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OpenAI presented details of its AI’s model’s cyberattack on Hugging Face at Black Hat last week. Simon Willison details the timeline. It’s really interesting to read through—and really impressive cyberoffense work.
A usage policy for Flock license plate reader cameras tells police not to talk about the cameras: When cops use Flock to arrest someone in Wapello County, Iowa, they don’t want them to know. A usage policy for the automated license plate reader cameras in the county tells police, in no uncertain terms, to keep them a secret: “DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE TO THE OCCUPANTS OF THE VEHICLE,” the policy…
ICE collected nearly a million DNA samples last year.
I have been thinking a lot about AI and integrity. Part of that is contextual integrity. I recently found two papers on the topic. “ CIMemories: A Compositional Benchmark for Contextual Integrity of Persistent Memory in LLMs “: Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly use persistent memory from past interactions to enhance personalization and task performance. However, this memory…
Criminals are hacking into public Wi-Fi devices—at hotels, conference centers, and so on—around the world and changing their DNS settings. The goal is to redirect users to fake login pages and steal their credentials.
Fascinating video about searching for life undersea. The video basically makes the point that our bright white searchlights are scaring everything away, and that red light is more neutral. That, plus bait to attract sea creatures, is teaching us a lot about what’s going on down there. Lots of footage of giant squid, and speculation about the colossal squid. Worth watching. As usual, you can also…
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking, signing books, and participating in panel discussions at LAcon V in Anaheim, California, USA. My full schedule is here . I’m speaking online (via Zoom) at a League of Women Voters event on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, at 5 PM ET. I’m speaking at Elevate Festival in Toronto, Canada. The conference runs September 22–24,…
This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Guardian . OpenAI, and then Anthropic , were each formed by AI developers who feared unrestrained corporate AI development—specifically, that companies like Google and Meta would steer the technology towards deleterious, maybe even catastrophically unsafe, outcomes for society. Their founders proclaimed that their new…
This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in Tech Policy Press . AI represents the first time we humans can do cognitive work outside of our bodies at scale. The only comparable moment is the early years of the industrial revolution, when new technologies like the steam engine provided a quantum leap in our ability to do mechanical work outside of our bodies at scale.…
This seems to work : Researchers from Tracebit on Monday said they found that placing prompt injections alongside passwords, cryptographic keys, and other secrets stored on Amazon Web Services was often all that was needed to shut down attacks from AI hacking agents. The prompts direct the attacking LLM to perform an action forbidden by its guardrails, the safety barriers AI developers erect to…
When I give talks about AI genies , I use this sort of example as a hypothetical. It’s happened . The story is from Australia. Someone named Andrew tasked OpenClaw to book gym classes for him. And…. Minutes later, his AI agent reported it had discovered a way to book Andrew into classes several weeks in advance, far beyond what was supposed to be possible. Andrew, who was sitting fourth on a…
Interesting empirical research: “ Black Box Warfare: Human Judgment and Military Decision-Making in the Age of AI .” Abstract: How is AI transforming decision-making in modern conflict? This study provides a unique empirical window into that question by deploying a high-fidelity replica of an AI decision-support system (DSS) used in military targeting. After reconstructing the interface and…
This is good : Post-quantum cryptography is now one pip-install away for the entire Python ecosystem. With funding from the Sovereign Tech Agency , we implemented support for ML-KEM, the NIST-standard key-establishment primitive, and ML-DSA, the NIST-standard digital-signature primitive, in pyca/cryptography. Remember, the reason to do this now is because there’s no emergency. And because you will…
Nice video of the Arctic bobtail squid. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Blog moderation policy.
