YIKES: NSO floats Pegasus spyware used in hypothetical "time of domestic crisis" in 🇺🇸America. I believe they won't stop lobbying until they get Pegasus into USA. To hack Americans. 1/

NEW: Paragon spyware hit a key Italian campaign manager / political strategist. Super concerning case & a reminder that Italy has a growing pile of unexplained infections with Paragon's Graphite spyware.

Outages are impromptu seminars on where the internet actually lives. On the syllabus: your favorite app's resilience & trust model. Good thread from @signal.org's CEO.

I'm getting a lot of LLM-generated inbound. Someone pushed a button forcing me to spend more time reading the message than they spent creating it. Please, give me your authenticity, typos & bad grammar.

POV: you can't sleep because Amazon is down. Design thinking that inserts brittle dependence into our lives. While extracting fees for life. Don't be these guys.

Today's Amazon outage should be a wakeup call. We've put too many internet eggs into a single basket.

Your favorite thing is down because DynamoDB at Amazon's AWS US-EAST-1 Regionwoke up with Main Character Syndrome. This is the default /legacy backbone for a ton of things. Including Amazon's own stuff. Massive outages. Here's what's going on & what we know 1/

NEW: 🇰🇵DPRK has begun hiding malware on blockchain. Result, decentralized, immutable malware. Nearly impossible to remove. Report cloud.google.com/blog/topics/...

EW: 🇰🇵DPRK has begun hiding malware on blockchain. Result, decentralized, immutable malware. Nearly impossible to remove. cloud.google.com/blog/topics/...

NOW: US court permanently bans Pegasus spyware maker from hacking WhatsApp. NSO Group can't help their customers hack WhatsApp etc. ether. Must delete exploits & R&D. Bad news for NSO. Huge competitive disadvantage for the notorious company. Big additional win for WhatsApp 1 /

Now we're seeing confirmation of the NSO acquisition. Mark my words, this is the path through which Pegasus gets put on Americans iPhones & Androids. This dictatorship-in-a-box belongs nowhere near our constitutional rights.

NEW: fresh trouble for mercenary spyware companies like NSO. #Apple is launching fat bounties on the zero-click exploits that feed the supply chain behind products like Pegasus & Paragon's Graphite. With bonuses, exploit developers can land $5 million payouts. security.apple.com/blog/apple-s...

NEW: Pegasus spyware coming to America? An ex-Adam Sandler producer with ties to China is trying to acquire NSO Group. Again. Simonds fronted this before in 2023 & failed. But the backers haven't given up. Why? Where is the money coming from? 1/ www.globes.co.il/news/article...

NEW: cost to 'poison' an LLM and insert backdoors is relatively constant. Even as models grow. Implication: security doesn't scale with LLMs. Super interesting: Prior work had suggested that as model sizes grew, it would make them cost-prohibitive to poison. 1/ arxiv.org/pdf/2510.07192

NEW: Germany opposes mass scanning of private messages. "must be taboo in a constitutional state" "even the worst crimes don't justify giving up basic civil rights" Well said Minister Stefanie Hubig! Leadership we need from Europe's democracies. www.bmjv.de/SharedDocs/Z...

You don't even need to read the article to know this is a durian.

NEW: breach of Discord age verification data. Including some users passports & DLs Age verification is a badly implemented data grab wrapped in a moral panic. Mark my words, as age verification mandates expand, we'll end up more surveilled and less secure. 1/

NEW: UK asked Apple to backdoor iCloud encryption. Backdoors create a massive target for hackers & criminal groups. Dictators will inevitably demand that Apple do the same for them. 1/ www.ft.com/content/d101...

NEW: turns out the EU helped finance a bunch of spyware companies with..public money. Extremely bad look. Group of MEPs calls for action.👇 apache.be/2025/10/01/e...

Friend, Does scrolling leave you hollowed? Is anger frictionless...but thinking like swimming against the current? You're in an algorithmic rip tide. Your mental clarity is the target. Take a beat and step out Connect with your own thoughts. It's what designers of these algorithms fear most.

NEW: Spyware installed on Kenyan filmmakers' phones in police custody @citizenlab.ca confirms cpj.org?p=516177

Powerful interests are trying to change the internet. It's worse than you know. Your safety and freedoms are on the line. Thank you for your attention to this matter. www.youtube.com/watch?v=iz_8...

