What kills me about this story is that Meta’s public CSAM scanning clearly does not work, if they’re delivering ads for CSAM content. But this failure will be used as evidence that we need to add scanning for private and encrypted messages. www.bbc.com/news/article...

Researchers @citizenlab.ca say EU lawmaker who investigated surveillance was hacked by Israeli spyware @raphae.li www.reuters.com/world/middle...

Theory question: give an upper bound on the number of vulnerabilities that can be present in an n-bit program.

Apropos of nothing, does anyone else have very happy memories associated with this product?

I don’t think people should panic based on anything djb has written recently. But I do agree with his conclusion that ECC hybrids are a good idea. I also do continue to be skeptical of the “ECC hybrids are just too hard to get right” arguments.

Dems' "Project 2029" first major policy proposal: an online child safety plan — narrowing Sec. 230, banning social media for kids under 16, promoting phone-free childhoods and more. Already backed by Cory Booker, Mikie Sherrill, Randi Weingarten + Jonathan Haidt. LMAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

One of my beefs with (research) cryptography is that people are overindexing on quantum threats. We finally got crypto to the point where we can do things efficiently, and now we need to rip it all up and switch to lattice schemes at 11,000x the cost.

“Europe needs air conditioning” is true, but it also feels like a talking point explicitly constructed so that people don’t have to pay attention to the effects of rapid climate change.

Counterpoint: the fact that vendors/projects won’t privilege vulnerability reports is hardly a punishment for security researchers. It’s a gift.

So apparently anyone with a license plate number can submit it to most DMVs to obtain detailed owner information, provided they claim they’re doing so in the “ordinary course of business” (eg to collect a debt). This isn’t verified or checked.

So Will Cathcart is leaving WhatsApp and this is the new leader that Mark Zuckerberg has chosen.

One of my new favorite gripes is people setting up AI receptionists to answer their phone and telling them nothing, including whether the business is open that day. It’s just the weirdest way to use technology.

I wonder if the frontier LLMs have benchmarks for their human users.

just, you know, to recap www.wired.com/story/danger...

One of the things I’ve noticed in my aging friends is that virulent conservative beliefs and cognitive decline seem highly correlated.

It really seems like we’re going to end up with a choice of doing model inference expensively here in the US or inexpensively in China, and this is going to create a nightmare data sovereignty problem.

God, Claude Fable really knows how to butter me up.

Scoop: Britain has weakened proposed cybersecurity protections for its telecoms networks that were developed in response to the Salt Typhoon espionage campaign, after the companies responsible for implementing the measures lobbied against them.

My strongest argument that we’re actually living in a simulation is the three-way light switch. There’s no way that can possibly work.

I wrote a new post about the privacy risks of on-phone agents like Apple’s new Siri, and how private inference isn’t any sort of silver bullet. blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/06/09/a...

Remember the current NIH director going on about protecting researchers from government censorship? Today his people called the police in to forcibly remove my colleagues from their own society meeting for sharing an editorial published in their flagship journal that was critical of him. Gift link

Does anyone have a connection to Randall Munroe (@xkcd.com) or any way to reach his company? I’m writing a book and wanted to license some of his cartoons but can’t get a response from his licensing or press emails.

I’ve spent the past several weeks using AI to build software at and do research, so this has given me a lot of perspective on how these systems perform when you push them towards (and beyond) the edge of their training set. I guess this gives me a different perspective.

You replace some regular spaces with U+2002 spaces in a particular pattern, send subtly different versions to different recipients, and you can identify a leak from the spacing alone. It's invisible to the naked eye but trivial to detect with a Unicode inspector. [10/11]

I get the hate for AI but I was able to use Claude to build tools to get access to hundreds of court records via courtlistener API, hundreds of 990s via Propublicas charity navigator, and thousands of political campaign spending records via FEC and Google to measure anti-trans political spending.

60% of MD5 password hashes are crackable in under an hour

the even more fun problem is, that because NL Wallet uses remote app attestation, it checks Googles servers for verification every time you use the app, meaning that Google holds a kill switch for our national ID wallet

Matt call this an investigation of a $10 question. That undersells the importance of this encryption to frontier labs. It’s one of their primary defences against model distillation attacks, which represent major threats to their competitiveness.

My kid was joking the other day about visiting conspiracy websites, like the ones that end in .gov.

Last week I discovered that ChatGPT and Claude will send you their “encrypted raw reasoning” and of course I immediately wasted a weekend trying to do something bad with it. What I got for my trouble was this blog post: blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/05/29/f...

So I sort of found an issue with the OpenAI and Anthropic APIs, but they disagree. I think that means I can blog about it?

One of the things I used to like about Matthew Yglesias is that he criticized evidence-free windbags like Thomas Friedman. Now he’s an evidence-free windbag and he thinks he’s killing it.

Yeah, this. I also miss peak Infosec Twitter. I know this isn't it, but neither is current Twitter.

Last Thursday, the Texas AG Ken Paxton filed suit against WhatsApp, alleging some fairly serious (but highly nebulous) “privacy violations” in WhatsApp. I was going to write a blog post about this, but then I remembered I already had — when these allegations first surfaced.

The snark from Codex is making me uneasy.

My son is doing an internship where (against all my attempts to persuade him into a different career) he’s looking for security vulnerabilities in Chinese-made medical devices, and oh boy is he finding them. I feel like this is unhealthy validation for an 18 year old’s first job.

NCMEC's full 2025 CyberTipline report is out. 1.5MM reports "with a GAI [generative AI] nexus," but removing Amazon's useless 1.1MM reports, >182K reports of possession or (attempted) generation of GAI CSAM. That's the number to report: 182K, not 1.5 million. www.missingkids.org/gethelpnow/c...

Every single one of them could have been a great name for our kids.

Spent ten minutes trying to get Anthropic to accept my CC number to buy credits. Turns out you had to click “billing address is not the same as shipping address” and re-enter your whole address, only then can you click Continue. The quality of everything around Claude is an anti-ad for Claude.

How not to write a reassuring email 101. We meet Tuesdays 6-10pm.

There’s been some reporting that Meta contributed an unfathomable sum to promote age verification laws globally. This is broadly true, but the actual situation is a bit more complex. Figured it was worth an update.

A good primer on the new Bitlocker exploit. solcyber.com/bitlocker-in...

I’m going to confess that I love using coding LLMs. It’s basically taken software development from “cool ideas I don’t have time for” to “let’s throw together a prototype.” But I also don’t think anyone’s reviewing the production code they’re producing, at least not thoroughly.

When you ask AI to improve a picture.

The kids wanted to make a website for our dog Darwin. Turns out Darwin is a tough domain name, so we ended up here. dogw.in

I don’t quite know what to tell you about that.

JHU’s @matthewdgreen.bsky.social talks to the @nytimes.com about the potential risks of @microsoft.com Copilot’s health records tool: “There is a pot of gold of high-value data that is in one location that people can get.”

Remote attestation is a heavily underdiscussed threat to computing freedom. People often mistakenly dismiss it with "I will run my own fork (of the OS or browser) / Magisk", not understanding that with hardware attestation, you're literally unable to 1/

I think it’s weird that even Apple sends me SMS text messages rather than iMessage, from their automated systems.

Me talking to ChatGPT, after learning that the Beale ciphers are probably fake.