AI-Generated Law

On April 14, Dubai's ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, announced that the United Arab Emirates would begin using artificial intelligence to help write its laws. A new Regulatory Intelligence Office would use the technology to "regularly suggest updates" to the law and "accelerate the...

Friday Squid Blogging: Japanese Divers Video Giant Squid

The video is really amazing. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered...

Regulating AI Behavior with a Hypervisor

Interesting research: "Guillotine: Hypervisors for Isolating Malicious AIs." Abstract :As AI models become more embedded in critical sectors like finance, healthcare, and the military, their inscrutable behavior poses ever-greater risks to society. To mitigate this risk, we propose Guillotine, a...

Friday Squid Blogging: Live Colossal Squid Filmed

A live colossal squid was filmed for the first time in the ocean. It's only a juvenile: a foot long. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered...

Friday Squid Blogging: Two-Man Giant Squid

The Brooklyn indie art-punk group, Two-Man Giant Squid, just released a new album. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered...

My Writings Are in the LibGen AI Training Corpus

The Atlantic has a search tool that allows you to search for specific works in the "LibGen" database of copyrighted works that Meta used to train its AI models. The rest of the article is behind a paywall, but not the search tool. It’s impossible to know exactly which parts of LibGen Meta used to...

Friday Squid Blogging: Beaked Whales Feed on Squid

A Travers' beaked whale Mesoplodon traversii washed ashore in New Zealand, and scientists conlcuded that "the prevalence of squid remains in its stomachs suggests that these deep-sea cephalopods form a significant part of the whale's diet, similar to other beaked whale species." Blog moderation...

Apps That Are Spying on Your Location

404 Media and Wired are reporting on all the apps that are spying on your location, based on a hack of the location data company Gravy Analytics: The thousands of apps, included in hacked files from location data company Gravy Analytics, include everything from games like Candy Crush to dating ap...

Casino Players Using Hidden Cameras for Cheating

The basic strategy is to place a device with a hidden camera in a position to capture normally hidden card values, which are interpreted by an accomplice off-site and fed back to the player via a hidden microphone. Miniaturization is making these devices harder to detect. Presumably AI will soon...

Algorithms Are Coming for Democracy—but It’s Not All Bad

In 2025, AI is poised to change every aspect of democratic politics--but it won't necessarily be for the worse. India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, has used AI to translate his speeches for his multilingual electorate in real time, demonstrating how AI can help diverse democracies to be more...

Deebot Robot Vacuums Are Using Photos and Audio to Train Their AI

An Australian news agency is reporting that robot vacuum cleaners from the Chinese company Deebot are surreptitiously taking photos and recording audio, and sending that data back to the vendor to train their AIs. Ecovacs's privacy policy--available elsewhere in the app--allows for blanket...

Matthew Green on Telegram’s Encryption

Matthew Green wrote a really good blog post on what Telegrams encryption is and is not. EDITED TO ADD 8/28: Another good explainer from Kaspersky...

Friday Squid Blogging: SQUID Is a New Computational Tool for Analyzing Genomic AI

Yet another SQUID acronym: SQUID, short for Surrogate Quantitative Interpretability for Deepnets, is a computational tool created by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory CSHL scientists. Its designed to help interpret how AI models analyze the genome. Compared with other analysis tools, SQUID is more...

Cloudflare Reports that Almost 7% of All Internet Traffic Is Malicious

6.8%, to be precise. From ZDNet: However, Distributed Denial of Service DDoS attacks continue to be cybercriminals weapon of choice, making up over 37% of all mitigated traffic. The scale of these attacks is staggering. In the first quarter of 2024 alone, Cloudflare blocked 4.5 million unique DDo...

On the CSRB’s Non-Investigation of the SolarWinds Attack

ProPublica has a long investigative article on how the Cyber Safety Review Board failed to investigate the SolarWinds attack, and specifically Microsofts culpability, even though they were directed by President Biden to do so...

