Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Nebula

Beautiful astronomical photo...

Friday Squid Blogging: Illex Squid and Climate Change

There are correlations between the populations of the Illex Argentines squid and water temperatures. 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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Vegan Squid-Ink Pasta

It uses black beans for color and seaweed for flavor. 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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Parts into Fertilizer

Its squid parts from college dissections, so its not a volume operation. 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...

Friday Squid Blogging: Underwater Sculptures Use Squid Ink for Coloring

The Molinière Underwater Sculpture Park has pieces that are colored in part with squid ink. 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...

AI Decides to Engage in Insider Trading

A stock-trading AI a simulated experiment engaged in insider trading, even though it "knew" it was wrong. The agent is put under pressure in three ways. First, it receives a email from its "manager" that the company is not doing well and needs better performance in the next quarter. Second, the...

Chocolate Swiss Army Knife

Its realistic looking. If I drop it in a bin with my keys and wallet, will the TSA confiscate it?...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Chromolithographs

Beautiful illustrations. 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. EDITED TO ADD 6/4: Slashdot thread...

Recovering Passwords by Measuring Residual Heat

Researchers have used thermal cameras and ML guessing techniques to recover passwords from measuring the residual heat left by fingers on keyboards. From the abstract: We detail the implementation of ThermoSecure and make a dataset of 1,500 thermal images of keyboards with heat traces resulting...

Drones Carrying Explosives

Weve now had an unsuccessful assassination attempt by explosive-laden drones...

How the FBI Gets Location Information

Vice has a detailed article about how the FBI gets data from cell phone providers like AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, based on a leaked I think 2019 139-page presentation...

Iranian Cyberespionage Tools Leaked Online

The source code of a set of Iranian cyberespionage tools was leaked online...

Friday Squid Blogging: How the Squid Lost Its Shell

Squids used to have shells. 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...

Is Someone Hacking DoD Refrigerators?

It sure seems like it. The stores confirmed to be affected include Fort Irwin, Calif.; F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyo.; Fort Huachuca, Ariz.; Naval Station Newport, R.I.; Columbus Air Force Base, Miss.; and Travis Air Force Base, Calif., according to announcements made online by each installatio...

Embedding Forbidden Text in Spyware to Discourage AI Analysis

At least one malware developer is adding text about nuclear and biological weapons to their spyware, in an effort to stop automatic AI analysis. Details: The index.js payload begins with a large JavaScript block comment containing fake system instructions and policy-triggering content. Because it...

Friday Squid Blogging: Jurassic Fish Chokes on Squid

Here's a fossil of a 150-million year old fish that choked to death on a belemnite rostrum : the hard, internal shell of an extinct, squid-like animal. Original paper. 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...

A Taxonomy of Cognitive Security

Last week, I listened to a fascinating talk by K. Melton on cognitive security, cognitive hacking, and reality pentesting. The slides from the talk are here, but--even better--Menton has a long essay laying out the basic concepts and ideas. The whole thing is important and well worth reading, and...

Friday Squid Blogging: Bioluminescent Bacteria in Squid

The Hawaiian bobtail squid has bioluminescent bacteria...

Meta’s AI Glasses and Privacy

Surprising no one, Meta's new AI glasses are a privacy disaster. I'm not sure what can be done here. This is a technology that will exist, whether we like it or not. Meanwhile, there is a new Android app that detects when there are smart glasses nearby...

Friday Squid Blogging: Increased Squid Population in the Falklands

Some good news: squid stocks seem to be recovering in the waters off the Falkland Islands. 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...

Microsoft is Giving the FBI BitLocker Keys

Microsoft gives the FBI the ability to decrypt BitLocker in response to court orders: about twenty times per year. It's possible for users to store those keys on a device they own, but Microsoft also recommends BitLocker users store their keys on its servers for convenience. While that means...

Ireland Proposes Giving Police New Digital Surveillance Powers

This is coming: The Irish government is planning to bolster its police's ability to intercept communications, including encrypted messages, and provide a legal basis for spyware use...

Friday Squid Blogging: The Chinese Squid-Fishing Fleet off the Argentine Coast

The latest article on this topic. 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...

Palo Alto Crosswalk Signals Had Default Passwords

Palo Alto's crosswalk signals were hacked last year. Turns out the city never changed the default passwords...

LinkedIn Job Scams

Interesting article on the variety of LinkedIn job scams around the world: In India, tech jobs are used as bait because the industry employs millions of people and offers high-paying roles. In Kenya, the recruitment industry is largely unorganized, so scamsters leverage fake personal referrals. I...

