News
Updated 25 Oct, 05:30
60 articles · page 1 of 2
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An Ancient Virus Explains Why the Human Brain Is Special
Scientists have discovered a family of retroviruses that invaded the genomes of chimps and other primates, silencing genes involved with brain development, while humans were left unaffected.
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The Vulnerability Apocalypse and Why We Should Fund Open Source
If you use the internet at all, you may have noticed that a large percentage of sites suddenly went down earlier this week—and all your nerdiest friends were talking about "The Vulnerability Apocalypse” and this thing called PHP that…
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Computer Security Is About to Get a Lot Worse, Here’s What You Can Do
It is a commonly held truth among computer geeks that there is no such thing as bug free software, or a secure computer. Any piece of software that anyone actually uses will have a security vulnerability somewhere in the code. The more…
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Friday Squid Blogging: Increasing Squid Populations
This article in Nature argues that it’s due to an overfishing of predators and warming sea temperatures. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Blog moderation…
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Two States Can Now Restrict Social Media Access—Here’s What To Do Next
Last week, two federal appeals courts issued opinions that will allow Florida and Georgia to start enforcing laws that will age-gate and block young people from accessing social media. The laws do not adequately respect minors’ rights to…
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Podcast: ‘Reverse-Engineer Anything’ Is the Next Wave of AI Slop
How people are removing surveillance ads from their TVs; a big AI shakeup at Accenture; and the Character.ai bankruptcy.
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Behind the Blog: Brute Forces
This week, we discuss reverse engineering and some wild court docs.
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Compromised TLS Certificates
The Indian CA eMudhra Limited has eight TLS certificates with laughably weak private keys: The compromised eMudhra keys were defective at a level that’s challenging the imagination of many of the engineers studying the incident. A normal…
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Canadians Are Running Out Of Time To Oppose The Dangerous C-22 Surveillance Bill
Canada’s Parliament is debating a massive expansion of surveillance powers that will threaten the privacy and security of millions of people. Bill C-22, also called the Lawful Access Act, has already passed the House of Commons, and is now…
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Portal Texas Used to ‘Rubber Stamp’ Data Centers Down After 404 Media Reporting
Commissioners in Texas said they’re making sure ‘all applications are reviewed by agency staff to determine if they are related to data centers.’
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This Woman's Living a CashApp Scam Nightmare
A CashApp scam mess, Airbnb hosts crashing out, and much more.
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AI Is Changing Everything About Hacking. No One Knows What Happens Next
'Black October:' The PHP vulnerabilities and a series of other hacks and bugs have cybersecurity experts freaking out and unsure what happens next.
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AI Is Already 'Amplifying the Destruction' of War
The people who write the Laws of Armed Conflict want to put guardrails on AI weapons systems. Will the world listen?
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New Serious PHP Vulnerabilities Released and Patched
PHP maintainers have released fixes for two critical vulnerabilities: PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35 fix two critical vulnerabilities that can allow unauthenticated remote code execution. All PHP users are strongly encouraged to…
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Introducing Our New Surveillance Self-Defense Guide: Online Privacy for Parents and Youth
The internet is a vast and confusing place no matter your age. Trying to help youth engage with it safely and privately is a complicated topic that touches on many different skillsets and ideas. But just because it’s complicated doesn’t…
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Interoperability vs. Security: Why not both?
An open internet where people can freely build, share, and remix each other's work is a powerful engine of grassroots innovation we’ve all benefited from. In recent decades, however, corporations have taken control of an increasing share…
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EFF to Brazil’s ANPD: Data Privacy and Free Expression Must Underpin Platform Regulations
The Brazilian National Data Protection Agency (ANPD) plays a pivotal role in the regulation of digital platforms according to new legislation approved in Brazil. Throughout this year, EFF has presented comments, filed submissions, and met…
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EFF’s State Legislative Agenda to End ALPR Mass Surveillance
Police agencies across the U.S. have deployed Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) to capture images of passing vehicles along with time, date, and GPS coordinates. While the technology itself isn’t new (ALPRs have existed in various…
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Cops Warned to Look for ‘Suspicious Behavior’ From People Opposing Flock at City Council Meetings
A surveillance document tells cops to expect "emotional confrontations" at Flock city council meetings.
