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? [...]

Academic papers were found to contain hidden instructions to LLMs: It discovered such prompts in 17 articles, whose lead authors are affiliated with 14 institutions including Japan’s Waseda University, South Korea’s KAIST, China’s Peking University and the National University of Singapore, as well as the University …

New research. 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. [...]

Once you build a surveillance system, you can’t control who will use it: A hacker working for the Sinaloa drug cartel was able to obtain an FBI official’s phone records and use Mexico City’s surveillance cameras to help track and kill the agency’s informants in …

A whole class of speculative execution attacks against CPUs were published in 2018. They seemed pretty catastrophic at the time. But the fixes were as well. Speculative execution was a way to speed up CPUs, and removing those enhancements resulted in significant performance drops. Now, people are rethinking the …

Dozens of accounts on X that promoted Scottish independence went dark during an internet blackout in Iran. Well, that’s one way to identify fake accounts and misinformation campaigns. [...]

American democracy runs on trust, and that trust is cracking. Nearly half of Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, question whether elections are conducted fairly. Some voters accept election results only when their side wins. The problem isn’t just political polarization—it’s a creeping erosion of trust in …

Tips on what to do if you find a mop of squid eggs. 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. [...]

We need to talk about data integrity. Narrowly, the term refers to ensuring that data isn’t tampered with, either in transit or in storage. Manipulating account balances in bank databases, removing entries from criminal records, and murder by removing notations about allergies from medical records are all integrity …

Reuters is reporting that the White House has banned WhatsApp on all employee devices: The notice said the “Office of Cybersecurity has deemed WhatsApp a high risk to users due to the lack of transparency in how it protects user data, absence of stored data encryption, and potential security …

Simon Willison talks about ChatGPT’s new memory dossier feature. In his explanation, he illustrates how much the LLM—and the company—knows about its users. It’s a big quote, but I want you to read it all. Here’s a prompt you can use to give you …

Scientists can manipulate air bubbles trapped in ice to encode messages. [...]

It was a recently unimaginable 7.3 Tbps : The vast majority of the attack was delivered in the form of User Datagram Protocol packets. Legitimate UDP-based transmissions are used in especially time-sensitive communications, such as those for video playback, gaming applications, and DNS lookups. It speeds up communications by …

This is the first ever video of the Antarctic Gonate Squid. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. [...]

Good article from 404 Media on the cozy surveillance relationship between local Oregon police and ICE: In the email thread, crime analysts from several local police departments and the FBI introduced themselves to each other and made lists of surveillance tools and tactics they have access to and felt …

Two articles crossed my path recently. First, a discussion of all the video Waymo has from outside its cars: in this case related to the LA protests. Second, a discussion of all the video Tesla has from inside its cars. Lots of things are collecting lots of video of …

The variations seem to be endless. Here’s a fake ghostwriting scam that seems to be making boatloads of money. This is a big story about scams being run from Texas and Pakistan estimated to run into tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars, viciously defrauding Americans with …

If you’ve worried that AI might take your job, deprive you of your livelihood, or maybe even replace your role in society, it probably feels good to see the latest AI tools fail spectacularly. If AI recommends glue as a pizza topping, then you’re safe for another …

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at the International Conference on Digital Trust, AI and the Future in Edinburgh, Scotland on Tuesday, June 24 at 4:00 PM. The list is maintained on this page. [...]

Video of the stubby squid ( Rossia pacifica ) from offshore Vancouver Island. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. [...]

Paragon is an Israeli spyware company, increasingly in the news (now that NSO Group seems to be waning). “Graphite” is the name of its product. Citizen Lab caught it spying on multiple European journalists with a zero-click iOS exploit: On April 29, 2025, a select group of iOS users …

This is news : A data broker owned by the country’s major airlines, including Delta, American Airlines, and United, collected U.S. travellers’ domestic flight records, sold access to them to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and then as part of the contract told CBP to not reveal where …

Researchers have discovered a new way to covertly track Android users. Both Meta and Yandex were using it, but have suddenly stopped now that they have been caught. The details are interesting, and worth reading in detail: Tracking code that Meta and Russia-based Yandex embed into millions of websites …