Collaborate Disseminate
The German police have successfully deanonymized at least four Tor users. It appears they watch known Tor relays and known suspects, and use timing analysis to figure out who is using what relay.
Tor has written about this.
Hacker News thread.
Continue reading Law Enforcement Deanonymizes Tor Users
It’s low tech, but effective.
Why Germany? It has more ATMs than other European countries, and—if I read the article right—they have more money in them.
Continue reading Criminals Are Blowing up ATMs in Germany
A giant squid has washed up on a beach in Northern Spain.
Blog moderation policy.
Continue reading Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid Found on Spanish Beach
Researchers at Google have developed a watermark for LLM-generated text. The basics are pretty obvious: the LLM chooses between tokens partly based on a cryptographic key, and someone with knowledge of the key can detect those choices. What makes this … Continue reading Watermark for LLM-Generated Text
An advocacy groups is filing a Fourth Amendment challenge against automatic license plate readers.
“The City of Norfolk, Virginia, has installed a network of cameras that make it functionally impossible for people to drive anywhere without having their movements tracked, photographed, and stored in an AI-assisted database that enables the warrantless surveillance of their every move. This civil rights lawsuit seeks to end this dragnet surveillance program,” the lawsuit notes. “In Norfolk, no one can escape the government’s 172 unblinking eyes,” it continues, referring to the 172 Flock cameras currently operational in Norfolk. The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures and has been ruled in many cases to protect against warrantless government surveillance, and the lawsuit specifically says Norfolk’s installation violates that.”…
Continue reading Are Automatic License Plate Scanners Constitutional?
The headline is pretty scary: “China’s Quantum Computer Scientists Crack Military-Grade Encryption.”
No, it’s not true.
This debunking saved me the trouble of writing one. It all seems to have come from this news article, which … Continue reading No, The Chinese Have Not Broken Modern Encryption Systems with a Quantum Computer
Cute squid scarf.
Blog moderation policy.
Continue reading Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Scarf
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the CEO of a still unnamed company has been indicted for creating a fake auditing company to falsify security certifications in order to win government business.
Continue reading Justice Department Indicts Tech CEO for Falsifying Security Certifications
The men’s world conkers champion is accused of cheating with a steel chestnut.
Continue reading Cheating at Conkers
The Washington Post has a long and detailed story about the operation that’s well worth reading (alternate version here).
The sales pitch came from a marketing official trusted by Hezbollah with links to Apollo. The marketing official, a woman whose identity and nationality officials declined to reveal, was a former Middle East sales representative for the Taiwanese firm who had established her own company and acquired a license to sell a line of pagers that bore the Apollo brand. Sometime in 2023, she offered Hezbollah a deal on one of the products her firm sold: the rugged and reliable AR924…
Continue reading More Details on Israel Sabotaging Hezbollah Pagers and Walkie-Talkies