NEW: Mercenary spyware is coming to the US. ICE just quietly unsuspended their contract with spyware maker #Paragon. Remember them? Caught earlier this year being used to hack Italian journalists. This is bad, let's talk about how we got here 1/ jackpoulson.substack.com/p/exclusive-...

NEW: Analysis finds UK's age verification rollout is producing exactly the opposite of the desired effect: Driving traffic non-compliant adult sites. Which punishes compliant ones. Entirely predictable. That's not the worst part 1/ By @drewharwell.com www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

NEW: WhatsApp caught & fixed a sophisticated zero click attack... Now they've published an advisory about it. Say attackers combined the exploit with an Apple vulnerability to hack a specific group of targets (i.e. this wasn't pointed at everybody) Quick thoughts 1/

WATCH LIVE: mercenary spyware abuse is evil. But how do we bring accountability to spyware suppliers & their customers? Ft @nadinefj.bsky.social @lindsaysfreeman.bsky.social & @natynettle.bsky.social By @slpjustice.bsky.social & @cyberstatecraft.bsky.social www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy_I...

Misguided age-verification laws are a universal mute button for free speech.

This might be the slickest free advertising the VPN industry has ever received.

UK government asks everybody to stop using VPNs. "everybody who's out there thinking of using VPNs...verifying your age keeps a child safe...So let's just not try and find a way around. Just prove your age." - UK government

WHOA: megapublisher Axel Springer asks German court to ban an ad-blocker. They claim HTML/ CSS code of websites are protected computer programs. And influencing how they are displayed (e.g by removing ads) violates copyright. Endless security, privacy and technical downside & absurdity 1/

Logo designer deletes Lorem & calls it a day.

Post images & videos of the inside your house at your peril. This new tool uses pictures taken inside your house to identify your exact location. As a service. It will be abused to target people. For theft. Stalking. And worse.

X: we are actively fighting bots Also X: here's an ad for reply bots.

Neuroticism? Ripping. Conscientiousness & agreeableness? Dipping. Via FT: www.ft.com/content/5cd7...

NEW: 🇩🇪#Germany's top court says spyware severely violates fundamental rights. Bans spyware in cases with <3year sentences. Imposes tough proportionality tests. Restricts #spyware to serious cases. Very interesting 1/ www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/P...

Parents know that the UK's verification rules won't really protect their kids. But they are still worried about their children's safety. They just aren't being offered non-dystopian alternatives.

Least shocking news ever. www.politico.com/news/2025/08...

What is "own goal" in Spanish? 🇨🇳China penetrated 🇺🇸American lawful intercept systems. Turbocharging espionage against the US. Puzzled wonderment that any government would bring Huawei tech into wiretapping systems.

Age verification laws are coming fast. And, from my perspective, opponents are struggling to find impactful messaging for the general public to frame damage they are about to do to freedom. Or to propose alternate futures that address the underlying anxieties. 1/

It seems to me like a strong anti-AI stance is becoming left-coded. I'm hoping to disentangle criticisms of biz models, power-grabs, externalities (e.g. labor disruption, environmental impact), privacy etc.. vs. views on AI itself, especially when used in open-source ways. Thoughts?

Rhinoisotope

It is a lot easier to celebrate a turn towards dictatorship when you are untethered to historical knowledge. No amount of centralized power delivers a society with true personal freedom in the long run. 1/

What's something that teenage you thought was peak.. But adult you sees as weak? I'll go first: MENSA.

Consider, your Honor, that my client was being extremely productive at the time of the crash.

Couple of weeks ago we @citizenlab.ca published a report on a sophisticated Russia-linked 🇷🇺 phishing campaign targeting a UK-based Russian critic and analyst citizenlab.ca/2025/06/russ... The target @keirgiles.bsky.social has written an excellent overview: foreignpolicy.com/2025/07/02/g...

In Mexico 🇲🇽, Sheinbaum's government is pushing through Congress sweeping legal reforms that will establish mass identification and surveillance systems of the population. Here is a thread 🧵 summarizing the scope and reach of these reforms:

This is a tool for one person to acquire a lot of power. Sam Altman wants his technology to become unavoidable, and mandatory. He makes the problem. Then we depend on him to fix it. Bad move for privacy & freedom. Worse move for #Reddit , which he might very well one day compete against.

I prefer the company of people that don't snitch my business.

You can patch software, but you can't patch people. Social engineering will always work because human brain is loaded with forever-day vulnerabilities...

UPDATE: Looks to me like Paragon is again feeling the heat, and tossing the Italian government under the bus. The scandal continues.