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 …
Squid Brand is a Thai company that makes fish sauce : It is part of Squid Brand’s range of “personalized healthy fish sauces” that cater to different consumer groups, which include the Mild Fish Sauce for Kids and Mild Fish Sauce for Silver Ages. It also has a Vegan …
Interesting research: “ An Empirical Study & Evaluation of Modern CAPTCHAs “: Abstract: For nearly two decades, CAPTCHAS have been widely used as a means of protection against bots. Throughout the years, as their use grew, techniques to defeat or bypass CAPTCHAS have continued to improve. Meanwhile, CAPTCHAS have also evolved in …
Researchers are trying to use AI to detect “social norms violations.” Feels a little sketchy right now, but this is the sort of thing that AIs will get better at. (Like all of these systems, anything but a very low false positive rate makes the detection useless in practice …
The UK Electoral Commission discovered last year that it was hacked the year before. That’s fourteen months between the hack and the discovery. It doesn’t know who was behind the hack. We worked with external security experts and the National Cyber Security Centre to investigate and secure …
This is why we need regulation: Zoom updated its Terms of Service in March, spelling out that the company reserves the right to train AI on user data with no mention of a way to opt out. On Monday, the company said in a blog post that there’s …
The NSA discovered the intrusion in 2020—we don’t know how—and alerted the Japanese. The Washington Post has the story : The hackers had deep, persistent access and appeared to be after anything they could get their hands on—plans, capabilities, assessments of military shortcomings, according to three …
Results from the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research Limited annual squid survey : This year, the team unearthed spectacular large hooked squids, weighing about 15kg and sitting at 2m long, a Taningia—which has the largest known light organs in the animal kingdom—and a few species that …
Really interesting “systematization of knowledge” paper : “SoK: The Ghost Trilemma” Abstract: Trolls, bots, and sybils distort online discourse and compromise the security of networked platforms. User identity is central to the vectors of attack and manipulation employed in these contexts. However it has long seemed that, try as it …
Cryptographic flaws still matter. Here’s a flaw in the random-number generator used to create private keys. The seed has only 32 bits of entropy. Seems like this flaw is being exploited in the wild. [...]
Researchers have trained a ML model to detect keystrokes by sound with 95% accuracy. “A Practical Deep Learning-Based Acoustic Side Channel Attack on Keyboards” Abstract: With recent developments in deep learning, the ubiquity of microphones and the rise in online services via personal devices, acoustic side channel attacks present …
I just read an article complaining that NIST is taking too long in finalizing its post-quantum-computing cryptography standards. This process has been going on since 2016, and since that time there has been a huge increase in quantum technology and an equally large increase in quantum understanding and interest …
A bunch of networks, including US Government networks, have been hacked by the Chinese. The hackers used forged authentication tokens to access user email, using a stolen Microsoft Azure account consumer signing key. Congress wants answers. The phrase “ negligent security practices ” is being tossed about—and with good reason …
I had no idea that squid contain sufficient oil to be worth extracting. 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. [...]
ChatGPT was released just nine months ago, and we are still learning how it will affect our daily lives, our careers, and even our systems of self-governance. But when it comes to how AI may threaten our democracy, much of the public conversation lacks imagination. People talk about the …
If you ask Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant AI system, whether Amazon is a monopoly, it responds by saying it doesn’t know. It doesn’t take much to make it lambaste the other tech giants, but it’s silent about its own corporate parent’s misdeeds. When Alexa …