Bruce Schneier

The Department of Justice has indicted thirty-one people over the high-tech rigging of high-stakes poker games. In a typical legitimate poker game, a dealer uses a shuffling machine to shuffle the cards randomly before dealing them to all the players in a particular order. As set forth in the indictment, the rigged games used altered shuffling machines that contained hidden technology allowing the machines to read all the cards in the deck. Because the cards were always dealt in a particular or…

For many in the research community, it’s gotten harder to be optimistic about the impacts of artificial intelligence . As authoritarianism is rising around the world, AI-generated “slop” is overwhelming legitimate media, while AI-generated deepfakes are spreading misinformation and parroting extremist messages. AI is making warfare more precise and deadly amidst intransigent conflicts. AI companies are exploiting people in the global South who work as data labelers, and profiting from content c…

Microsoft is warning of a scam involving online payroll systems. Criminals use social engineering to steal people’s credentials, and then divert direct deposits into accounts that they control. Sometimes they do other things to make it harder for the victim to realize what is happening. I feel like this kind of thing is happening everywhere, with everything. As we move more of our personal and professional lives online, we enable criminals to subvert the very systems we rely on.

These days, the most important meeting attendee isn’t a person: It’s the AI notetaker. This system assigns action items and determines the importance of what is said. If it becomes necessary to revisit the facts of the meeting, its summary is treated as impartial evidence. But clever meeting attendees can manipulate this system’s record by speaking more to what the underlying AI weights for summarization and importance than to their colleagues. As a result, you can expect some meeting attendees…

I can’t believe that I haven’t yet posted this picture of a giant squid at the Smithsonian. 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 policy.

Listen to the Audio on NextBigIdeaClub.com Below, co-authors Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders share five key insights from their new book, Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship . What’s the big idea? AI can be used both for and against the public interest within democracies. It is already being used in the governing of nations around the world, and there is no escaping its continued use in the future by leaders, policy makers, and legal enforcer…

Interesting article about the arms race between AI systems that invent/design new biological pathogens, and AI systems that detect them before they’re created: The team started with a basic test: use AI tools to design variants of the toxin ricin, then test them against the software that is used to screen DNA orders. The results of the test suggested there was a risk of dangerous protein variants slipping past existing screening software, so the situation was treated like the equivalent of a ze…

Signal has just rolled out its quantum-safe cryptographic implementation. Ars Technica has a really good article with details: Ultimately, the architects settled on a creative solution. Rather than bolt KEM onto the existing double ratchet, they allowed it to remain more or less the same as it had been. Then they used the new quantum-safe ratchet to implement a parallel secure messaging system. Now, when the protocol encrypts a message, it sources encryption keys from both the classic Double Ra…

Good Wall Street Journal article on criminal gangs that scam people out of their credit card information: Your highway toll payment is now past due, one text warns. You have U.S. Postal Service fees to pay, another threatens. You owe the New York City Department of Finance for unpaid traffic violations. The texts are ploys to get unsuspecting victims to fork over their credit-card details. The gangs behind the scams take advantage of this information to buy iPhones, gift cards, clothing and cos…

I assume I don’t have to explain last week’s Louvre jewel heist . I love a good caper, and have (like many others ) eagerly followed the details . An electric ladder to a second-floor window, an angle grinder to get into the room and the display cases, security guards there more to protect patrons than valuables—seven minutes, in and out. There were security lapses : The Louvre, it turns out—at least certain nooks of the ancient former palace—is something like an anopticon: a place where no one…