This essay was written with Kasra Rafi, and originally appeared in The Guardian.
Earlier this month, about 40 top mathematicians gathered at OpenAI’s offices to discuss the future of their profession. The meeting was off-the-record, but if recent articles by mathematicians are any guide, it was most…
Ugh:
A tractor-trailer rollover sent a truckload of squid spilling into a Rhode Island roadway, leaving a stench as they sat in the road for hours in the summer heat. Local authorities have dubbed it the “Squidpocalypse of ’26.”
That would be twenty tons of squid.
As usual, you can also use this squ…
Flock Safety is hurting. It spent the early part of its career pitching plate reader tech to people who honestly didn’t need it: HOA supervisors and gated communities. Then it realized there was far more money to be made by courting governments, rather than the richest parts of the private sector. A…
agrupados por: flock · surveillance · company · police
The New York Times has a long article (alt link) on surveillance systems aimed at babies. They are increasingly using AI.
Nanit and its rivals want to own 24/7 health tracking for the sub-four-foot set. And their already astonishing levels of baby data collection are just the beginning. Nanit recent…
OpenAI disrupted a social engineering group from Cambodia that used ChatGPT. Its scope is impressive:
The network simultaneously conducted multiple types of scams, often blending elements from different schemes. For instance, operators used dating personas to build trust before introducing fraudulen…
Andy Ellis has a roundup of the security vendors at Black Hat this year.
Key Takeaways: We have entered into an AI world. While nearly half of booths didn’t directly mention AI or agents in their taglines, the effects of AI are everywhere. Multiple spaces (Identity, SaaS, AppSec, Data) have almost…
Interesting paper:
Abstract: With entrepreneurial fraud cases on the rise, we investigate how entrepreneurs carry out criminal deception, employing deceptive means to defraud audiences. Analyzing court data from Silicon Valley ventures and their founders prosecuted for fraud between 2000 and 2023, o…
Fascinating video about searching for life undersea. The video basically makes the point that our bright white searchlights are scaring everything away, and that red light is more neutral. That, plus bait to attract sea creatures, is teaching us a lot about what’s going on down there. Lots of footag…
I have been thinking a lot about AI and integrity. Part of that is contextual integrity. I recently found two papers on the topic.
“CIMemories: A Compositional Benchmark for Contextual Integrity of Persistent Memory in LLMs“:
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly use persistent memory …
The AI Security Institute has a new report of AI systems engaging in “unsanctioned behavior”—what I have been calling “genie behavior—while being tested on their cybersecurity capabilities.
The incident stemmed from a single evaluation where agents were given a task of solving a cyber security chall…
This sort of research is both exciting and terrifying:
The two models in question were told to generate complete genomes for a viable bacteriophage—a type of virus able to infect and replicate itself inside bacteria, destroying them from the inside.
Using an existing bacteriophage as an example—ΦX17…
The neon flying squid can fly in formation.
The shoal of about 100 squid rose unexpectedly from a patch of the Pacific Ocean around 370 miles from Tokyo and glided near the boat for about 30 metres. The astonished researchers were the first to capture photographs of such a thing, which looked like t…
There are many companies manufacturing adversarial clothing designed to confuse facial recognition systems.
It’s a cool idea, but I worry that it’s mostly security theater:
“Our patterns play with that chaos, confuse algorithms and make it way harder to pin you down,” he said.
Bell, however, said “…
Nice video of the Arctic bobtail squid.
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.
This is good:
Post-quantum cryptography is now one pip-install away for the entire Python ecosystem. With funding from the Sovereign Tech Agency, we implemented support for ML-KEM, the NIST-standard key-establishment primitive, and ML-DSA, the NIST-standard digital-signature primitive, in pyca/crypt…
Interesting empirical research: “Black Box Warfare: Human Judgment and Military Decision-Making in the Age of AI.”
Abstract: How is AI transforming decision-making in modern conflict? This study provides a unique empirical window into that question by deploying a high-fidelity replica of an AI decis…
When I give talks about AI genies, I use this sort of example as a hypothetical. It’s happened.
The story is from Australia. Someone named Andrew tasked OpenClaw to book gym classes for him. And….
Minutes later, his AI agent reported it had discovered a way to book Andrew into classes several weeks …
This seems to work:
Researchers from Tracebit on Monday said they found that placing prompt injections alongside passwords, cryptographic keys, and other secrets stored on Amazon Web Services was often all that was needed to shut down attacks from AI hacking agents. The prompts direct the attacking …
This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in Tech Policy Press.
AI represents the first time we humans can do cognitive work outside of our bodies at scale. The only comparable moment is the early years of the industrial revolution, when new technologies like the steam e…
This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Guardian.
OpenAI, and then Anthropic, were each formed by AI developers who feared unrestrained corporate AI development—specifically, that companies like Google and Meta would steer the technology towards deleterious, may…
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:
I’m speaking, signing books, and participating in panel discussions at LAcon V in Anaheim, California, USA. My full schedule is here.
I’m speaking online (via Zoom) at a League of Women Voters event on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, at…
In the near future, AI-powered surveillance systems will be able to track everything we do in public, and much of what we do in private. And if we do something wrong—shoplift, litter, jaywalk, you name it—the system will notice, retain it, tie it to your official government record, communicate that …
In a rare combined cybersecurity/squid post, a twenty-nine-year-old squid proxy bug can leak HTTP requests.
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.
Not sure this will have any effect, but I support the effort:
According to Google’s legal filing, Outsider Enterprise operates through Telegram. The group offers phishing-as-a-service to individuals who may not be technically savvy enough to set up fraudulent websites and text campaigns on their own…
Last week, national security agencies from the Five Eyes—that’s the rich, English-language-speaking countries club—jointly released a statement warning of the increasing cyber risks of AI models: in particular, their ability to autonomously hack into systems and networks. The statement was more meas…
Because of the way they are trained, large language models capture only a slice of human language. They’re trained on the written word, from textbooks to social media posts, and our speech as captured in movies and on television. These models have minimal access to the unscripted conversations we ha…
France is accelerating its transition to post-quantum encryption:
France’s cybersecurity agency ANSSI said on Tuesday it would stop certifying security products that lack quantum-resistant encryption, a move that will force government bodies and critical operators to shift away from older systems.
S…
