Author Archives: Bruce Schneier

South Korean Police Accidentally Post Cryptocurrency Wallet Password

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An expensive mistake:

Someone jumped at the opportunity to steal $4.4 million in crypto assets after South Korea’s National Tax Service exposed publicly the mnemonic recovery phrase of a seized cryptocurrency wallet.

The funds were stored in a Ledger cold wallet seized in law enforcement raids at 124 high-value tax evaders that resulted in confiscating digital assets worth 8.1 billion won (currently approximately $5.6 million).

When announcing the success of the operation, the agency released photos of a Ledger device, a popular hardware wallet for crypto storage and management…

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Academia and the “AI Brain Drain”

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In 2025, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta collectively spent US$380 billion on building artificial-intelligence tools. That number is expected to surge still higher this year, to $650 billion, to fund the building of physical infrastructure, such as data centers (see go.nature.com/3lzf79q). Moreover, these firms are spending lavishly on one particular segment: top technical talent.

Meta reportedly offered a single AI researcher, who had cofounded a start-up firm focused on training AI agents to use computers, a compensation package of $250 million over four years (see …

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Canada Needs Nationalized, Public AI

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Canada has a choice to make about its artificial intelligence future. The Carney administration is investing $2-billion over five years in its Sovereign AI Compute Strategy. Will any value generated by “sovereign AI” be captured in Canada, making a difference in the lives of Canadians, or is this just a passthrough to investment in American Big Tech?

Forcing the question is OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, which has been pushing an “OpenAI for Countries” initiative. It is not the only one eyeing its share of the $2-billion, but it appears to be the most aggressive. OpenAI’s top lobbyist in the region has met with Ottawa officials, including Artificial Intelligence Minister Evan Solomon…

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New Attack Against Wi-Fi

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It’s called AirSnitch:

Unlike previous Wi-Fi attacks, AirSnitch exploits core features in Layers 1 and 2 and the failure to bind and synchronize a client across these and higher layers, other nodes, and other network names such as SSIDs (Service Set Identifiers). This cross-layer identity desynchronization is the key driver of AirSnitch attacks.

The most powerful such attack is a full, bidirectional machine-in-the-middle (MitM) attack, meaning the attacker can view and modify data before it makes its way to the intended recipient. The attacker can be on the same SSID, a separate one, or even a separate network segment tied to the same AP. It works against small Wi-Fi networks in both homes and offices and large networks in enterprises…

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Friday Squid Blogging: Squid in Byzantine Monk Cooking

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This is a very weird story about how squid stayed on the menu of Byzantine monks by falling between the cracks of dietary rules.

At Constantinople’s Monastery of Stoudios, the kitchen didn’t answer to appetite.

It answered to the “typikon”: a manual for ensuring that nothing unexpected happened at mealtimes. Meat: forbidden. Dairy: forbidden. Eggs: forbidden. Fish: feast-day only. Oil: regulated. But squid?

Squid had eight arms, no bones, and a gift for changing color. Nobody had bothered writing a regulation for that. This wasn’t a loophole born of legal creativity but an oversight rooted in taxonomic confusion. Medieval monks, confronted with a creature that was neither fish nor fowl, gave up and let it pass…

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Anthropic and the Pentagon

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OpenAI is in and Anthropic is out as a supplier of AI technology for the US defense department. This news caps a week of bluster by the highest officials in the US government towards some of the wealthiest titans of the big tech industry, and the overhanging specter of the existential risks posed by a new technology powerful enough that the Pentagon claims it is essential to national security. At issue is Anthropic’s insistence that the US Department of Defense (DoD) could not use its models to facilitate “mass surveillance” or “fully autonomous weapons,” provisions the defense secretary Pete Hegseth …

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