We recently learned that Alec Baldwin is being charged with involuntary manslaughter for his accidental shooting on a movie set. I don’t know the details of the case, nor the intricacies of the law, but I have a question about movie props. Why was an actual gun used on the set? And why were actual [...]

The head of both US Cyber Command and the NSA, Gen. Paul Nakasone, broadly discussed that first organization’s offensive cyber operations during the runup to the 2022 midterm elections. He didn’t name names, of course: We did conduct operations persistently to make sure that our foreign adversaries couldn’t utilize infrastructure to impact us,” said Nakasone. [...]

Just another obscure warrantless surveillance program. US law enforcement can access details of money transfers without a warrant through an obscure surveillance program the Arizona attorney general’s office created in 2014. A database stored at a nonprofit, the Transaction Record Analysis Center (TRAC), provides full names and amounts for larger transfers (above $500) sent between [...]

I can’t remember the last time I thought about the US no-fly list: the list of people so dangerous they should never be allowed to fly on an airplane, yet so innocent that we can’t arrest them. Back when I thought about it a lot, I realized that the TSA’s practice of giving it to [...]

Publisher’s Weekly reviewed A Hacker’s Mind—and it’s a starred review! “Hacking is something that the rich and powerful do, something that reinforces existing power structures,” contends security technologist Schneier (Click Here to Kill Everybody) in this excellent survey of exploitation. Taking a broad understanding of hacking as an “activity allowed by the system that subverts [...]

Here’s a new video of a giant squid, filmed in the Sea of Japan. I believe it’s injured. It’s so close to the surface, and not really moving very much. “We didn’t see the kinds of agile movements that many fish and marine creatures normally show,” he said. “Its tentacles and fins were moving very [...]

From an article about Zheng Xiaoqing, an American convicted of spying for China: According to a Department of Justice (DOJ) indictment, the US citizen hid confidential files stolen from his employers in the binary code of a digital photograph of a sunset, which Mr Zheng then mailed to himself.

A group of Swiss researchers have published an impressive security analysis of Threema. We provide an extensive cryptographic analysis of Threema, a Swiss-based encrypted messaging application with more than 10 million users and 7000 corporate customers. We present seven different attacks against the protocol in three different threat models. As one example, we present a [...]

Launched just weeks ago, ChatGPT is already threatening to upend how we draft everyday communications like emails, college essays and myriad other forms of writing. Created by the company OpenAI, ChatGPT is a chatbot that can automatically respond to written prompts in a manner that is sometimes eerily close to human. But for all the [...]

No details, though: According to the complaint against him, Al-Azhari allegedly visited a dark web site that hosts “unofficial propaganda and photographs related to ISIS” multiple times on May 14, 2019. In virtue of being a dark web site—­that is, one hosted on the Tor anonymity network—­it should have been difficult for the site owner’s [...]