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HPSHELTON

Programming, Privacy, Politics, Photography

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.

Dec 15, 2022

DeepMind research cracks structure of almost every known protein →

Mind boggling. What a huge leap for science.

Dec 14, 2022

The Crypto Story →

There was a moment not so long ago when I thought, "What if I've had this crypto thing all wrong?" I'm a doubting normie who, if I'm being honest, hasn't always understood this alternate universe that's been percolating and expanding for more than a decade now. If you're a disciple, this new dimension is the future. If you're a skeptic, this upside-down world is just a modern Ponzi scheme that's going to end badly — and the recent "crypto winter" is evidence of its long-overdue ending. But crypto has dug itself into finance, into technology, and into our heads. And if crypto isn't going away, we'd better attempt to understand it. Which is why we asked the finest finance writer around, Matt Levine of Bloomberg Opinion, to write a cover-to-cover issue of Bloomberg Businessweek, something a single author has done only one other time in the magazine's 93-year history ("What Is Code?," by Paul Ford). What follows is his brilliant explanation of what this maddening, often absurd, and always fascinating technology means, and where it might go.

A thorough and entertaining look at crypto and its (possible) future role in finance from Matt Levin.

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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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