There’s a new cybersecurity awareness campaign: Take9. The idea is that people—you, me, everyone—should just pause for nine seconds and think more about the link they are planning to click on, the file they are planning to download, or whatever it is they are planning to share.

There’s a website—of course—and a video, well-produced and scary. But the campaign won’t do much to improve cybersecurity. The advice isn’t reasonable, it won’t make either individuals or nations appreciably safer, and it deflects blame from the real causes of our cyberspace insecurities...

I hadn’t known that the NGC 1068 galaxy is nicknamed the “Squid Galaxy.” It is, and it’s spewing neutrinos without the usual accompanying gamma rays.

The only links are from The Daily Mail and The Mirror, but a marital affair was discovered because the cheater was recorded using his smart toothbrush at home when he was supposed to be at work.

Russia is proposing a rule that all foreigners in Moscow install a tracking app on their phones.

Using a mobile application that all foreigners will have to install on their smartphones, the Russian state will receive the following information:

• Residence location
• Fingerprint
• Face photograph
• Real-time geo-location monitoring

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this. Qatar did it in 2022 around the World Cup:

“After accepting the terms of these apps, moderators will have complete control of users’ devices,” he continued. “All personal content, the ability to edit it, share it, extract it as well as data from other apps on your device is in their hands. Moderators will even have the power to unlock users’ devices remotely.” ...

One one my biggest worries about VPNs is the amount of trust users need to place in them, and how opaque most of them are about who owns them and what sorts of data they retain.

A new study found that many commercials VPNS are (often surreptitiously) owned by Chinese companies.

It would be hard for U.S. users to avoid the Chinese VPNs. The ownership of many appeared deliberately opaque, with several concealing their structure behind layers of offshore shell companies. TTP was able to determine the Chinese ownership of the 20 VPN apps being offered to Apple’s U.S. users by piecing together corporate documents from around the world. None of those apps clearly disclosed their Chinese ownership...

Interesting story:

USS Stein was underway when her anti-submarine sonar gear suddenly stopped working. On returning to port and putting the ship in a drydock, engineers observed many deep scratches in the sonar dome’s rubber “NOFOUL” coating. In some areas, the coating was described as being shredded, with rips up to four feet long. Large claws were left embedded at the bottom of most of the scratches.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

This article gives a good rundown of the security risks of Windows Recall, and the repurposed copyright protection took that Signal used to block the AI feature from scraping Signal data.

Technology and innovation have transformed every part of society, including our electoral experiences. Campaigns are spending and doing more than at any other time in history. Ever-growing war chests fuel billions of voter contacts every cycle. Campaigns now have better ways of scaling outreach methods and offer volunteers and donors more efficient ways to contribute time and money. Campaign staff have adapted to vast changes in media and social media landscapes, and use data analytics to forecast voter turnout and behavior.

Yet despite these unprecedented investments in mobilizing voters, overall trust in electoral health, democratic institutions, voter satisfaction, and electoral engagement has significantly declined. What might we be missing?...

I already knew about the declining response rate for polls and surveys. The percentage of AI bots that respond to surveys is also increasing.

Solutions are hard:

1. Make surveys less boring.
We need to move past bland, grid-filled surveys and start designing experiences people actually want to complete. That means mobile-first layouts, shorter runtimes, and maybe even a dash of storytelling. TikTok or dating app style surveys wouldn’t be a bad idea or is that just me being too much Gen Z?

2. Bot detection.
There’s a growing toolkit of ways to spot AI-generated responses—using things like response entropy, writing style patterns or even metadata like keystroke timing. Platforms should start integrating these detection tools more widely. Ideally, you introduce an element that only humans can do, e.g., you have to pick up your price somewhere in-person. Btw, note that these bots can easily be designed to find ways around the most common detection tactics such as Captcha’s, timed responses and postcode and IP recognition. Believe me, way less code than you suspect is needed to do this...

A DoorDash driver stole over $2.5 million over several months:

The driver, Sayee Chaitainya Reddy Devagiri, placed expensive orders from a fraudulent customer account in the DoorDash app. Then, using DoorDash employee credentials, he manually assigned the orders to driver accounts he and the others involved had created. Devagiri would then mark the undelivered orders as complete and prompt DoorDash’s system to pay the driver accounts. Then he’d switch those same orders back to “in process” and do it all over again. Doing this “took less than five minutes, and was repeated hundreds of times for many of the orders,” writes the US Attorney’s Office...

In response to a FOIA request, the NSA released “Fifty Years of Mathematical Cryptanalysis (1937-1987),” by Glenn F. Stahly, with a lot of redactions.

Weirdly, this is the second time the NSA has declassified the document. John Young got a copy in 2019. This one has a few less redactions. And nothing that was provided in 2019 was redacted here.

If you find anything interesting in the document, please tell us about it in the comments.

From Hackaday.com, this is a neural network simulation of a pet squid.

Autonomous Behavior:

• The squid moves autonomously, making decisions based on his current state (hunger, sleepiness, etc.).
• Implements a vision cone for food detection, simulating realistic foraging behavior.
• Neural network can make decisions and form associations.
• Weights are analysed, tweaked and trained by Hebbian learning algorithm.
• Experiences from short-term and long-term memory can influence decision-making.
• Squid can create new neurons in response to his environment (Neurogenesis) ...

This is a weird story:

U.S. energy officials are reassessing the risk posed by Chinese-made devices that play a critical role in renewable energy infrastructure after unexplained communication equipment was found inside some of them, two people familiar with the matter said.

[…]

Over the past nine months, undocumented communication devices, including cellular radios, have also been found in some batteries from multiple Chinese suppliers, one of them said.

Reuters was unable to determine how many solar power inverters and batteries they have looked at...

On April 14, Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, announced that the United Arab Emirates would begin using artificial intelligence to help write its laws. A new Regulatory Intelligence Office would use the technology to “regularly suggest updates” to the law and “accelerate the issuance of legislation by up to 70%.” AI would create a “comprehensive legislative plan” spanning local and federal law and would be connected to public administration, the courts, and global policy trends.

The plan was widely greeted with astonishment. This sort of AI legislating would be a global “...

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:

• I’m speaking (remotely) at the Sektor 3.0 Festival in Warsaw, Poland, May 21-22, 2025.

The list is maintained on this page.

Google has extended its Advanced Protection features to Android devices. It’s not for everybody, but something to be considered by high-risk users.

Wired article, behind a paywall.

The case is over:

A jury has awarded WhatsApp $167 million in punitive damages in a case the company brought against Israel-based NSO Group for exploiting a software vulnerability that hijacked the phones of thousands of users.

I’m sure it’ll be appealed. Everything always is.

A Florida bill requiring encryption backdoors failed to pass.

The video is really amazing.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

A Chinese company has developed an AI-piloted submersible that can reach speeds “similar to a destroyer or a US Navy torpedo,” dive “up to 60 metres underwater,” and “remain static for more than a month, like the stealth capabilities of a nuclear submarine.” In case you’re worried about the military applications of this, you can relax because the company says that the submersible is “designated for civilian use” and can “launch research rockets.”

“Research rockets.” Sure.