Cheating on Quantum Computing Benchmarks
July 31 2025Peter Gutmann and Stephan Neuhaus have a new paper—I think it’s new, even though it has a March 2025 date—that makes the argument that we shouldn’t trust any...
Read moreMeasuring the Attack/Defense Balance
July 30 2025“Who’s winning on the internet, the attackers or the defenders?”
I’m asked this all the time, and I can only ever give a qualitative hand-wavy answer. But Jason Healey...
Read moreThat Time Tom Lehrer Pranked the NSA
July 29 2025Bluesky thread. Here’s the paper, from 1957. Note reference 3.
Read moreMicrosoft SharePoint Zero-Day
July 28 2025Chinese hackers are exploiting a high-severity vulnerability in Microsoft SharePoint to steal data worldwide:
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-53770, carries a severity rating of 9.8 out of a possible...
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Yet another SQUID acronym: “Stable Quasi-Isodynamic Design.” It’s a stellarator for a fusion nuclear power plant.
Read moreSubliminal Learning in AIs
July 25 2025Today’s freaky LLM behavior:
We study subliminal learning, a surprising phenomenon where language models learn traits from model-generated data that is semantically unrelated to those traits. For example, a...
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How the Solid Protocol Restores Digital Agency
July 24 2025The current state of digital identity is a mess. Your personal information is scattered across hundreds of locations: social media companies, IoT companies, government agencies, websites you have accounts...
Read moreGoogle Sues the Badbox Botnet Operators
July 23 2025It will be interesting to watch what will come of this private lawsuit:
Google on Thursday announced filing a lawsuit against the operators of the Badbox 2.0 botnet, which...
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“Encryption Backdoors and the Fourth Amendment”
July 22 2025Law journal article that looks at the Dual_EC_PRNG backdoor from a US constitutional perspective:
Abstract: The National Security Agency (NSA) reportedly paid and pressured technology companies to trick...
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