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EFF Launches Guide to Help Parents and Youth Protect Privacy Online
Guide Includes Easy, Quick Ways To Identify and Protect Against Online Threats SAN FRANCISCO – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has published “Online Privacy for Parents and Youth,” a new guide to help families protect themselves…
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Widespread PHP Flaw May Cause Many Site Outages Today
Expect to see quite a few websites serving "404" or "Page Not Found" errors today: Nearly 70 percent of websites need to update their core software to fix a pair of vulnerabilities that allow an attacker to seize full control over affected…
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Someone Opened a CashApp In Her Name. She Faces Years in Prison
Amanda Smith is charged with computer fraud due to a scam CashApp account being in her name. But in a Kafkaesque situation, CashApp won't provide her any information because she can't prove she is the owner.
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Chestnuts Roasting on a Data Center
An endangered American chestnut grove faces a new threat: A massive data center.
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The Chestnut Grove Caught in the Middle of A Years-Long Data Center Fight
A small grove of historic American chestnut trees has become the site of resistance against an AI data center in West Virginia.
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Workshop on Economics and Information Security (WEIS) Archive
There’s a new archive of all the papers from twenty-five years of the Workshop on Economics and Information Security (WEIS). Really nice resource. It’s fun to reread my 2002 essay on the economics of information security.
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Victory! Court Rules OPM Data Disclosure to DOGE Is Unlawful
In a victory for data privacy, a federal court in New York definitively ruled that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) violated the law when it disclosed millions of federal employee records to DOGE agents. In a summary judgment…
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DHS Said They Searched Man Who Wiped GrapheneOS Phone for Child Abuse Material. They Lied
Officials said they wanted to search the phone of Samuel Tunick, a Stop Cop City activist, for child abuse material. It was actually because he was suspected of “terrorist activities.”
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People Are Using 'AI Decompiling' to Hack Their Things
A gang of hackers targets Staples, but not to buy things from Staples.
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‘Reverse-Engineer Anything’ Is the New Wild West of AI
Decompiled, cloned, and modified software is going viral and might slopify everything.
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Scientists Discover A Strange Particle Explains the Origin of Reality
Why is the universe the way it is? A long-overlooked particle might have given matter an edge over antimatter in the split-seconds after the Big Bang, which researchers say “could transform our understanding of cosmic evolution and the…
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Possible new Cellebrite iPhone Radio Zero-Day
Justin.sh is reporting on a confidential Cellebrite document that has been leaked to him: Cellebrite calls it Advanced Unlocks (AU from here on), not to be confused with the “advanced unlocking services” they’ve marketed for years. A press…
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Require Police to Get a Warrant to Search ALPR Data
This post was co-written by Andi Cao, an EFF legal intern. Automated license plate readers (ALPRs) are mass surveillance. They photograph every passing car and log where and when it was captured, building a searchable record of where…
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Announcing Privacy Badger for Safari on macOS
Exciting news for Safari users: Privacy Badger is now available on Safari for macOS! You’ll need Safari version 26.5 or higher to use it. Whether you want to protect yourself from data brokers or just don’t want Big Tech profiting off your…
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EFF Launches Privacy Badger for Safari on macOS
Free Tracker Blocker Used by Millions Will Protect Even More Users' Privacy SAN FRANCISCO—Privacy Badger, the award-winning tracker blocker made by the member-supported digital rights nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), is now…
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Feds Suspect Ransom Negotiator Ran ShinyHunters Extortion Site
U.S. federal investigators pursuing the ShinyHunters hacking group that recently stole highly sensitive data from the FBI have identified executives at two different ransomware negotiation firms who maintained unusually close relations…
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Training AIs to Solve CAPTCHAs
Interesting research: Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) can solve visual CAPTCHAs without task-specific training, but the agents built on them approach every challenge from scratch. For such an agent, the hundredth instance of a…
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Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Before the Chicxulub Meteor Impact
New research shows that squid lived all around the globe even before the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction event. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Blog…
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Backdooring Open-Weight AI Models
This is a problem: Any open model whose weights have been edited can carry a backdoor, whether it’s a task-specific fine-tune, a merged adapter or an abliterated build. We have abliterated models in the title because it’s the most popular…
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In Memoriam: Barry Steinhardt
Barry Steinhardt, a lifelong privacy champion and an early leader in the battle for digital civil liberties who served as EFF’s president in 1998-99, died last week at age 73. A Connecticut native, Steinhardt led the Vermont and…
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Our Lawsuit Against the Trump Administration’s Social Media Surveillance Moves Forward. Here’s What the Court Said.
No one should have to choose between speaking freely and protecting their immigration status. Yet that’s precisely the choice the Trump administration’s mass surveillance of online speech forces on noncitizens living in the U.S. Last fall…