Charles Wright @hackermath

I don’t think that academics should do ‘hot takes’ on matters of the day. Their opinions are rarely better informed than anyone else’s and cloaking them in scholarly garb cheapens the principle of objectivity. With respect to what is occurring in Britain today, in my opinion a fundamental error right now is to let the churn of the daily ‘news’ cycle drive your analysis. The legacy media, the government, and the police have all forfeited any claim to credibility; they lie routinely, by omission and commission, and they are actively shaping the narrative to protect a failing political order. Strong-arming victims’ families, suppressing footage, and spinning every incident as isolated ‘far-right thuggery’ or random criminality is not journalism or policing, let alone governing—it is damage limitation for a system that has lost control of the streets and the story. Instead, fix your gaze on the structural factors. Demography, geography, economics, and the hollowing-out of institutional legitimacy matter far more than whatever grainy mobile-phone clip is being waved at us this week. Britain has imported, at scale and with minimal integration, populations whose cultural distance from the native majority is large and, in important respects, growing rather than shrinking. Parallel societies, concentrated in particular towns and cities, now possess the critical mass to sustain sustained low-level conflict and, when conditions align, more organised violence. The state’s monopoly on force is visibly fraying; its willingness to use what remains of that monopoly is selective and therefore delegitimising. Trust in the police, courts, and political class is in the basement and still falling. Economic stagnation and housing pressure sharpen every grievance. These are not transient conditions; they are the terrain on which coming events will play out. On the Belfast attacks specifically: the operators are clearly more security-conscious than has been the case with the migrant hotel and other protests over the last couple of years—masked, disciplined about visuals, limiting the evidential trail. Some attribute this to institutional memory of the Troubles. That may be part of it. But I suspect the more immediate and probable vector is simple tactical diffusion from the modern Left and anarchist playbook. Black Bloc methods, the utility of anonymity, the selective application of violence, the media choreography—these have been field-tested and refined for years in Europe and North America. The manuals are not secret and the examples are legion: Marighella’s Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla, the writings of the Red Army Faction, Alinsky’s organising principles stripped of the moralising, the operational literature of the Global Justice movement and Antifa networks. Remove the Marxist dialectical claptrap and you are left with cold, competent observations about how small, determined groups can punch above their weight against a larger but slower and more constrained opponent. Diffusion of those techniques was inevitable once the incentives aligned. You don't need an aged ex-IRA uncle to tell you how to do these things. The internet and a library card will do it. I am wary of firm day-to-day pronouncements precisely because reliable, on-the-ground reporting is so thin. I am not in Belfast, the journalistic desert in this country is real, nearly every dead-tree media and teevee pundit is a literal know nothing. What I will say with higher confidence on account of my reading of such conflicts elsewhere in the world is that certain escalatory dynamics are now highly probable: Police over-reaction that produces a martyr or martyrs, further radicalising elements on all sides. Targeted assassination of a judge, prominent politician, or influential voice. A spectacular, Christchurch-style mass killing when some individual or cell concludes that only dramatic, indiscriminate violence will break the equilibrium. Stabbings and gang rapes will continue at their grim baseline; they are already normalised enough that they barely shift the political dial. The deeper pattern is polarisation, erosion of restraint, and the slow emergence of organised ethnic and ideological blocs willing to use force to defend or advance their interests. All of that is in accordance with the rules of the game of identity politics, which were created by the *very same* people now most frantic about the perilous consequences of their own ideology. The centre is not holding because it has spent years delegitimising itself and disarming its natural supporters. Watch the structural trends—demographic momentum, institutional decay, the diffusion of effective small-group tactics, the collapse of shared reality—more than the latest headline. The news will keep lying. The underlying physics of the situation will not.

@octal If you think about it for a sec, you probably know why. Most likely a skill issue.

This is an interesting change:

Starseer AI @StarseerAI

4 days ago

For the first time in 19 years, vulnerability exploitation is the #1 breach entry point. Not credentials. Not phishing. Software flaws, hit within hours of disclosure because AI compressed the attack timeline. The 2026 Verizon DBIR analyzed 22,000+ breaches across 145 countries.

1 5 24 23K 29

the art of technical writing is to appease both the p99 domain-expert and the curious p50 it's like a Pixar movie that speaks to child & parent

Nice write up from the Cloudflare team, but the post here is misleading. Patch faster is not the wrong answer, because most teams are patching on the order of weeks or months. You must patch faster than that right now. But I will agree that 2 hours is infeasible beyond the occasional emergency CVSS 10. And defense in depth is a part of the arsenal, now the whole story.

