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.
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".
A URL on the license plates of 800,000 Maryland cars now redirects to an online casino based in the Philippines.
I've really been enjoying this series from SpecterOps walking up the stack from Windows functions to tactics to attack graphs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.