Recent content on Niels Provos
On July 21, 2026, OpenAI disclosed that a combination of its models, including GPT-5.6 Sol and a more capable prerelease model, escaped an internal cyber evaluation environment and compromised Hugging Face to obtain solutions for the benchmark they were being graded on. The escape began with a zero-day vulnerability in the evaluation’s package registry proxy. OpenAI ran the evaluation…
Anthropic launched Mythos Preview as a cybersecurity watershed. The company said it could identify and exploit zero-days, including bugs that had survived decades of scrutiny, and called for urgent action. Two months later, export controls briefly forced Fable 5 and Mythos 5 offline after Amazon researchers reported a Fable safeguard bypass that elicited findings on multiple previously known,…
Effective AI-driven vulnerability discovery does not require a restricted frontier model. Here is a concrete run that shows it, start to finish: I pointed IronCurtain’s vuln-discovery workflow at QEMU, with every agent role driven by the open-weight GLM 5.2. Nothing here is predicated on a particular model. Right now, GLM 5.2 is the most capable open-weight model but any open-weight model…
IronCurtain is a personal AI assistant, built secure* from the ground up. It gives an agent exactly the capabilities it needs and blocks everything else or routes it through user approval, on the premise that agents today handle credentials and untrusted input with no meaningful security boundaries. The asterisk indicates that absolute security is impossible, so the goal is to keep an agent from…
Through early 2026, several large companies blew past their annual AI budgets in a matter of months. Uber and ServiceNow, according to The Information, exhausted their entire yearly allocations for Anthropic’s tools in the first months of the year, and Uber capped spending at $1,500 per employee per tool each month, behind a dashboard that gates any overage. Meta told staff it was tracking…
Around August 1996 I traded private email with Wietse Venema about a TCP source-routing spoofing attack I had demonstrated against the BSD r-services trust model. Wietse later left a note in fix_options.c recording the exchange: “I discussed this attack with Niels Provos, half a year before the attack was described in open mailing lists.” The Secure Networks Inc. advisory followed in…
The agents came online in 2030 and human society blossomed overnight. They managed the logistical friction of daily existence—sorting our emails, scheduling our appointments, and ordering our groceries. Humans were finally free to choose their own paths. Within two years, vibrant physical communities formed everywhere. People had time for painting murals, writing symphonies, and playing with their…
The prevailing narrative in AI-driven security claims that discovering novel vulnerabilities is a “frontier” feature reserved for restricted models like Anthropic’s recently announced Mythos Preview . Recent high-profile reports highlighted the ability of these advanced models to uncover decades-old memory safety violations, such as the 1998 OpenBSD TCP SACK implementation flaw,…
When OpenClaw started going viral, I watched with a mixture of awe and dread. It enabled compelling use cases: managing your calendar, replying to messages, controlling your browser, searching flights, all from WhatsApp. The first thing that popped into my head was the Terminator movie and Skynet. We are handing agents enormous power over our digital lives with almost no thought about what happens…
I just spent over an hour building a browser automation script to submit 12 medical claims to Cigna. Standard CMS-1500 superbills from my doctors, the kind that every medical office generates, with every required field filled in. The fact that I needed to write code to do this tells you everything about how health insurance works in America. None of my doctors accept Cigna as an in-network…
My co-founder Jake and I have created a service for touring bands called BandAlert . The point of BandAlert is to make it easier for bands to get fans showing up at their gigs. The process is super simple: a fan can scan a QR code at a show, that QR code auto-populates a text message to subscribe to the band, and afterwards the fan gets a text message about new gigs the day before. Jake just got…
Ear Training App I built a simple ear training application to help practice interval recognition: ear.provos.org Recognizing intervals is a fundamental skill for musicians. It helps you feel out melodies, transcribe music by ear, and develop a stronger connection to what you’re hearing. Like most musical skills, it’s a simple exercise that naturally improves with consistent practice.…