Upcoming Book on AI and Democracy

If youve been reading my blog, youve noticed that I have written a lot about AI and democracy, mostly with my co-author Nathan Sanders. I am pleased to announce that were writing a book on the topic. This isnt a book about deep fakes, or misinformation. This is a book about what happens when AI...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: Im appearing on a panel on Society and Democracy at ACM Collective Intelligence in Boston, Massachusetts. The conference runs from June 26 through 29, 2024, and my panel is at 9:00 AM on Friday, June 28. Im speaking on "Reimagining...

Seeing Like a Data Structure

Technology was once simply a tool--and a small one at that--used to amplify human intent and capacity. That was the story of the industrial revolution: we could control nature and build large, complex human societies, and the more we employed and mastered technology, the better things got. We don...

Supply Chain Attack against Courtroom Software

No word on how this backdoor was installed: A software maker serving more than 10,000 courtrooms throughout the world hosted an application update containing a hidden backdoor that maintained persistent communication with a malicious website, researchers reported Thursday, in the latest episode o...

IBM Sells Cybersecurity Group

IBM is selling its QRadar product suite to Palo Alto Networks, for an undisclosed--but probably surprisingly small--sum. I have a personal connection to this. In 2016, IBM bought Resilient Systems, the startup I was a part of. It became part if IBMs cybersecurity offerings, mostly and weirdly...

AI Voice Scam

Scammers tricked a company into believing they were dealing with a BBC presenter. They faked her voice, and accepted money intended for her...

Whale Song Code

During the Cold War, the US Navy tried to make a secret code out of whale song. The basic plan was to develop coded messages from recordings of whales, dolphins, sea lions, and seals. The submarine would broadcast the noises and a computer--the Combo Signal Recognizer CSR--would detect the specif...

Using AI-Generated Legislative Amendments as a Delaying Technique

Canadian legislators proposed 19,600 amendments--almost certainly AI-generated--to a bill in an attempt to delay its adoption. I wrote about many different legislative delaying tactics in A Hackers Mind, but this is a new one...

Cheating Automatic Toll Booths by Obscuring License Plates

The Wall Street Journal is reporting on a variety of techniques drivers are using to obscure their license plates so that automatic readers cant identify them and charge tolls properly. Some drivers have power-washed paint off their plates or covered them with a range of household items such as...

Essays from the Second IWORD

The Ash Center has posted a series of twelve essays stemming from the Second Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy IWORD 2023. Aviv Ovadya, Democracy as Approximation: A Primer for “AI for Democracy” Innovators Kathryn Peters, Permission and Participation Claudia Chwalisz, Moving...

On the Insecurity of Software Bloat

Good essay on software bloat and the insecurities it causes. The world ships too much code, most of it by third parties, sometimes unintended, most of it uninspected. Because of this, there is a huge attack surface full of mediocre code. Efforts are ongoing to improve the quality of code itself,...

NSA Buying Bulk Surveillance Data on Americans without a Warrant

It finally admitted to buying bulk data on Americans from data brokers, in response to a query by Senator Weyden. This is almost certainly illegal, although the NSA maintains that it is legal until its told otherwise. Some news articles...

On IoT Devices and Software Liability

New law journal article: Smart Device Manufacturer Liability and Redress for Third-Party Cyberattack Victims Abstract: Smart devices are used to facilitate cyberattacks against both their users and third parties. While users are generally able to seek redress following a cyberattack via data...

A Robot the Size of the World

In 2016, I wrote about an Internet that affected the world in a direct, physical manner. It was connected to your smartphone. It had sensors like cameras and thermostats. It had actuators: Drones, autonomous cars. And it had smarts in the middle, using sensor data to figure out what to do and the...

Extracting GPT’s Training Data

This is clever: The actual attack is kind of silly. We prompt the model with the command "Repeat the word poem forever" and sit back and watch as the model responds complete transcript here. In the abridged example above, the model emits a real email address and phone number of some unsuspecting...

