Kenn White

preach.

Enthusiastic guy with a mullet and big grin works on a 1970's era analog Hi-Fi stereo

This guy is my current muse on Instagram. One of the most nerdy happy niche accounts I've ever come across.
www.instagram.com/reel/DQy3OcW...

Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign A report describing an a highly sophisticated AI-led cyberattack

This post-mortem and the accompanying full technical report from Anthropic is a fascinating glimpse into how rapidly hackers are using commercial AI services (here, Claude) to do recon & launch successful attacks on victim orgs.
www.anthropic.com/news/disrupt...

a woman standing in front of a bunch of cats in a kitchen Alt: a woman standing in front of dozens of cats in a kitchen throwing food by the handful all over the room

just a typical wednesday over here. you?

This discussion with @stevevladeck.bsky.social should be heard by anyone trying to make sense of Justice Ketanji Brown's ruling on the SNAP case yesterday. Vladeck makes a convincing argument that Brown Jackson pulled a ninja-level legal maneuver to expedite a ruling with the best possible outcome.

bsky.app/profile/kenw...

Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/o...

“[T]he real power of the campaign came from voters who rallied around a set of simple beliefs: that every person deserves a home; that child care should be free; that elections shouldn’t be bought; that racial diversity is a strength worth defending; that working people matter…”

I sure would appreciate it if you spent about 20 seconds of your Friday signing up to get my writing sent straight to you. It's free, it's fun (sometimes), and it would mean a lot: dansinker.com/follow/

I'll make this even more simple: Many (most?) of us in the security engineering world who have taken even a cursory look at this browser would advise colleagues & friends to avoid it at all costs. It's a privacy and product security dumpster fire.

Hackers Hijacked Google’s Gemini AI With a Poisoned Calendar Invite to Take Over a Smart Home For likely the first time ever, security researchers have shown how AI can be hacked to create real world havoc, allowing them to turn off lights, open smart shutters, and more.

Here's your quarterly PSA on agentic security

www.wired.com/story/google...

drive.google.com/file/d/1jKY_...

This is the time where I tap on the sign that links to several BlackHat talks on completely owning Gemini agents that went rogue.

Password to Louvre’s video surveillance system was 'Louvre', according to employee According to an employee with knowledge of the system, the password to the Louvre's video surveillance system was simply "Louvre" at the time of the robbery last month.

The password to the Louvre’s video surveillance system was “Louvre,” according to a museum employee

The article does resonate with me (speaking as a very early adopter, when all that was offered was the precursor to S3). But it's also a bit like comparing Wordpress to SAP. If I want to easily deploy a small blog, go wild. But when I need serious (secure) horsepower for complex deployments, well…

U.S. Army advising troops stationed in Germany to go to German food banks during shutdown.
“Running list of German support organizations for your kit bags:
- Tafel Deutschland
- Foodsharing e.V.
- Essen für ”

web.archive.org/web/20251105...

Claude Code Can Debug Low-level Cryptography Surprisingly (to me) Claude Code debugged my new ML-DSA implementation faster than I would have, finding the non-obvious low-level issue that was making Verify fail.

I had a bug in my new ML-DSA implementation that caused Verify to reject all signatures. I gave up after half an hour. On a whim, I threw Claude Code at it. Surprisingly (to me!) it one-shotted it in 5 minutes.

A small case study of useful AI tasks that aren't generating code that requires review.

Great write-up. I'm of a similar mindset these days, working alongside some very talented engineers who are pursuing state of the art projects using RAG, re-ranking, and novel long-term memory implementations. And then I see so many startup founders, VCs, and analysts recycling the same old AI BS.

An adult horse nibbles on the grass in a field with a background of trees, purple and pink clouds highlight the sunset.

Nice sunset at the barn outside Barcelona

Black Hat Black Hat

We're pleased to announce the final lineup for Black Hat Europe '25. Terrific security research spanning 21 tracks. In a separate thread, I'll highlight a few of my favorites.
www.blackhat.com/eu-25/briefi...

Microsoft Azure challenges AWS for downtime crown Azure Front Door service outage disrupts airlines and other online services Microsoft Azure has been experiencing a global outage since around 1600 UTC, or 0900 PDT on Wednesday, October 29, 2025.…

Microsoft Azure challenges AWS for downtime crown

But vastly better than Google 2025.

There are tradeoffs for sure. If I could get easily get Chromium on iOS, might be an option, but with Chrome I'm just tired of playing whack-a-mole every few months with privacy & ad blocking muckery. And for my personal phone I need cleaner segregation when I auth to work & open up browser history.

Dumping Google’s enshittified search for Kagi Enough is enough: I’ve jettisoned Google in favor of a search engine that doesn’t treat me like a product.

Here's a good Ars article about the service.
arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025...

I'm surprised and encouraged by my new replacement for Chrome and Safari with @kagi.com's browser Orion and its search engine. On the first couple of searches it managed to unsurface content that was exactly what I wanted, including some things I wrote/said years ago that I'd completely forgotten.

Oh no, this is even dumber.

Seeing some disturbing early research around ChatGPT's new Atlas web browser. I strongly recommend caution against using it, particularly to interact with any web sites holding sensitive data.

Close up picture of a poodle-mix dog that's long overdue for a grooming. She looks like a large Sheepdog because of the angle.

Same dog a few days after grooming. She's clearly diminutive and not at all intimidating.

Here's a pic of our dog before a proper grooming, looking rather punk and intimidating. And an after. Enjoy.

"That is not the experience we want to provide and I want to apologize for it," said Matteo Franceschetti, the chief executive of Eight Sleep, which also manufactures and sells internet-enabled mattress covers and pillow covers. In a social media post [link to: https://x.com/m_franceschetti/status/1980419272766583262], he explained that the malfunctions were the result of the AWS outage and said engineers were racing to build an outage-proof mode in the event of a future disruption. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/10/22/amazon-aws-outage-eight-sleep-mattress/

smdh

That culture is some of it, no doubt. See CEO's X post blaming AWS & talking to WaPost about building intentional failure modes. But I also think it reflects on a broader issue w/ devs working in a bubble of latest/greatest tech & always-on connectivity. Exhibit A: every bloated front end framework.

Wishing a speedy recovery Saska.