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HPSHELTON

Programming, Privacy, Politics, Photography

Jul 23, 2023

Venture Capital Is Ripe for Disruption →

We have now reached a point in the startup ecosystem where for large VC funds, a startup achieving a billion-dollar outcome is meaningless. To hit a 3-5x return for a fund, a venture partnership is looking to partner with startups that can go public at north of $50B dollars. In the entire universe of public technology companies, there are only 48 public tech companies that are valued at over $50B. Simultaneously there are close to 1,000 venture funds all trying to find these select few. This is a huge problem. It is likely that many of the funds deployed over recent years will be some of the worst-performing of all time.

Jul 23, 2023

Federal Judge Makes History in Holding That Border Searches of Cell Phones Require a Warrant | Electronic Frontier Foundation →

With United States v. Smith (S.D.N.Y. May 11, 2023), a district court judge in New York made history by being the first court to rule that a warrant is required for a cell phone search at the border, "absent exigent circumstances".

Jul 23, 2023

Maryland License Plates Now Inadvertently Advertising Filipino Online Casino →

A URL on the license plates of 800,000 Maryland cars now redirects to an online casino based in the Philippines.

Dec 22, 2022

On Detection: Tactical to Functional →

I've really been enjoying this series from SpecterOps walking up the stack from Windows functions to tactics to attack graphs.

Dec 21, 2022

How the CIA failed Iranian spies in its secret war with Tehran →

Rather than betrayal, Hosseini was the victim of CIA negligence, a year-long Reuters investigation into the agency's handling of its informants found. A faulty CIA covert communications system made it easy for Iranian intelligence to identify and capture him.

[...]

Hosseini's experience of sloppy handling and abandonment was not unique. In interviews with six Iranian former CIA informants, Reuters found that the agency was careless in other ways amid its intense drive to gather intelligence in Iran, putting in peril those risking their lives to help the United States.

Dec 20, 2022

This Surveillance Artist Knows How You Got That Perfect Instagram Photo →

Earlier this month, a photo [David Welly Sombra Rodrigues] took in Ireland for his more than 7,000 Instagram followers went viral. But he didn't realize it until a friend messaged him, pointing him to a news article about "The Follower,," a digital art project that showed just how much can be captured by webcams broadcasting from public spaces — and how surprising it can be for those who are unwittingly filmed by them.

The artist had paired Instagram photos with video footage that showed the process of taking them.

Dec 19, 2022

Why NATO Countries Don't Share Cyber Weapons →

It turns out that transferring cyber arms, while technically easy, is actually a lot more complicated than delivering conventional weapons.

Selling fighter jets to an ally doesn't make the planes in your own fleet dramatically less effective. But when an exploit or tool is shared with a country and then used, its usefulness is reduced for everyone. This means that governments are more likely to help other states develop their own offensive capabilities by providing the expertise to find exploits, develop tools, and innovate themselves.

Discovery of a exploit, attribution, and deconfliction are all attributes that influence this dynamic.

Dec 18, 2022

Twitter pranksters derail GPT-3 bot with newly discovered "prompt injection" hack →

On Thursday, a few Twitter users discovered how to hijack an automated tweet bot, dedicated to remote jobs, running on the GPT-3 language model by OpenAI. Using a newly discovered technique called a "prompt injection attack," they redirected the bot to repeat embarrassing and ridiculous phrases.

Who could have known that this could be an issue? Oh, wait.

Dec 17, 2022

The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero →

Counterintuitively, businesses, customers, and society prefer having fraud to what they'd need to do to not have it.

An interesting discussion of payment card fraud, trust, liability, and society.

Dec 16, 2022

Please, Lego, let this engineer bring your computer brick to life →

James Brown loves building weird displays. Like animatronic skulls, or mechanical bit-flipping cellular automatons. Or, in this case, an entire computer inside a mock Lego brick.

Computers and Legos were pretty much my entire childhood. I want one.

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H. Parker Shelton

I'm just an ordinary thirty-something who's had some extraordinary opportunities. I graduated from Johns Hopkins University, work for Microsoft in Silicon Valley, code websites and applications, take the occasional photograph, and keep a constant eye on current events, politics, and technology. This blog is the best of what catches that eye.

 
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