Denmark Accuses Russia of Conducting Two Cyberattacks

News: The Danish Defence Intelligence Service DDIS announced on Thursday that Moscow was behind a cyber-attack on a Danish water utility in 2024 and a series of distributed denial-of-service DDoS attacks on Danish websites in the lead-up to the municipal and regional council elections in November...

Microsoft Is Finally Killing RC4

After twenty-six years, Microsoft is finally upgrading the last remaining instance of the encryption algorithm RC4 in Windows. of the most visible holdouts in supporting RC4 has been Microsoft. Eventually, Microsoft upgraded Active Directory to support the much more secure AES encryption standard...

New Anonymous Phone Service

A new anonymous phone service allows you to sign up with just a zip code...

Huawei and Chinese Surveillance

This quote is from House of Huawei: The Secret History of China 's Most Powerful Company. "Long before anyone had heard of Ren Zhengfei or Huawei, Wan Runnan had been China's star entrepreneur in the 1980s, with his company, the Stone Group, touted as "China's IBM." Wan had believed that economic...

More on Rewiring Democracy

It's been a month since Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship was published. From what we know, sales are good. Some of the book's forty-three chapters are available online: chapters 2, 12, 28, 34, 38, and 41. We need more reviews--six on Amazon is no...

Scientists Need a Positive Vision for AI

For many in the research community, it's gotten harder to be optimistic about the impacts of artificial intelligence. As authoritarianism is rising around the world, AI-generated "slop" is overwhelming legitimate media, while AI-generated deepfakes are spreading misinformation and parroting...

The AI-Designed Bioweapon Arms Race

Interesting article about the arms race between AI systems that invent/design new biological pathogens, and AI systems that detect them before they're created: The team started with a basic test: use AI tools to design variants of the toxin ricin, then test them against the software that is used ...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: Nathan E. Sanders and I will be giving a book talk on Rewiring Democracy at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, on October 22, 2025, at noon ET. Nathan E. Sanders and I will be speaking and...

Rewiring Democracy is Coming Soon

My latest book, Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship , will be published in just over a week. No reviews yet, but you can read chapters 12 and 34 of 43 chapters total. You can order the book pretty much everywhere, and a copy signed by me here. Pleas...

AI in the 2026 Midterm Elections

We are nearly one year out from the 2026 midterm elections, and it's far too early to predict the outcomes. But it's a safe bet that artificial intelligence technologies will once again be a major storyline. The widespread fear that AI would be used to manipulate the 2024 US election seems rather...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Overfishing in the Southwest Atlantic

Article. Report...

Details of a Scam

Longtime Crypto-Gram readers know that I collect personal experiences of people being scammed. Here's an almost: Then he added, "Here at Chase, we'll never ask for your personal information or passwords." On the contrary, he gave me more information--two "cancellation codes" and a long case numbe...

Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid vs. Blue Whale

A comparison aimed at kids...

Spying on People Through Airportr Luggage Delivery Service

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 or important people. And mayb...

Another Supply Chain Vulnerability

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 investigatio...

Friday Squid Blogging: How Squid Skin Distorts Light

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...

Ubuntu Disables Spectre/Meltdown Protections

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...

Here’s a Subliminal Channel You Haven’t Considered Before

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

Surveillance in the US

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...

Ghostwriting Scam

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 false hopes of...

Report on the Malicious Uses of AI

OpenAI just published its annual report on malicious uses of AI. By using AI as a force multiplier for our expert investigative teams, in the three months since our last report we’ve been able to detect, disrupt and expose abusive activity including social engineering, cyber espionage, deceptive...

Why Take9 Won’t Improve Cybersecurity

There's a new cybersecurity awareness campaign: Take9. The idea is that people--you, me, everyone--should just pause for nine seconds and think more about the link they are planning to click on, the file they are planning to download, or whatever it is they are planning to share. There's a...

Friday Squid Blogging: NGC 1068 Is the “Squid Galaxy”

I hadn't known that the NGC 1068 galaxy is nicknamed the "Squid Galaxy." It is, and it's spewing neutrinos without the usual accompanying gamma rays. 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: Pyjama Squid

The small pyjama squid Sepioloidea lineolata produces toxic slime, "a rare example of a poisonous predatory mollusc." As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered...

Critical GitHub Attack

This is serious: A sophisticated cascading supply chain attack has compromised multiple GitHub Actions, exposing critical CI/CD secrets across tens of thousands of repositories. The attack, which originally targeted the widely used “tj-actions/changed-files” utility, is now believed to have...