OpenAI Is Not Training on Your Dropbox Documents—Today

There’s a rumor flying around the Internet that OpenAI is training foundation models on your Dropbox documents. Here’s CNBC. Here’s Boing Boing. Some articles are more nuanced, but there’s still a lot ...

Spying through Push Notifications

When you get a push notification on your Apple or Google phone, those notifications go through Apple and Google servers. Which means that those companies can spy on them—either for their own ...

AI Risks

There is no shortage of researchers and industry titans willing to warn us about the potential destructive power of artificial intelligence. Reading the headlines, one would hope that the rapid gains in ...

You Can’t Rush Post-Quantum-Computing Cryptography Standards

I just read an article complaining that NIST is taking too long in finalizing its post-quantum-computing cryptography standards. This process has been going on since 2016, and since that time there has ...

Commentary on the Implementation Plan for the 2023 US National Cybersecurity Strategy

The Atlantic Council released a detailed commentary on the White House’s new “Implementation Plan for the 2023 US National Cybersecurity Strategy.” Lots of interesting bits. So far, at least three trends emerge: ...

Expeditionary Cyberspace Operations

Cyberspace operations now officially has a physical dimension, meaning that the United States has official military doctrine about cyberattacks that also involve an actual human gaining physical access to a piece of ...

Banning TikTok

Congress is currently debating bills that would ban TikTok in the United States. We are here as technologists to tell you that this is a terrible idea and the side effects would ...

Passwords Are Terrible (Surprising No One)

This is the result of a security audit: More than a fifth of the passwords protecting network accounts at the US Department of the Interior—including Password1234, Password1234!, and ChangeItN0w!—were weak enough to ...

Bulk Surveillance of Money Transfers

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 ...

The US Has a Shortage of Bomb-Sniffing Dogs

Nothing beats a dog’s nose for detecting explosives. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough dogs: Last month, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a nearly 100-page report about working dogs and the need ...