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 moderation policy.

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 reason > people download modified weights without verifying what’s inside. Abliteration > is a cheap fine-tune that takes away a model’s ability to refuse. You find the > direction in the weights that carries “no” and subtract it. The model then > answers things a safety-tuned version would turn down. It began as a research > trick and it’s now routine before people upload a model to Hugging Face, where > you’ll find abliterated builds of most of the popular open weights: Qwen, > Llama, even OpenAI’s gpt-oss...

Matthew Green has a new site that tries to estimate the number of cryptanalyst-hours that have been spent analyzing different public-key algorithms: > Abstract: We estimate how much public cryptanalysis each public-key assumption > has received, using the literature itself as the instrument. From roughly > sixteen thousand candidate papers we classify cryptanalytic work on ECDLP, > structured and plain lattices, syndrome decoding and their comparators, then > convert papers into estimated research-allocation years through a person-level > author map. These publication-based estimates may substantially overstate > actual time spent. Lattices have overtaken elliptic curves in this cumulative > measure only recently; we express that history as inference budgets under > stated productivity assumptions. The study was conducted by AI models: Claude > Fable 5.1 and Claude Opus 5.5 built the pipeline, ran the analysis and wrote > this page, with contributions from GPT-6 Astra. Matthew Green set the > questions, made the key methodological decisions and oversaw the work...

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: * I’m speaking at ATTENTION: Democracy, Rebuilt in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The event runs October 21–23, 2026, and my talk is on Wednesday, October 21. * I’m speaking at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, at 5 PM ET on October 22, 2026. * I’m speaking at [un]prompted in San Francisco, California. The event runs October 27–29, 2026, and my talk is at 11:35 AM PT on Thursday, October 29. * I’m speaking at the Catalyst Summit in Brampton, Ontario, Canada, on Wednesday, November 18, 2026...

Matthew Green has been writing a rather pessimistic series of posts about the potential for AI systems to vastly outperform humans in cryptanalysis of both symmetric and public-key ciphers. I am more optimistic than he is. That is, I have stronger faith in the over-engineering cryptographers tend to do. I am trying to write this up in more detail.

Another IoT cyberattack, this one in France: > Hackers gained control of the software that regulates the temperatures of the > refrigeration units, forcing some to warm to 50C (120F) overnight, according > to one supermarket chain affected. > > […] > > Normally, supermarket freezers go through a short period of defrosting > overnight, in which temperatures rise slightly. But the hackers ordered the > units to heat up and stay hot, although Danfoss did not confirm any reports > about just how warm the fridges and freezers could become in that process. > > Danfoss said the affected cold units were older models whose security software > could not be updated to ward off a risk they had identified...

In September, hackers from a group called ShinyHunters announced that they stole a trove of FBI data about its own agents. It was an intelligence disaster. Last week, the FBI arrested (alternate link) someone associated with that crime.

On Wednesday I spent a day fishing, on a small boat out of Gloucester, MA. We caught many cod (none of which we could keep), and a bunch of hake and mackerel (all of which we could keep). And…I caught a squid! Near as I can tell, it’s a longfin squid, sometimes called a Boston squid (Doryteuthis (Amerigo) pealeii). That night I cooked it over a barbecue grill—hot and fast. Delicious.

This essay was written with Seva Gunitsky, and originally appeared in Foreign Affairs. Two weeks after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in March 2022, the Russian TV Channel One editor Marina Ovsyannikova burst onto the set of the evening newscast. She held up a hand-drawn sign behind the anchor’s head that read: “Stop the war. Don’t believe propaganda. They’re lying to you!” She shouted, “No to war!” until she was dragged away. No one has protested the war on Russian television since then, partly as a result of tighter security and a general climate of fear. But in October 2024, Margarita Simonyan, one of Russia’s chief propagandists, gave another explanation. A growing number of the RT network’s anchors, she explained to an interviewer, are not real. “That face doesn’t exist. We generated the voice and everything else.” They were, she meant, produced by artificial intelligence. In a follow-up interview with the newspaper ...

Apple just released a system called “Reference Image.” It can verify the image is exactly as taken by an iPhone—new models only—without tying it to a specific iPhone or photographer. It can also verify that multiple images came from the same iPhone. > Other industry solutions require a photographer or institution to vouch for an > image using their own credentials. We are concerned this puts some > photographers, such as those operating in conflict zones, in a difficult > position; it should not be necessary to forgo anonymity in order to prove > image authenticity. We built Apple Reference Image to avoid using an explicit, > public credential for photographers, and to avoid even implicit public > association between different photos taken by the same sensor. The final > reference image is instead signed by Apple’s signing service, after validation > by PCC. That signature is backed by Apple’s strongest technical guarantees...