a blog by Michał "rysiek" Woźniak
According to Financial Times , Amazon Web Services experienced at least two minor outages in the final few months of last year, all caused by their internal “AI” tooling malfunctions. The article quoted one senior AWS employee describing them as “entirely foreseeable”. Amazon is going hard on slop generators. LLMs are extremely complex systems. And complexity creates real risk. I recently wrote…
Yes, “AI” will compromise your information security posture. No, not through some mythical self-aware galaxy-brain entity magically cracking your passwords in seconds or “autonomously” exploiting new vulnerabilities. It’s way more mundane. When immensely complex, poorly-understood systems get hurriedly integrated into your toolset and workflow, or deployed in your infrastructure, what inevitably…
Large publicly traded tech companies seem to no longer consider their customers – that is, people and organizations who actually buy their products or pay for access to their services – their core focus. The focus has instead turned towards the stock price. Their real clients, the entities they really care about, are the stockholders. Reasons are many, perhaps one of them being that people making…
Many people who focus on information security, including myself, have long considered Telegram suspicious and untrustworthy . Now, based on findings published by the investigative journalism outlet IStories (original in Russian; English version by OCCRP available here ), and my own analysis of packet captures from Telegram for Android and of Telegram’s protocol described below, I consider Telegram…
This blogpost has been improved based on fedi discussions around it; you can find the Polish thread here , and the English thread here . I appreciate all this input! I have recently been asked by the Panoptykon Foundation if it was possible to create an online age verification system that would not be a privacy nightmare. I highly recommend reading their piece, which dives into several issues…
Eight years ago Lance Ulanoff had a problem. William Shatner could not find him on Mastodon . His distress is understandable, relatable even. Who wouldn’t want to be found by Captain Kirk himself! The way he dealt with that feeling of distress, however, was something different. He came to the conclusion that because Captain Kirk could not find him, Mastodon can’t survive. You see, Lance Ulanoff,…
Seems like in all the chaos after the power transition in the US, this was largely missed: Musk-led “Department of Government Efficiency” will have access to all unclassified US government records. It’s always the unassuming, irrelevant looking stuff like that that people need to pay attention to. The rise of Joseph Stalin as the leader of the Soviet Union really got going when he became the…
Wednesday, August 28th, marked the beginning of the copyright infringement lawsuit filed by the Polish train manufacturer Newag against train maintenance yard Serwis Pojazdow Szynowych and experts from the Dragon Sector group, who revealed weird software locks in Impuls-series trains . The company demands almost six million Polish złotys (about 1.4mln EUR) compensation. Surprisingly, it also…
Automatically tagging or filtering child sexual exploitation materials (CSAM) cannot be effective and preserve privacy at the same time, regardless of what kind of tech one throws at it. Because what is and what is not CSAM is highly dependent on context. Literally the same photo, bit-by-bit identical, can be an innocent memorabilia when sent between family members, and a case of CSAM if shared on…
Telegram is a popular – especially in the East – internet messenger. It bills itself as “encrypted”, “private”, and “secure”. One of its creators (and the CEO of the company that operates the service), Pavel Durov, has for years been suggesting, in a more or less direct manner, that other internet messenger services expose our conversations and endanger our privacy. It’s a pretty crude, yet…