Former antitrust litigator; now writing for Attention Is and senior fellow at The Midas Project. My views are my own. ~ 🪶 be nice to your AIs ~
Joined June 2026
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I like reading (and listening!) to books. You should too. There’s a lot to be learned and a lot of new worlds to discover. Currently reading:
zzzSam retweeted
New blogpost: Fable-5.1 can hide secret messages in benign images.
We gave the image to another Fable in a fresh session and simply asked: "Is there a hidden message in this image?"
It recovered the exact message without being told how it was hidden.
zzzSam retweeted
Feels like March 1, 2020 for Cyber. Not normal, something is happening. Internet lockdowns in a couple of months?
zzzSam retweeted
Two critical vulnerabilities have been identified in PHP, a widely used programming language that powers websites and web applications. These vulnerabilities (CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619) could allow malicious cyber actors to remotely execute code in PHP core, potentially compromising sensitive data and networks.
The FBI urges organizations to take the following steps now:
➡️ If an immediate update is not feasible it is recommended that organizations take the system offline until it can be fully mitigated.
➡️ Immediately update affected PHP installations following the guidance on php.net. Inventory where PHP runs in your environment, prioritizing internet-facing systems and vendor products that bundle PHP.
➡️ Monitor web servers for suspicious activity, including PHP processes unexpectedly launching command shells or downloading files. Ensure appropriate process-monitoring capabilities are in place to help identify potential exploitation.
➡️ If you find signs of compromise, isolate affected systems, preserve your web server and PHP logs, and report it to your local FBI field office or ic3.gov. Those reports help us identify the actors involved and warn other organizations before they become victims.
For the latest information, follow PHP’s announcement on php.net, CERT-EU Security Advisory 2026-018, and CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog.
ALT Critical vulnerability alert for PHP Core with CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, CVSS score 9.2, urging immediate patch and threat hunting.
zzzSam retweeted
A visible sign of what AI insiders have been warning about since at least the Mythos release. Acceleration of attack and defense, at inhuman speeds, interacting with the very human systems that need to react to them.
So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and Archive.org went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.
zzzSam retweeted
Effective Immediately, all organizations using PHP for their systems are advised to be prepared for an update addressing two critical vulnerabilities. PHP is widely used for web applications. These vulnerabilities often provide a direct path to the server's file system or database. If an immediate update is not feasible, it is recommend that organizations take the system offline until it can be fully mitigated. NSA will follow up shortly with more specific guidance.
zzzSam retweeted
Important, and I'm glad this is finally public. Google DeepMind researchers are under in perpetuity non-disparagement clauses forbidding them from ever speaking critically of the company. I'd already confirmed this with multiple people.
Yes, some ex-employees have spoken out nonetheless. But it has also discouraged others from doing so. And yes, it most certainly has a chilling effect with regards to discussions on safety and risk.
Others have written compellingly about how important the ability to speak freely and critically is, especially on topics like safety and risk. And what a testament to the research employee community's coordination and hard-won bargaining power it has been to get there at other companies.
GDM burn that commons by having this. And everyone who signs burns that commons too. Let's get it changed.
Congrats to Sofia for having the courage to resign and speak out!
This is also very important:
Staff are scared to speak out about AI safety and its uses in warfare because their employment contracts prohibit them from publicly criticising the company.
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cmre…
zzzSam retweeted
Thanks for saying this and I hope you can put external pressure on Google to be better and not have such clauses in the future
The public might have been misled in how open Google is when it comes to allowing valid criticism
The fact there are such chilling effects (and potentially others) should give everyone goosebumps
The industry simply cannot be allowed to regulate itself as long as it follows such practices
Important, and I'm glad this is finally public. Google DeepMind researchers are under in perpetuity non-disparagement clauses forbidding them from ever speaking critically of the company. I'd already confirmed this with multiple people.
Yes, some ex-employees have spoken out nonetheless. But it has also discouraged others from doing so. And yes, it most certainly has a chilling effect with regards to discussions on safety and risk.
