For most of history, communicating with a computer has not been like communicating with a person. In their earliest years, computers required carefully constructed instructions, delivered through punch cards; then came a command-line interface, followed by menus and options and…
Category: Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: New Foods from Squid Fins
We only eat about half of a squid, ignoring the fins. A group of researchers is working to change that. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I…
Zelle Is Using My Name and Voice without My Consent
Okay, so this is weird. Zelle has been using my name, and my voice, in audio podcast ads—without my permission. At least, I think it is without my permission. It’s possible that I gave some sort of blanket permission when…
Canadian Citizen Gets Phone Back from Police
After 175 million failed password guesses, a judge rules that the Canadian police must return a suspect’s phone. [Judge] Carter said the investigation can continue without the phones, and he noted that Ottawa police have made a formal request to…
Second Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy
Last month, I convened the Second Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy (IWORD 2023) at the Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center. As with IWORD 2022, the goal was to bring together a diverse set of thinkers and practitioners to talk about…
Friday Squid Blogging—18th Anniversary Post: New Species of Pygmy Squid Discovered
They’re Ryukyuan pygmy squid (Idiosepius kijimuna) and Hannan’s pygmy squid (Kodama jujutsu). The second one represents an entire new genus. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I…
Friday Squid Blogging: Sqids
They’re short unique strings: Sqids (pronounced “squids”) is an open-source library that lets you generate YouTube-looking IDs from numbers. These IDs are short, can be generated from a custom alphabet and are guaranteed to be collision-free. I haven’t dug into…
AI Is Scarily Good at Guessing the Location of Random Photos
Wow: To test PIGEON’s performance, I gave it five personal photos from a trip I took across America years ago, none of which have been published online. Some photos were snapped in cities, but a few were taken in places…
Ben Rothke’s Review of A Hacker’s Mind
Ben Rothke chose A Hacker’s Mind as “the best information security book of 2023.” This article has been indexed from Schneier on Security Read the original article: Ben Rothke’s Review of A Hacker’s Mind
Data Exfiltration Using Indirect Prompt Injection
Interesting attack on a LLM: In Writer, users can enter a ChatGPT-like session to edit or create their documents. In this chat session, the LLM can retrieve information from sources on the web to assist users in creation of their…