Collaborate Disseminate
Dolphins, sharks, turtles, and human workers are all victims of unregulated squid fishing fleets.
Another news article.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Blog moderat… Continue reading Friday Squid Blogging: Victims of Unregulated Squid Fishing
On June 9th, Anthropic released its Fable generative AI model. Three days later, the US government classified it as a dangerous munition, and used its export-control authority to prohibit any foreign nationals from accessing it. Unable to differentiate between Americans and foreigners, the company shut off access for everyone.
The government’s actions won’t help. The problem isn’t any one particular model; it’s the general trend of increasing AI capabilities. And any real solution requires the sort of collective action that just isn’t possible right now…
At least one malware developer is adding text about nuclear and biological weapons to their spyware, in an effort to stop automatic AI analysis.
The _index.js payload begins with a large JavaScript block comment containing fake system instructions and policy-triggering content. Because it is inside a comment, it does not affect JavaScript execution. The runtime skips it. The real malware begins after the comment with a try{eval(…)} wrapper around a large character-code array and a ROT-style substitution function.
This header appears designed for AI-mediated analysis, not for Node, Bun, or Python. It attempts to derail scanners or analyst copilots that feed the beginning of a file to a language model without clearly isolating the content as untrusted data. In weak pipelines, this can cause refusal behavior, prompt confusion, context pollution, or premature classification before the scanner reaches the actual malware…
Continue reading Embedding Forbidden Text in Spyware to Discourage AI Analysis
On 14 April, the Trump administration quietly acknowledged the widespread use of AI to automate government processes. The office of management and budget (OMB) disclosed a staggering 3,611 active or planned use cases for AI across the federal government. The list has ballooned by 70% from the one published in the final year of the Biden administration, and includes many disturbing-seeming plans to hand over sensitive governmental functions to AI.
Scanning this list, many readers may find many causes for alarm. It represents a transfer of decision processes from human to machine on a massive scale over matters of individual freedom, public health and well-being, nuclear reactor safety and more…
There are over a dozen cases around the country where police officers are using the Flock surveillance camera system to obsessively and illegally stalk people.
Alternate link.
Continue reading Flock Cameras Are Being Used for Stalking
A proposed FCC rule would kill burner phones: phones whose accounts are not attached to a particular person.
The FCC plans to do this by legally forcing the country’s telecoms to store a wealth of personal information about essentially all phone customers, including a government issued identification number and their physical address, alarming privacy advocates and civil rights activists who compare the measures to those from authoritarian countries where it can be difficult to buy a mobile phone plan without giving up your identity.
The proposed change would drastically shake up how people obtain phone plans in the U.S., and have all sorts of privacy and cybersecurity knock-on effects. The FCC is proposing the data collection partly as a way to combat scammers, with telecoms being required to collect other information on business and foreign customers like the intended use case of their bulk phone plan purchase and their IP address. But the changes would mean telecoms collect data on all new and renewing customers, and the FCC provides a long list of other things that the collected data could help authorities with…
This fluid pump was inspired by the way squids propel themselves through the water.
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.
Continue reading Friday Squid Blogging: Squid-Inspired Fluid Pump
This fluid pump was inspired by the way squids propel themselves through the water.
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.
Continue reading Friday Squid Blogging: Squid-Inspired Fluid Pump
Let no one accuse Bernie Sanders of ducking the big questions. Writing in the New York Times last week, the senator asked: “Will the future of humanity be determined by a handful of billionaires who have promoted and developed AI, with virtually no democratic input, who stand to become even richer and more powerful than they are today?”
We agree entirely that this is one of the most potent questions facing global democracy today. Our book, Rewiring Democracy, surveys the emerging uses for and impacts of AI in democracy around the world and reaches the same conclusion: that the most urgent risk posed by AI is the …
Continue reading Bernie Sanders’ AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Plan
Let no one accuse Bernie Sanders of ducking the big questions. Writing in the New York Times last week, the senator asked: “Will the future of humanity be determined by a handful of billionaires who have promoted and developed AI, with virtually no democratic input, who stand to become even richer and more powerful than they are today?”
We agree entirely that this is one of the most potent questions facing global democracy today. Our book, Rewiring Democracy, surveys the emerging uses for and impacts of AI in democracy around the world and reaches the same conclusion: that the most urgent risk posed by AI is the …
Continue reading Bernie Sanders’ AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Plan