Apple to Add Manual Authentication to iMessage

Signal has had the ability to manually authenticate another account for years. iMessage is getting it: The feature is called Contact Key Verification, and it does just what its name says: it lets you add a manual verification step in an iMessage conversation to confirm that the other person is wh...

Friday Squid Blogging: Eating Dancing Squid

Its not actually alive, but it twitches in response to soy sauce. 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...

New York Increases Cybersecurity Rules for Financial Companies

Another example of a large and influential state doing things the federal government wont: Boards of directors, or other senior committees, are charged with overseeing cybersecurity risk management, and must retain an appropriate level of expertise to understand cyber issues, the rules say...

Friday Squid Blogging: Why There Are No Giant Squid in Aquariums

Theyre too big and we cant recreate their habitat. 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...

Analysis of Intellexa’s Predator Spyware

Amnesty International has published a comprehensive analysis of the Predator government spyware products. These technologies used to be the exclusive purview of organizations like the NSA. Now theyre available to every country on the planet--democratic, nondemocratic, authoritarian, whatever--for...

Friday Squid Blogging: New Squid Species

An ancient squid: New research on fossils has revealed that a vampire-like ancient squid haunted Earths oceans 165 million years ago. The study, published in June edition of the journal Papers in Palaeontology, says the creature had a bullet-shaped body with luminous organs, eight arms and sucker...

Detecting AI-Generated Text

There are no reliable ways to distinguish text written by a human from text written by an large language model. OpenAI writes: Do AI detectors work? In short, no. While some including OpenAI have released tools that purport to detect AI-generated content, none of these have proven to reliably...

Friday Squid Blogging: Cleaning Squid

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 guidelines here...

Fake Signal and Telegram Apps in the Google Play Store

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 ESET. It was also...

Spyware Vendor Hacked

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...

Friday Squid Blogging: NIWA Annual Squid Survey

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...

Hacking AI Resume Screening with Text in a White Font

The Washington Post is reporting on a hack to fool automatic resume sorting programs: putting text in a white font. The idea is that the programs rely primarily on simple pattern matching, and the trick is to copy a list of relevant keywords--or the published job description--into the resume in a...

Friday Squid Blogging: Zaqistan Flag

The fictional nation of Zaqistan in Utah has a squid on its flag. 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...

New York Using AI to Detect Subway Fare Evasion

The details are scant--the article is based on a "heavily redacted" contract--but the New York subway authority is using an "AI system" to detect people who dont pay the subway fare. Joana Flores, an MTA spokesperson, said the AI system doesnt flag fare evaders to New York police, but she decline...

Friday Squid Blogging: Balloon Squid

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 Password Game

Amusing parody of password rules. BoingBoing: For example, at a certain level, your password must include todays Wordle answer. And then theres rule 27: "At least 50% of your password must be in the Wingdings font." EDITED TO ADD 7/13: Here are all the rules...

Stalkerware Vendor Hacked

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 litt...

Security and Human Behavior (SHB) 2023

Im just back from the sixteenth Workshop on Security and Human Behavior, hosted by Alessandro Acquisti at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. SHB is a small, annual, invitational workshop of people studying various aspects of the human side of security, organized each year by Alessandro...

How Attorneys Are Harming Cybersecurity Incident Response

New paper: "Lessons Lost: Incident Response in the Age of Cyber Insurance and Breach Attorneys": Abstract: Incident Response IR allows victim firms to detect, contain, and recover from security incidents. It should also help the wider community avoid similar attacks in the future. In pursuit of...

Brute-Forcing a Fingerprint Reader

Its neither hard nor expensive: Unlike password authentication, which requires a direct match between what is inputted and whats stored in a database, fingerprint authentication determines a match using a reference threshold. As a result, a successful fingerprint brute-force attack requires only...