here’s the paper, from 1957. Note reference 3. [...]

Chinese hackers are exploiting a high-severity vulnerability in Microsoft SharePoint to steal data worldwide: The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-53770, carries a severity rating of 9.8 out of a possible 10. It gives unauthenticated remote access to SharePoint Servers exposed to the Internet. Starting Friday, researchers began warning of …

Yet another SQUID acronym: “ Stable Quasi-Isodynamic Design.” It’s a stellarator for a fusion nuclear power plant. [...]

Today’s freaky LLM behavior : We study subliminal learning, a surprising phenomenon where language models learn traits from model-generated data that is semantically unrelated to those traits. For example, a “student” model learns to prefer owls when trained on sequences of numbers generated by a “teacher” model that prefers …

The current state of digital identity is a mess. Your personal information is scattered across hundreds of locations: social media companies, IoT companies, government agencies, websites you have accounts on, and data brokers you’ve never heard of. These entities collect, store, and trade your data, often without your …

The current state of digital identity is a mess. Your personal information is scattered across hundreds of locations: social media companies, IoT companies, government agencies, websites you have accounts on, and data brokers you’ve never heard of. These entities collect, store, and trade your data, often without your …

It will be interesting to watch what will come of this private lawsuit : Google on Thursday announced filing a lawsuit against the operators of the Badbox 2.0 botnet, which has ensnared more than 10 million devices running Android open source software. These devices lack Google’s security protections …

Law journal article that looks at the Dual_EC_PRNG backdoor from a US constitutional perspective: Abstract : The National Security Agency (NSA) reportedly paid and pressured technology companies to trick their customers into using vulnerable encryption products. This Article examines whether any of three theories removed the Fourth Amendment’s requirement …

ProPublica is reporting : Microsoft is using engineers in China to help maintain the Defense Department’s computer systems—with minimal supervision by U.S. personnel—leaving some of the nation’s most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking from its leading cyber adversary, a ProPublica investigation has found. The arrangement …

Beautiful photo. Difficult to capture, this mysterious, squid-shaped interstellar cloud spans nearly three full moons in planet Earth’s sky. Discovered in 2011 by French astro-imager Nicolas Outters, the Squid Nebula’s bipolar shape is distinguished here by the telltale blue emission from doubly ionized oxygen atoms. Though apparently …

The Chinese have a new tool called Massistant. Massistant is the presumed successor to Chinese forensics tool, “MFSocket”, reported in 2019 and attributed to publicly traded cybersecurity company, Meiya Pico. The forensics tool works in tandem with a corresponding desktop software. Massistant gains access to device GPS location data …

The ICEBlock tool has vulnerabilities : The developer of ICEBlock, an iOS app for anonymously reporting sightings of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials, promises that it “ensures user privacy by storing no personal data.” But that claim has come under scrutiny. ICEBlock creator Joshua Aaron has been accused …

Seems like an old system system that predates any care about security: The flaw has to do with the protocol used in a train system known as the End-of-Train and Head-of-Train. A Flashing Rear End Device (FRED), also known as an End-of-Train (EOT) device, is attached to the back …

The Cambridge Cybercrime Conference was held on 23 June. Summaries of the presentations are here. [...]

New research : One reason the early years of squids has been such a mystery is because squids’ lack of hard shells made their fossils hard to come by. Undeterred, the team instead focused on finding ancient squid beaks—hard mouthparts with high fossilization potential that could help the team …

Long article on the difficulty (impossibility?) of human spying in the age of ubiquitous digital surveillance. [...]

Good tutorial by Micah Lee. It includes some nonobvious use cases. [...]

This time it’s the Swedish prime minister’s bodyguards. (Last year, it was the US Secret Service and Emmanuel Macron’s bodyguards. in 2018, it was secret US military bases.) This is ridiculous. Why do people continue to make their data public? [...]