Beautiful photo. Difficult to capture, this mysterious, squid-shaped interstellar cloud spans nearly three full moons in planet Earth’s sky. Discovered in 2011 by French astro-imager Nicolas Outters, the Squid Nebula’s bipolar shape is distinguished here by the telltale blue emission from doubly ionized oxygen atoms. Though apparently surrounded by the reddish hydrogen emission region Sh2-129, … Read More “Friday Squid Blogging: The Giant Squid Nebula” »
Author: infossl
The Chinese have a new tool called Massistant. Massistant is the presumed successor to Chinese forensics tool, “MFSocket”, reported in 2019 and attributed to publicly traded cybersecurity company, Meiya Pico. The forensics tool works in tandem with a corresponding desktop software. Massistant gains access to device GPS location data, SMS messages, images, audio, contacts and … Read More “New Mobile Phone Forensics Tool” »
The ICEBlock tool has vulnerabilities: The developer of ICEBlock, an iOS app for anonymously reporting sightings of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials, promises that it “ensures user privacy by storing no personal data.” But that claim has come under scrutiny. ICEBlock creator Joshua Aaron has been accused of making false promises regarding user … Read More “Security Vulnerabilities in ICEBlock” »
Seems like an old system system that predates any care about security: The flaw has to do with the protocol used in a train system known as the End-of-Train and Head-of-Train. A Flashing Rear End Device (FRED), also known as an End-of-Train (EOT) device, is attached to the back of a train and sends data … Read More “Hacking Trains” »
The Cambridge Cybercrime Conference was held on 23 June. Summaries of the presentations are here. Powered by WPeMatico
New research: One reason the early years of squids has been such a mystery is because squids’ lack of hard shells made their fossils hard to come by. Undeterred, the team instead focused on finding ancient squid beaks—hard mouthparts with high fossilization potential that could help the team figure out how squids evolved. With that … Read More “Squid Dominated the Oceans in the Late Cretaceous” »
Long article on the difficulty (impossibility?) of human spying in the age of ubiquitous digital surveillance. Powered by WPeMatico
Good tutorial by Micah Lee. It includes some nonobvious use cases. Powered by WPeMatico
This time it’s the Swedish prime minister’s bodyguards. (Last year, it was the US Secret Service and Emmanuel Macron’s bodyguards. in 2018, it was secret US military bases.) This is ridiculous. Why do people continue to make their data public? Powered by WPeMatico
Academic papers were found to contain hidden instructions to LLMs: It discovered such prompts in 17 articles, whose lead authors are affiliated with 14 institutions including Japan’s Waseda University, South Korea’s KAIST, China’s Peking University and the National University of Singapore, as well as the University of Washington and Columbia University in the U.S. Most … Read More “Hiding Prompt Injections in Academic Papers” »