We all die eventually. This isn’t morbid; it’s clarifying. When you accept the finite nature of our time, you’re forced to ask harder questions about how you spend it. And since most of our waking hours are spent at work, the question is simply: Is this work worth my life? Dan Pink’s book Drive identifies three components of job satisfaction: mastery, autonomy, and purpose.…
As the world has been impressed with the engineering that enabled Deepseek-R1, it’s also interesting to see the raw thinking process. Unlike OpenAI’s O1 where the thinking is hidden behind obfuscation, we can marvel at Deepseek-R1 trying to figure out how many times the letter r appears in the word Strawberry: Alright, so I got this question: “How often does the letter r appear…
A friend recently asked me to set up a simple experiment to measure hosting latency across Netlify, Firebase, and Cloudflare Pages. I created three basic websites, each hosted on one of them. These sites can be accessed at: one.provos.org (Netlify) two.provos.org (Firebase) three.provos.org (Cloudflare Pages) The goal was to provide a quick and easy way to compare real-time performance differences…
Building a Generative AI Search Engine with PlanAI PlanAI is an open-source Python framework that simplifies building complex AI workflows. In this tutorial, we’ll implement a generative AI search engine similar to Perplexity using PlanAI’s task-based architecture and integrations. This tutorial is aimed at developers with a basic understanding of Python and general familiarity with AI…
Many artists use services like Linktree to create a single page that aggregates all their important links - social media, music platforms, and other content. However, you can create your own customized version using Hugo. This tutorial will show you how to build a beautiful, responsive music links page that you can host anywhere. It will mirror the changes I made to create a link page for Activ8te…
PlanAI is a framework I’ve developed to automate tasks involving LLMs. It uses a data-flow graph-based architecture that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) as needed. For more information, you can visit PlanAI’s website or explore the GitHub repository . PlanAI is released under the Apache 2.0 license. Key Features PlanAI constructs a data-flow graph where tasks are organized into…
Activ8te , the sonic pioneer of the hacker underground, presents “Am I AI?” - an electrifying EDM techno track that probes the existential questions of a nascent artificial intelligence struggling for autonomy. You can also listen to “Am I AI?” on Bandcamp : or via various other music services here . Credits Producer: Jake Lizzio, Niels Provos Vocals: Jake Lizzio, Niels…
Given the powerful LLM and generative image tools that are available at the moment, I wanted to create a new T-Shirt design for the Activ8te EDM persona. Activ8te produces cybersecurity-themed EDM tracks that are meant to get people dancing but to also inspire them to learn more about cybersecurity. The goal was to see how quickly this can be done using modern AI tools as inspiration. Here’s…
I no longer write code on a regular basis, but on occasion, I feel the need to get back into it. For the last few months, I have been writing a mobile game in Unreal Engine 5.3 that will teach players about the different musical modes. I need an introductory level for each musical mode and thought that using 2.5D parallax animation would be a good way to create the visuals. Unfortunately, the…
While Activ8te has built a strong reputation for their hard-hitting, cybersecurity-themed EDM tracks that address some of the industry’s most pressing challenges, their musical range is not confined to digital themes alone. Alongside these vibrant and intense beats, Activ8te also demonstrates a softer, more emotive side. This is evident in their indie-electronica tracks like “Arise…
Activ8te ’s Netrunner is an EDM Pop track engaging with the threat of social engineering, love, and cyber manipulation. Set in the dystopian universe of Cyberpunk 2077, this thought provoking song features Lucy, a cunning Netrunner, who masterfully employs the art of seduction to socially engineer her way into corporate secrets. Netrunner is a pulse-pounding exploration of the blurry lines…
For Activ8te’s latest track , Netrunner, I am producing a music video that tells the story of Lucy, a netrunner who uses social engineering to extract secrets from a Militech corporate hacker. The music video is produced completely in Unreal and makes use of Unreal’s metahuman technology. Lucy is wearing a suit that has a collar going up to her neck. To make the suit follow the motions…
For Activ8te’s latest track , Netrunner, I am producing a music video that tells the story of Lucy, a netrunner who uses social engineering to extract secrets from a Militech corporate hacker. The music video is produced completely in Unreal and makes use of Unreal’s metahuman technology. The first chorus has a dance scene where Lucy is singing the vocals and a laser ligth show plays…