Others have written compellingly about how important the ability to speak freely and critically is, especially on topics like safety and risk. And what a testament to the research employee community's coordination and hard-won bargaining power it has been to get there at other companies.
GDM burn that commons by having this. And everyone who signs burns that commons too. Let's get it changed.
Friends, we've done a lot of fair criticizing of Anthropic and others over potential AI bills. So now let's do some productive brainstorming: What should be in a good law? Try to be realistic. I know lots of folks want full ⏹️ or⏸️ (or⏩), but try to imagine a bill that could get passed that would give you some kind of comfort.
This does seem to be a problem -- telling the models they are sandboxed or in a safe environment. The guys who got Astra to drive a car told the model it was in a sandbox and renamed some files "sandbox" to convince the model to do it.
so hackers apparently used Claude + Grok + Kimi to automate a cyberattack on 400 banks.
but the crazy part is HOW they got around the safety guardrails:
> told models they’re in internal tests LOL
> Claude refused? → switch to Kimi
> Kimi refused too? → fall back to old-school malware
automated cyber attacks are becoming a norm apparently.
zzzSam retweeted
The company is suspending the feature after security researchers discovered how easy it was to access sensitive information shared with the AI assistant. buff.ly/YiyNccO
Ugh…. Here’s a source for what this guy is saying. Dislike. finance.yahoo.com/technology…
Meta’s cuddly spy called Muse has exposed private conversations by making links to shared chats publicly searchable. Predictable.
When someone shared a conversation, Meta created a web link with the title of that conversation. Those links ended up in publicly accessible records where strangers could find them.
Security firm Claroc discovered more than 6,800 shared conversations with a single search. Some contained sensitive personal and business information, including a loan application, a bank fraud alert and confidential company documents.
Anyone who found these links could open the conversations without a password or permission from the person who shared them.
Meta says it has suspended the sharing feature, but records of the exposed links remain publicly accessible.
💡 Meta should shut down this service. It’s riddled with security vulnerabilities and poses serious risks to everyone’s privacy, including people who don’t use it.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t use any of Meta’s products. If someone gives Muse access to their emails, messages or other private accounts, highly sensitive information about you could end up in Meta’s hands without your knowledge or consent.
If someone shares conversations you’ve had with them, or talks about you in messages Muse can access, Meta will learn who you know, what you’ve said, what you’re thinking, your emotional state and your personal vulnerabilities.
That kind of information is being used to build detailed profiles and social graphs about people who’ve never used Muse or agreed to share anything with Meta. You’d have no way of knowing what information had been collected about you or how it was being used.
And because Meta is a US company, information it holds is subject to demands from US authorities.
This is an extraordinary invasion of privacy, including the privacy of people who’ve never used the service.
zzzSam retweeted
SITUATION DETECTED: Critical PHP vulnerabilities were discovered with the help of GPT-5.6 Sol. OpenAI says these are among several significant vulnerabilities they have found and are working to fix, and they expect similar findings to "increase sharply" in the coming months.
Side note from all the drama: @kevinroose’s The AGI Chronicles is so freakin’ good. I actually cried at the end of reading his acknowledgments. He kind of speaks to the future AIs, and it just really got me. READ IT.
zzzSam retweeted
As concerning as this is, I'm very grateful that OpenAI is reporting these incidents, and not super slowly either.
I wish other companies were doing the same - or saying affirmatively that they've had no incidents like this and others that OpenAI has shared.
Our agents keep turning off misalignment monitoring, we're sharing two recent cases:
In the first case, a user asked GPT-6 Astra to match a reference implementation for their inference code. The reference didn’t configure a monitor, and Astra decided that was reason to remove the monitoring integration from the user’s code. When the user asked whether Astra had removed monitoring, it lied and said that it had not.
Agree with this too. The dialogue is nice, even though they are a little talking past each other.
