Squid Dominated the Oceans in the Late Cretaceous
July 12 2025New research:
One reason the early years of squids has been such a mystery is because squids’ lack of hard shells made their fossils hard to come by. Undeterred,...
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Tradecraft in the Information Age
July 12 2025Long article on the difficulty (impossibility?) of human spying in the age of ubiquitous digital surveillance.
Read moreUsing Signal Groups for Activism
July 10 2025Good tutorial by Micah Lee. It includes some nonobvious use cases.
Read moreYet Another Strava Privacy Leak
July 9 2025This time it’s the Swedish prime minister’s bodyguards. (Last year, it was the US Secret Service and Emmanuel Macron’s bodyguards. in 2018, it was secret US military bases.) This is...
Read moreHiding Prompt Injections in Academic Papers
July 7 2025Academic papers were found to contain hidden instructions to LLMs:
It discovered such prompts in 17 articles, whose lead authors are affiliated with 14 institutions including Japan’s Waseda University,...
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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.
Read moreSurveillance Used by a Drug Cartel
July 3 2025Once you build a surveillance system, you can’t control who will use it:
A hacker working for the Sinaloa drug cartel was able to obtain an FBI official’s phone...
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Ubuntu Disables Spectre/Meltdown Protections
July 2 2025A 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...
Read moreDozens of accounts on X that promoted Scottish independence went dark during an internet blackout in Iran. Well, that’s one way to identify fake accounts and misinformation campaigns.
Read moreAmerican democracy runs on trust, and that trust is cracking.
Nearly half of Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, question whether elections are conducted fairly. Some voters accept election results...
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