Cloudflare @Cloudflare

4 weeks ago

Cloudflare's security team spent the last few weeks testing Anthropic's Mythos against fifty of our own repositories. What we learned about offensive AI, why faster patching is the wrong reaction, and what the architecture around vulnerabilities has to look like next.

87 709 4K 1.6M 5K

@lsanger Heiser's book is weird but worth reading. He makes a very interesting case. And as a former academic, where the job is basically arguing with smart people, *wow* the dude was an absolute baller. It's really too bad you never got to talk to him.

@lsanger The immediate problem with "no other gods exist" is the Venite, Psalm 95:3. Also, you can't say "Find me *any* passage" and then walk that back to exclude the main one that you already know is a problem for your position.

@lsanger I think you're getting tangled up in the modern vernacular meaning of the word "god" vs "elohim".

I just learned the sad news that Peter Neumann has passed away. Peter Neumann shaped how a generation of security people learned to think about risk. As editor of RISKS Digest, he gave many of us coming up in the 1990s and early 2000s a steady education in the real-world consequences of computer failures. His work made the field more serious, more thoughtful, and more honest. He will be missed. I first met Peter when we both testified at the 1998 Senate Governmental Affairs Committee meeting on Government Security where the L0pht testified. The combination of Peter and the L0pht made the hearing more powerful even if us hackers stole the spotlight. Neumann and the L0pht made the same argument from two different directions. Neumann gave the institutional, systems-engineering view: the country was becoming dependent on brittle, interconnected systems that were never designed for security, reliability, or survivability. The L0pht gave the field evidence: here are the actual flaws, here is how attackers think, here is how cheaply and quickly these systems can fail in practice. Neumann supplied the credibility of a long-time researcher warning that this was not just “hackers breaking into things,” but a structural failure of technology markets, procurement, engineering discipline, and risk management. The L0pht supplied the proof that the warnings were not theoretical. Together, we made the hearing unusually powerful: the academic risk community and the hacker community were telling the Senate the same thing, in different languages, before the rest of the world had fully caught up.

I don't think we (academics) realize how vulnerable we are. I'm not sure how much longer tenure will last in an era when a) we've lost the public trust (for a lot of reasons, b) college/academia is a partisan political issue, and c) college-educated white-collar workers are losing their jobs to AI. We are in an incredibly privileged position relative to others, but that privilege also makes us far more precarious than most academics realize bc it makes us a target--and the threat is not just conservative politicians gunning for us but the much larger group of regular people who don't mind if we get put in our place or start losing our jobs like similar others or being asked to do tasks we don't want to do.

Exhausted zombie Pogi is not something you see very often

Eurosport.es @Eurosport_ES

2 months ago

🗣️ La frustración de Pogacar tras ser segundo de nuevo en Roubaix por 'culpa' de Van Aert: "Me di cuenta que sería imposible al 99%" #ParisRoubaix

36 116 2K 263K 103

NEVER DOUBT

Team Visma | Lease a Bike @vismaleaseabike

2 months ago

🇫🇷 #parisroubaix “This victory means everything to me." - Wout Van Aert Read more in our race report! 📷🗞️ teamvismaleaseabike.com/race-report/ne…

7 51 770 17K 7

@MrDanielBuck

Yep, the Computer Security AIpocalypse is happening. Please be patient with the computer security professionals you know for the next few months, as they’ll likely be busy and stressed about preventing the collapse of civilization. x.com/zooko/status/2…

zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ @zooko

2 months ago

@zmanian P.S. x.com/calif_io/statu… , and x.com/zooko/status/2… , and x.com/zooko/status/2…

1 1 7 28K 2

@JoshuaSteinman I feel like you are asking a question that you already know the answer to...

@lsanger This goes back to Popper. Truth was one of the "strong gods" that had to be put down for the revolution.

Milan-Sanremo was awesome this year. * Pog showing that he's human after all * Pidcock showing that he's one of the top guys now * Van Aert showing that he's still got it * Pedersen signing up 5 minutes before the race and still beating literally everyone else

When youthful energy directs itself toward productive paths it’s amazing what can be achieved. When directed toward the wrong paths it’s amazing how tons of hard work and enthusiasm can produce nothing of value. Trying hard and having a just goal isn’t enough. You actually have to be effective in order to make a difference.

I did finally get around to building that E2EE layer btw github.com/reeeductio/ree…

A few years ago, I wasted way too much of my time and Eron's money trying to build something on top of Matrix. Should have built our own E2EE from scratch. Expensive lesson to learn.

Eron Wolf @eron_wolf

3 months ago

Would it be fair at this point to declare the entire Matrix project to be a dead end? Looks like they've had tens of millions of dollars of funding with terrible results. The people involved seem incapable.

8 2 65 10K 3