Friday Squid Blogging: Live Squid Washes up on North Carolina Beach

A "mysterious squid" -- big and red -- washed up on a beach in Carteret County, North Carolina. Someone found it, still alive, and set it back in the water after taking some photos of it. Squid scientists later decided it was a diamondback squid. So, you think that O'Shea might know the identity ...

Jumping Airgaps with a Laser and a Scanner

Researchers have configured two computers to talk to each other using a laser and a scanner. Scanners work by detecting reflected light on their glass pane. The light creates a charge that the scanner translates into binary, which gets converted into an image. But scanners are sensitive to any...

Stealing Browsing History Using Your Phone's Ambient Light Sensor

There has been a flurry of research into using the various sensors on your phone to steal data in surprising ways. Here's another: using the phone's ambient light sensor to detect what's on the screen. It's a proof of concept, but the paper's general conclusions are correct: There is a lesson her...

Reading Analytics and Privacy

Interesting paper: "The rise of reading analytics and the emerging calculus of reading privacy in the digital world," by Clifford Lynch: Abstract: This paper studies emerging technologies for tracking reading behaviors "reading analytics" and their implications for reader privacy, attempting to...

Analyzing Cyber Insurance Policies

There's a really interesting new paper analyzing over 100 different cyber insurance policies. From the abstract: In this research paper, we seek to answer fundamental questions concerning the current state of the cyber insurance market. Specifically, by collecting over 100 full insurance policies...

Advances in Ad Blocking

Ad blockers represent the largest consumer boycott in human history. They're also an arms race between the blockers and the blocker blockers. This article discusses a new ad-blocking technology that represents another advance in this arms race. I don't think it will "put an end to the ad-blocking...

Faking Domain Names with Unicode Characters

It's things like this that make phishing attacks easier. News article...

Friday Squid Blogging: Video of Squid Attacking Another Squid

Wow, is this cool. 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...

Tracing Spam from E-mail Headers

Interesting article from Brian Krebs...