Collaborate Disseminate
Doryteuthis opalescens is known as the market squid, and was critical in the recent squid RNA research.
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 he… Continue reading Friday Squid Blogging: See-Through Squid
The Washington Post is reporting that the US is spying on the UN Secretary General.
The reports on Guterres appear to contain the secretary general’s personal conversations with aides regarding diplomatic encounters. They indicate that the United States relied on spying powers granted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to gather the intercepts.
Lots of details about different conversations in the article, which are based on classified documents leaked on Discord by Jack Teixeira.
There will probably a lot of faux outrage at this, but spying on foreign leaders is a perfectly legitimate use of the NSA’s capabilities and authorities. (If the NSA didn’t spy on the UN Secretary General, we should fire it and replace it with a more competent NSA.) It’s the bulk surveillance of whole populations that should outrage us…
Continue reading The US Is Spying on the UN Secretary General
We have learned this lesson again:
As part of the FTC v. Microsoft hearing, Sony supplied a document from PlayStation chief Jim Ryan that includes redacted details on the margins Sony shares with publishers, its Call of Duty revenues, and even the cost… Continue reading Redacting Documents with a Black Sharpie Doesn’t Work
The stalkerware company LetMeSpy has been hacked:
TechCrunch reviewed the leaked data, which included years of victims’ call logs and text messages dating back to 2013.
The database we reviewed contained current records on at least 13,000 compromised devices, though some of the devices shared little to no data with LetMeSpy. (LetMeSpy claims to delete data after two months of account inactivity.)
[…]
The database also contained over 13,400 location data points for several thousand victims. Most of the location data points are centered over population hotspots, suggesting the majority of victims are located in the United States, India and Western Africa…
Don’t do it:
Recently, the manager of the Harvard Med School morgue was accused of stealing and selling human body parts. Cedric Lodge and his wife Denise were among a half-dozen people arrested for some pretty grotesque crimes. This part is also at least a little bit funny though:
Over a three-year period, Taylor appeared to pay Denise Lodge more than $37,000 for human remains. One payment, for $1,000 included the memo “head number 7.” Another, for $200, read “braiiiiiins.”
It’s so easy to think that you won’t get caught.
… Continue reading Typing Incriminating Evidence in the Memo Field
In this detailed article about academic plagiarism are some interesting details about how to do data forensics on Excel files. It really needs the graphics to understand, so see the description at the link.
(And, yes, an author of a paper on dishonesty… Continue reading Excel Data Forensics
Giggling Squid is a Thai chain in the UK.
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.
Continue reading Friday Squid Blogging: Giggling Squid
I get UPS phishing spam on my phone all the time. I never click on it, because it’s so obviously spam. Turns out that hackers have been harvesting actual UPS delivery data from a Canadian tracking tool for its phishing SMSs.
Continue reading UPS Data Harvested for SMS Phishing Attacks
It’s become fashionable to think of artificial intelligence as an inherently dehumanizing technology, a ruthless force of automation that has unleashed legions of virtual skilled laborers in faceless form. But what if AI turns out to be the one tool able to identify what makes your ideas special, recognizing your unique perspective and potential on the issues where it matters most?
You’d be forgiven if you’re distraught about society’s ability to grapple with this new technology. So far, there’s no lack of prognostications about the democratic…
Tadayoshi Kohno, Yasemin Acar, and Wulf Loh wrote excellent paper on ethical thinking within the computer security community: “Ethical Frameworks and Computer Security Trolley Problems: Foundations for Conversation“:
Abstract: The computer security research community regularly tackles ethical questions. The field of ethics / moral philosophy has for centuries considered what it means to be “morally good” or at least “morally allowed / acceptable.” Among philosophy’s contributions are (1) frameworks for evaluating the morality of actions—including the well-established consequentialist and deontological frameworks—and (2) scenarios (like trolley problems) featuring moral dilemmas that can facilitate discussion about and intellectual inquiry into different perspectives on moral reasoning and decision-making. In a classic trolley problem, consequentialist and deontological analyses may render different opinions. In this research, we explicitly make and explore connections between moral questions in computer security research and ethics / moral philosophy through the creation and analysis of trolley problem-like computer security-themed moral dilemmas and, in doing so, we seek to contribute to conversations among security researchers about the morality of security research-related decisions. We explicitly do not seek to define what is morally right or wrong, nor do we argue for one framework over another. Indeed, the consequentialist and deontological frameworks that we center, in addition to coming to different conclusions for our scenarios, have significant limitations. Instead, by offering our scenarios and by comparing two different approaches to ethics, we strive to contribute to how the computer security research field considers and converses about ethical questions, especially when there are different perspectives on what is morally right or acceptable. Our vision is for this work to be broadly useful to the computer security community, including to researchers as they embark on (or choose not to embark on), conduct, and write about their research, to program committees as they evaluate submissions, and to educators as they teach about computer security and ethics…