The Semiconductor Industry and Regulatory Compliance

Earlier this week, the Trump administration narrowed export controls on advanced semiconductors ahead of US-China trade negotiations. The administration is increasingly relying on export licenses to allow American semiconductor firms to sell their products to Chinese customers, while keeping the most powerful of them out of the hands of our military adversaries. These are the chips that power the artificial intelligence research fueling China’s technological rise, as well as the advanced military equipment underpinning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The US government relies on private-sector firms to implement those export controls. It’s not working. US-manufactured semiconductors have been found in Russian weapons....

Update for NGI Zero Entrust: GNS to DNS Migration and Zone Management

Update for NGI Zero Entrust: GNS to DNS Migration and Zone Management

We are happy to announce that we have successfully completed two Milestones:

Our name registration service at https://fcfs.gnunet.org has been running...

Surveilling Your Children with AirTags

Skechers is making a line of kid’s shoes with a hidden compartment for an AirTag.

First Sentencing in Scheme to Help North Koreans Infiltrate US Companies

An Arizona woman was sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in prison for her role helping North Korean workers infiltrate US companies by pretending to be US workers.

From an article:

According to court documents, Chapman hosted the North Korean IT workers’ computers in her own home between October 2020 and October 2023, creating a so-called “laptop farm” which was used to make it appear as though the devices were located in the United States.

The North Koreans were hired as remote software and application developers with multiple Fortune 500 companies, including an aerospace and defense company, a major television network, a Silicon Valley technology...

Peak Printer: 3D Print your favourite Landscape

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=ld09WI1nC14

There is something timeless and universal about our connection to mountains. Whether it’s the jagged teeth of the Himalayas or the gentle curves of the Alps, the sight of these natural wonders captures our imagination and fuels our sense of adventure. With the advance of satellite technology, especially the initiatives from the European Space Agency (ESA), we now have the unprecedented ability to capture the Earth in intricate detail. The Copernicus programme, the EU’s flagship Earth observation mission, has democratized access to this satellite data like never before. It’s this incredible resource that made the PeakPrinter project possible: a tool...

Friday Squid Blogging: A Case of Squid Fossil Misidentification

What scientists thought were squid fossils were actually arrow worms.

Spying on People Through Airportr Luggage Delivery Service

Airportr is a service that allows passengers to have their luggage picked up, checked, and delivered to their destinations. As you might expect, it’s used by wealthy or important people. So if the company’s website is insecure, you’d be able to spy on lots of wealthy or important people. And maybe even steal their luggage.

Researchers at the firm CyberX9 found that simple bugs in Airportr’s website allowed them to access virtually all of those users’ personal information, including travel plans, or even gain administrator privileges that would have allowed a hacker to redirect or steal luggage in transit. Among...

Run Agentic AI MCP Servers in Google Cloud Run

Transforming AI Tooling: Deploying Remote MCP Servers with Google Cloud Run

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become more central to modern software systems, the need to supply them with relevant and reliable context has grown urgent. Developers often face challenges integrating external data and tools into LLM workflows, especially when trying to maintain deterministic behaviors or replicate precise calculations. Recognizing this friction, Anthropic introduced the Model Context Protocol (MCP)—a standardized way to define and serve tool interfaces for LLMs. MCP bridges models with external context using structured, type-safe requests, enabling everything from math operations to full API integrations.

Initially, MCP was mostly...

Cheating on Quantum Computing Benchmarks

Peter Gutmann and Stephan Neuhaus have a new paper—I think it’s new, even though it has a March 2025 date—that makes the argument that we shouldn’t trust any of the quantum factorization benchmarks, because everyone has been cooking the books:

Similarly, quantum factorisation is performed using sleight-of-hand numbers that have been selected to make them very easy to factorise using a physics experiment and, by extension, a VIC-20, an abacus, and a dog. A standard technique is to ensure that the factors differ by only a few bits that can then be found using a simple search-based approach that has...

AI Puts Your Personal Privacy at Risk

The proliferation of AI models across consumer platforms has ushered in a new era of convenience—but it’s also accelerated the erosion of personal privacy.
Large language models (LLMs) are trained on staggering volumes of data, including publicly available content and, in some cases, personally identifiable information (PII). That means sensitive metadata—everything from search history and location trails to voice recordings and biometric markers—can be folded into systems that behave like omniscient assistants, but without full user transparency or consent. In the monolithic culture of big tech, “innovation” often comes at the cost of ethical boundaries.

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