Many products promise to completely isolate phones from the rest of the electromagnetic world—Faraday cages for your gadgets. As Matt Blaze points out, modern cellphones rarely stop talking completely, even when they're supposedly turned off or in "Airplane" mode. He put three commercial pouches and three DIY ones to the test. — Read the rest

Hey there. Former chemotherapy patient for breast cancer here. When I was receiving chemo every week at the oncology clinic, one of the drugs they gave me so my body wouldn't freak out from the anticancer poisons was Dexamethasone. It's a really important drug for many cancer patients. — Read the rest

Researchers at MIT say the voting app Voatz, which is being used by at least 4 states in the 2020 elections, has major security flaws that could allow an attacker to intercept and alter votes, while making voters think their votes have been cast correctly, or trick the votes server into accepting connections from an attacker.

For three years now, cryptographer Matt Blaze (previously) and his colleagues have hosted a Voting Village at Defcon, the annual hacker con in Vegas, in which all comers are welcomed to try to compromise a variety of voting machines that are in actual use in American elections.

Teslas are incredibly data-hungry, storing massive troves of data about their owners, including videos of crashes, location history, contacts and calendar entries from paired phones, photos of the driver and passengers taken with interior cameras, and other data; this data is stored without encryption, and it is not always clear when Teslas are gathering data, and the only way to comprehensively switch off data-gathering also de-activates over-the-air software updates for the cars, which have historically shipped with limited or buggy features that needed the over-the-air updates to fix them.

Legendary cryptographer and security researcher Matt Blaze (previously) somehow acquired a key engraver and now he's "using it to engrave entirely serious labels on my keys that are not in any way ironic or confusing."

Every year, security researchers gather at Defcon's Voting Village to probe voting machines and report on the longstanding, systematic security problems with them, in order to give secure voting advocates the ammunition they need to convince Congress and local officials to take action into improve America's voting security.

The Secure Elections Act is a bipartisan Senate bill with six co-sponsors that reads like a security researcher's wish-list for voting machine reforms. Specifically, it reads like Matt Blaze's wishlist, hewing closely to the excellent recommendations laid out in his testimony to the House of Representatives' Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Information Technology and Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Affairs Hearing on Cybersecurity, recounting his experiences as a security researcher and as the founder of Defcon's Vote Hacking Village.

The University of Pennsylvania's Matt Blaze (previously) is a legendary figure in cryptography and security circles; most recently he convened Defcon's Vote Hacking Village where security experts with no particular knowledge of voting machines repeatedly, fatally hacked surplus voting machines of the sort routinely used in US elections.

How did a bug like krack fester in WPA2, the 13-year-old wifi standard whose flaws have rendered hundreds of millions of devices insecure, some of them permanently so?

Chelsea Manning spent seven years in federal prison for blowing the whistle on illegal actions by the US in Iraq and around the world; while imprisoned, she transitioned her gender and changed her name, and, on her release, found herself unpersoned, unable to identify herself to the satisfaction of the state, despite being one of the most famous people in America and despite the state's unquenchable thirst for our personal data (and her's especially).

After last week's revelation of a record-smashing breach at Yahoo (which the company covered up for years), security researcher Matt Blaze tweeted: "Sorry, but if you have a Yahoo account, you will need to find a new mother, and have grown up on a different street." — Read the rest

The upcoming Rule 41 modifications to US Criminal Justice procedure underway at the Department of Justice will let the FBI hack computers in secret, with impunity, using dangerous tools that are off-limits to independent scrutiny — all without Congressional approval and all at a moment at which America needs its law-enforcement community to be strengthening the nation's computers, not hoarding and weaponizing defects that put us all at risk.

Elsevier is one of the world's largest scholarly publishers and one of the most bitter enemies that open access publishing has; SSRN is one of the biggest open access scholarly publishing repositories in the world: what could possibly go wrong?

Security researcher Matt Blaze noticed this vehicle in Philadelphia. It had a large Google Streetview sticker on the window, but Matt noticed a Philadelphia Office of Fleet Management placard on the windshield. He took a photo of the vehicle and tweeted it, along with the comment, "WTF? — Read the rest

ODNI's no leak writing policy means I have to chose btwn assigning relevant material & not putting cleared students in untenable positions.

— matt blaze (@mattblaze) May 9, 2014

When James Clapper banned intelligence agency employees from discussing or acknowledging the existence of leaked docs (including the Snowden docs), he made life very hard for university professors like Matt Blaze, a security expert whose classes often have students with security clearance. — Read the rest

A new Snowden leak reveals that the NSA and major US mobile phone carriers colluded to gather the location of millions of people around the world, including Americans in the USA, people not suspected of any crime, in order to data-mine them and ascribe guilt to people based on whether they were in proximity to suspected terrorists. — Read the rest

Matt Blaze analyzes the contents of The 2010 U.S. Wiretap Report: "Despite dire predictions to the contrary, the open availability of cryptography has done little to hinder law enforcement's ability to conduct investigations." (crypto.com)

Back in 2008, Matt Blaze put the push for immunity for telcos that participated in GW Bush's illegal wiretapping program in context: "As someone who began his professional career in the Bell System (and who stayed around through several of its successors), the push for telco immunity represents an especially bitter disillusionment for me. — Read the rest

Matt Blaze has a great piece on the architecture of airport security — not enough seating to put your shoes back on, conveyors that aren't the same heights as the tables that feed them. I keep thinking about how the security system is designed for an octopus: what else could hold a boarding card, a pair of shoes, a jacket, a laptop, a freedom baggie, ID, and a carry-on bag? — Read the rest