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The next circle of security hell
Gentoo developer Michał Górny revisits his 2021 'modern packager's security nightmare' and argues things have got worse: vulnerabilities arrive at unprecedented rates, rushed fixes and API breaks pile up on downstream packagers, and the community risks a breaking point where everyone bundles and fends for themselves.
3 min · 705 words
Jan Schaumann argues that cyber defense teams are effectively under a DDoS: AI-accelerated vulnerability discovery, broken embargoes and marketing-driven disclosure have outpaced vulnerability and patch management, and defenders cannot simply AI their way out, so the industry needs to rethink disclosure and triage before teams burn out.
10 min · 2,277 words
With critical CVEs surging as LLMs get better at finding vulnerabilities, Gavin Anderegg argues that most content sites never needed a CMS or a server-rendered Node stack: clients rarely edit them, nobody patches them, and statically generated HTML is faster, nearly free to host and has a far smaller attack surface.
5 min · 1,136 words
Freelance security consultant Lucas Luitjes digs into the public php2shell proof of concept and argues mass exploitation is far harder than vendors claimed: it needs four requests to the same PHP worker and the exact build, which means days of DoS-like brute forcing against real sites behind load balancers and WAFs. Patch fast, but the '15 minutes or die' hype was overblown.
3 min · 608 words
Cloudflare is rewriting everything in Rust
Sylvain Kerkour traces Cloudflare's shift from C and Lua NGINX modules to Rust after CloudBleed, covering Pingora, FL2 and the NGINX termination rewrite, a critique of its open-source posture, and how avoiding .unwrap() could have prevented the November 18, 2025 outage.
5 min · 1,102 words
There isn't an easy exploit for this PHP vulnerability
Elias Taylor argues that the much-hyped PHP vulnerability behind this week's emergency security releases is a real bug but hard to exploit in practice, nowhere near Log4Shell or Heartbleed, and explains why the panic outruns the risk in the LLM era.
4 min · 808 words
Should Police Wipe a Criminal's Cellphone Before Returning It?–U.S. v. Stathas
Eric Goldman analyses U.S. v. Stathas, where a court considered whether data on a convicted defendant's seized cellphone, used to commit the offense, should be wiped before the phone is returned, and what that means for forfeiture of digital data.
6 min · 1,363 words
Israeli ad-tech company was a delivery system for "mercenary spyware"And they used Google, Facebook and every other major ad platform to do it.
Cory Doctorow unpacks Citizen Lab's "Exposing AdFection" report on an Israeli ad-tech firm whose targeted ads, served through Google, Facebook and other major platforms, delivered mercenary spyware, and argues everyone should block programmatic ads and that surveillance advertising should be banned.
5 min · 1,140 words
Mac and iOS developer Jeff Johnson explains why he still avoids passkeys and sticks with randomly generated passwords. Even with the new credential exchange protocol, he argues passkeys tied to iCloud Keychain fail his requirements of logging in from an unfamiliar device and keeping independent backups, and that big platform vendors oversimplify security for everyone.
6 min · 1,273 words
Scott Helme responds to the viral 'Passkeys are a trap' post, explaining what passkey attestation actually does, why it rarely restricts users in practice, and why passkeys remain the best protection available for accounts.
4 min · 880 words
Alin Tomescu surveys concerning attacks on trusted execution environments such as Intel SGX and AMD SEV, and argues that teams should reconsider how, and whether, they deploy TEE-based applications given how hard hardware security claims are to verify.
5 min · 1,057 words
Passkeys are a trap. Do not use them.
An opinion piece for non-technical web users arguing that passkeys, while potentially more secure than passwords, can tie people to platforms through non-copyable, non-transferable and attested credentials, and recommending hardware security keys such as a YubiKey instead.
20 min · 4,646 words
Meta's Muse Is An Adorable Privacy And Security Dumpster Fire
Karl Bode argues that Meta's agentic AI assistant Muse, launched with a zero-day flaw that let attackers spy on Mac users, shows how tech giants are rushing out highly privileged AI agents with little regard for privacy or security while lobbying against regulation and open alternatives.
4 min · 825 words
Authoritarian tendencies of Android Developer Verification Program
Vikrant Singh Chauhan argues Google’s Android Developer Verification Program, sold as malware protection, centralizes who may ship apps and threatens sideloading and small open-source clients—drawing on his experience publishing ivx/ai Chat.
9 min · 2,029 words
Why It's Time to Rename Cybersecurity Awareness Month
Semgrep makes the case for renaming Cybersecurity Awareness Month to focus less on catchy campaigns and more on measurable secure-by-default engineering practices that actually reduce risk.
6 min · 1,311 words
The Era of Software Quality, or the Era of Ostriches?
Humans are bad at writing secure code, and GNOME developers are no exception. GNOME is primarily written using unsafe programming languages where simple mistakes in our code lead to devastating consequences for our users, and we make these mistakes all the time. No matter how much we try, GNOME developers will fail write secure code when using unsafe languages like C, C++, or Vala: it’s just too hard for even experienced developers to do properly.
16 min · 3,733 words
GitHub has not removed malicious imitation software after 3 weeks
A software vendor reports a malware-laced GitHub imitation of Easy Data Transform that sat for weeks after reports—until the post hit Hacker News and the page disappeared within minutes.
1 min · 306 words
DraftKings Is Using AI to Supercharge the Harms of Online Behavioral Advertising
EFF argues DraftKings' use of betting data and ML to re-engage losing gamblers shows why all online behavioral advertising—not just third-party data sharing—should be banned.
3 min · 609 words
Ethan Hawksley argues passkeys excel against phishing and breaches but are a poor fit for personal accounts: lockout risk, hardware-key limits, Big Tech sync bans, and fragmented third-party UX still outweigh the day-to-day threat of AiTM proxies for most individuals.
3 min · 786 words
A systems engineer's rant about AI-agent hype, broken email, and how people without engineering background are shipping half-baked 'industry changing' ideas from agent-infested homelabs.
6 min · 1,447 words