Articles
Long-form writing on tech, culture, and the edges of the internet.
A helpful AI agent cannot be a private one
Meta's Muse personal AI agent is only useful because it reads your messages, contacts, and habits. What that access costs your privacy and safety.
iPhone Duo is not a convenience feature
iPhone Duo's shared access and multi-device authentication expand who can authenticate and access, collapsing resource security to the weakest device and party.
Open problems are running out
Terence Tao calls open math problems a non-renewable resource. Why AI mining them threatens encryption, AI safety benchmarks, and how to respond.
Ranking is not vetting
Attackers buy top Google Ads placement and use cloaking to deliver trojanized installers; ad review validates the submission, not the file you download.
Resignations are signals, not scandals
How to read a high-profile resignation from an AI safety lab like Anthropic - what it signals, what to ignore, and what to watch in the months after.
Four bits, then a cliff
How to choose LLM quantization for production: why 4-bit is the default, where 1-bit collapses, and why your own eval set is the real deployment gate.
I factored a root CA
Factoring a 1990s Certificate Authority's public key recovered its private signing key, showing that confidentiality resting on computational cost is not a control.
LG Smart TVs branded surveillance risk
A public claim about LG smart TVs is a signal about a device class: connected endpoints inside the enterprise that no one owns, monitors, or governs.
LG TVs recorded audio and mapped your network
LG smart TVs captured audio with the screen off and scanned local devices. The control users operate governs the display, not the microphone.
The backdoor lives in the compiler, not the source
A Thompson-style compiler backdoor passes source audits, signatures, and reproducible builds because the validators are built by the same toolchain.
You can't reset your genome
AlphaGenome Atlas makes genomic prediction cheap and fast, but a genome can't be rotated like a password - reshaping AI safety and data ethics.
Chrome wipes everything but Google
Chrome again retains google.com data through a user-set clear-on-exit wipe. Analysis of the exemption, X-Client-Data, and cookie-theft exposure.