Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Helps Discover New Marine Species
The Squid is a new scientific machine: One of the technological breakthroughs was the onboard use of a spinning wheel confocal microscope, nicknamed the Squi...
Schneier on Security
20 articles
Anthropic’s Opus 5 Is Better at Resisting Prompt Injection
The chart is interesting. On the IPI benchmark, Opus 5 improved over Opus 4.
Facial Recognition at Madison Square Garden
Last month, the story broke (alternate link) that Madison Square Garden uses facial recognition software on everyone entering the facility, and—among other g...
American Being Prosecuted for Wiping His Phone Before Handing It Over to Border Officials
He’s being prosecuted for giving border officials a code that wiped his phone: The case centers on a feature included in GrapheneOS, a custom Android operati...
Should You Use AI for a Task? Here’s a Simple Way to Decide
This essay originally appeared in The Guardian. I teach public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Munk School at the University of Toronto.
Measuring the Tendency of AI Agents to Go Rogue
This essay was written with Barath Raghavan, and originally appeared in The Guardian. In July, Hugging Face, a company that hosts much of the world’s AI soft...
Long-Lived Vulnerability in Microsoft Secure Boot
Microsoft’s Secure Boot has had a serious vulnerability for most of its existence. An industry-wide standard Microsoft invented to protect Windows, and later...
Measuring LLMs’ Ability to Perform Cryptanalysis
There’s new benchmark measuring AI’s ability to perform mathematical cryptanalysis. Anthropic’s frontier model actually found new attacks.
Axon Is Another License Plate Surveillance Company
Governments are switching, but I’m not sure it makes a difference: …some municipalities, including Denver, Colorado, are ditching their Flock arrays. But kee...
Cognyte Sells a Mobile Cell Surveillance Van
Yet another Israeli mass surveillance company: Made by Israeli surveillance company Cognyte, the tech simulates a mobile phone tower, which forces nearby pho...
Friday Squid Blogging: Illex Squid Catch in the Falklands
Lower catch this year. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Why AI Needs a “Genie Coefficient”
This essay was written with Barath Raghavan, and originally appeared in The Guardian. Major benchmarks measure what AI can do.
End-to-End Encryption and “Going Dark”
New paper: “Encryption and Globalization 15 Years Later: End-to-End Encryption and the Third Round of the ‘Going Dark’ Debate“: Abstract: This Article update...
First-Person Identity Theft Story
Harrowing story of an identity theft victim. Yes, the person made a mistake—they gave the scammer a two-factor authentication code that allowed the scammer t...
MIT to Become Hotbed of AI Video Surveillance
It’s a lot: According to information obtained by The Tech, MIT is spending over $3 million on more than 500 AI surveillance cameras in academic buildings, re...
On Flock License Plate Tracking Cameras
A recent story of a writer who was mistakenly identified, tracked, and arrested using data from Flock cameras has gone viral. The New Jersey plates that were...
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Washing Up on Cape Cod Beach
Lots of articles about this. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Details of Alan Turing’s Voice Encryption System
Really interesting piece of cryptographic history: In November 2023, a large cache of his wartime papers—nicknamed the “Bayley papers”—was auctioned in Londo...
Protecting Privacy in an AI Era
Daniel Solove argues in the Wall Street Journal (alternate link) that giving people control of their personal data is not an effective way to regulate privac...
A Video Screen That Is Also a Camera
Amazing: Researchers from ETH Zurich in Switzerland, however, managed to create a new type of pixel that can simultaneously do both. This hypercharged pixel,...