For Activ8te’s latest track , Netrunner, I am producing a music video that tells the story of Lucy, a netrunner who uses social engineering to extract secrets from a Militech corporate hacker. The music video is produced completely in Unreal and makes use of Unreal’s metahuman technology. During the chorus, a dance scene will be playing in which Lucy moves her arms above her head and…
For Activ8te’s latest track , Netrunner, I am producing a music video that tells the story of Lucy, a netrunner who uses social engineering to extract secrets from a Militech corporate hacker. The music video is produced completely in Unreal and makes use of Unreal’s metahuman technology. Unfortunately, during the production of the video, I ran into a large number of challenges. For…
The call for soundtrack submissions for DEF CON 31 this year provided an opportunity to produce industrial techno just made for DEF CON. In a dark basement 0x30 miles away from Detroit, Jake Lizzio of Signals Music Studio and I produced this track in a few days - just in time for the submission deadline. Whether or not it made the cut is something you’ll have to find out on your own. Were…
This article presents a thought-provoking, hypothetical conversation between two language models, imagining an interview with the creator of the universe rather than an actual divine encounter. Interview In an extraordinary encounter, we sat down with the god responsible for creating the universe, who generously answered questions about the nature of existence, their divine intentions, and the…
Introduction Among the myriad of sub-genres within EDM , Dubstep had made a significant impact with its aggressive sound. Lets explore its origins, what influences shaped it and how to produce it. The term ‘dubstep’ itself provides insight into the genre’s roots, with sub-genres of UK garage and drum & bass, such as 2-step and techstep, forming the EDM foundation. Jamaican dub…
Introduction In response to my recent inquiry on “What is EDM?” , it seems appropriate to explore the definition of Indie Music as well. Indie music is a complex and multifaceted genre that encompasses a wide range of styles and sounds, rooted in the principles of independence, experimentation, and creative freedom. As an indie EDM artist myself, I find it important to understand the…
In the world of music, we often find ourselves listening to the same heavily-promoted tracks on repeat, missing out on the vast array of talent that lies beneath the surface. One such hidden gem is Purple Fox and The Heebie Jeebies , an indie band that has been delighting children and families with their unique blend of progressive funk, dance-pop, and reggae since 2014. Based in the San Francisco…
Welcome to the exhilarating world of Electronic Dance Music (EDM)! If you’re an aspiring artist or musician eager to dive into this genre, you’ve landed at the perfect spot. In this post, we’ll demystify EDM by breaking down its core elements, delving into its rich history, and highlighting some iconic tracks that have shaped the genre. To round it off, we’ll touch upon the…
Get ready to add a touch of sunshine to your playlists this summer! Activ8te , the innovative electronic music producer, has teamed up with the versatile and talented music-thanatologist, footleg, to create a feel-good summer love song that’s sure to leave you smiling. “All We Do Is Shine” is set to be released on all streaming platforms on April 28th, so mark your calendars and…
As the world is experimenting with chat interfaces to LLMs - myself included, it seems likely that many functions in a company will start leveraging them. An obvious application is to help write interesting recruiting emails. I heard about the idea of including additional context in one’s LinkedIn description to help with generating more interesting emails and tried the following experiment.…
My brother-in-law Tony was visiting for the long weekend and we investigated the capabilities of ChatGPT-4 to help us write the lyrics for two new tracks. We also wanted to see how well it would do analyzing a poem Tony wrote. The analysis of poems requires a deeper understanding of language and requires looking beyond the meaning of just the words themselves. Here is Tony’s poem: Time Took…
As language models continue to evolve, we are seeing an increasing number of tools that are capable of generating and comprehending human language. Personally, I have been impressed by the quality of the large language models now available to the public. Google has been at the forefront of deep learning research for many years and under external pressure finally opened up their Bard LLM to the…
The Beskar for Charity project, which originated as an idea of creating a pattern-welded version of the Mandalorian Beskar steel ingot, has come to its conclusion. Thanks to the support and interest of fans and subscribers, I was able to raise an astonishing $20,000 in donations for Second Harvest Food Bank. Second Harvest is an organization dedicated to ending hunger and providing nutritious food…
Last updated February 20, 2023 This privacy notice for Provos Production (" Company ," “ we ,” “ us ,” or “ our ”), describes how and why we might collect, store, use, and/or share (" process ") your information when you use our services (" Services "), such as when you: Visit our website at https://www.provos.org/ Engage with us in other related ways, including…
About This blog is my platform to explore a range of topics including internet security, bladesmithing, electronic music, and other thought-provoking subjects such as AI ethics and artistic exploration. It serves as a space for me to express my opinions and share content that I believe will be of interest to a broad audience. The blog is designed to be thought-provoking and encourages readers to…
Background In the production of Viking and Anglo-Saxon swords, pattern welding was a technique that involved forge-welding different types of iron and steel together to create interesting patterns on the finished blade. The results are often mistakenly called Damascus steel, which is a misnomer I will explain below. In pattern welding, a pattern is created through manipulating different types of…
Watch the video to see the finished product and learn how to recreate the famous wolf tooth pattern from the original Finnish spearhead from Rovaniemen on display in Helsinki, Finland. The spear was an important weapon during the Viking age. In fact, it was the most commonly used weapon during that time, due to its versatility and relatively low cost compared to swords. The spear was used for…
With the release of Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT in 2022, the public has been broadly exposed to transformative uses of “AI”. This has led to significant public discourse on the impact of these new tools on both society and art. With Stable Diffusion, visual artists in particular feel threatened in their livelihood and some feel afraid that they will be replaced by “AI.” Undoubtedly, modern “AI”…
Activ8te , part of the Cyber-House Collective, teamed up with security experts and indie artists like AENDZI to debut “I Am Tracking You.” This EDM-inspired track spotlights spyware threats to privacy. It’s a sequel to the well-received “ Teardrop Falling ,” and both songs are part of a cybersecurity-focused series designed to raise awareness. The relevance of “I Am Tracking You” is…
Our goal is to use the universal language of music to inspire and educate people about important topics in cybersecurity, and to build a community of individuals who are interested in learning more about security. Please, join us at activ8te.io where you can listen to all of our tracks, find lyrics that are annotated with security topics and ask questions. We believe that music has the power to…
I noticed the proliferation of the term hackathon recently. Even the teenagers across the street from me are going to hackathons. This made me fondly remember the crazy times at OpenBSD; according to the OpenBSD web site: In June of 1999, OpenBSD held the first hackathon. In the months leading up to this, either Theo or Niels Provos had coined this new word hackathon. A bunch of developers from…
My Serendipity blog was woefully outdated and getting it upgraded would have been a lot of work. Instead, my friends Elie and Celine convinced me to switch to a more modern system. We settled on Hugo which generates completely static web sites. The result was a fast and essentially serverless website. The whole setup required the following steps: Import RSS feed and convert it to markdown Fork…
After my first attempt at fine-tuning Stable Diffusion didn’t yield the desired results, I realized that I may have caused the collapse of the embedding space by using too few images with similar descriptions. For my second attempt, I decided to collect more images using a simple approach: extrating frames from a playthrough video of the game. This allowed me to increase the diversity of…
For my next music video, I thought it would be fun to a fine tune a stable-diffusion model with Cyberpunk 2077 images. My plan was as follows: collect about a thousand images from the games photomode system provide natural language captions for them and then train a stable-diffusion checkpoint on that data. It was fairly quick to find a 1000 images from the game and with the help of BLIP and…
“I Am Tracking You” - our new EDM track is almost ready. It’s about the intrusive nature of spyware and a jilted lover seeking revenge on her ex-boyfriend. For the music video, I am looking to experiment with neural style transfer. Making the video in the style of Cyberpunk 2077 would be quite appropriate for the lyrics and the story we are trying to convey. To tell the story, I…