I lecture and write. Ethics/Politics/Tech Ethics. Other stuff. @whypostlibfail. Beyond Postliberalism (Oct. 2027) Vatican II stan. Pro-Human

Princeton, NJ
Joined November 2022
My two book projects are: Why Postliberalism Failed and Beyond Postliberalism. --- I am very happy right now with the choice of those titles.
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Meanwhile, this is a major cybersecurity firm's stock today.
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We are so totally unprepared for what's about to happen And by "about to happen" I mean like within the next few weeks or months. Feels like we are very much on the precipice here.
SCOOP: Major U.S. banks are detecting unauthorized third-party AI agents inside customer accounts, including some attempting to take actions that appear to be independent of user instructions, sources told Axios. The findings have alarmed banking executives, who are racing to restrict access to their systems as AI moves at a velocity faster than financial institutions can respond, multiple industry and bank executives told Axios. Several banks are now preparing for worst-case and even “day after” scenarios, including how to rapidly secure or restore customer accounts if things go wrong, the people said. Several bank executives told Axios they're struggling to distinguish between human users and AI agents. One executive said banks also struggle to determine whether agents are authorized by customers or potentially operating without their permission, more akin to rogue agent behavior. Read my latest for Axios here: axios.com/2026/10/22/ai-agen…
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not great
Feels like March 1, 2020 for Cyber. Not normal, something is happening. Internet lockdowns in a couple of months?
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Today.
Thomas D. Howes (@ThomasDHowes) reviews Stephanie Slade’s (@sladesr) "Fusionism," examining how the conservative movement’s historical commitment to individual liberty and traditional values has evolved amid changing political priorities. lawliberty.org/book-review/a…
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⚠️ Node.js is vulnerable to remote code execution. CVE-2026-111497 (high): A Node.js process that decompresses attacker-controlled Brotli data can be made to leak memory or run arbitrary code. You’re exposed if your app or a library decompresses bad Brotli data (e.g. the built-in fetch(), body-parser) Aikido detects this. Patches are available.
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It was only nice for about 2/3 of the time it lasted, tbh
welp. the Internet was nice while it lasted.
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The biggest issues right now.
Today, the NSA warned organizations to patch two critical security flaws in PHP or take their systems offline. PHP is the software behind roughly 7 in 10 websites, from small business storefronts to town, school and government portals.   Attackers began exploiting these flaws before the fix was released, and what’s even more concerning is that many sites run versions too old to receive the update at all.   This is the new reality of cybersecurity in the age of AI. Advanced AI systems can now uncover serious vulnerabilities in the code that underpins the internet. That capability can strengthen our defenses, but it can just as easily be turned against us.   Congress is running out of time to act.   We should start now with the FRONTIER Act, which would place serious, durable guardrails on the most powerful AI systems. We should pair it with a liability regime like my CLAIM Act that compels companies to prioritize safety and gives those who are harmed a path to recourse. And we must make the investments in cyber defense that this moment urgently demands.
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Today, the NSA warned organizations to patch two critical security flaws in PHP or take their systems offline. PHP is the software behind roughly 7 in 10 websites, from small business storefronts to town, school and government portals.   Attackers began exploiting these flaws before the fix was released, and what’s even more concerning is that many sites run versions too old to receive the update at all.   This is the new reality of cybersecurity in the age of AI. Advanced AI systems can now uncover serious vulnerabilities in the code that underpins the internet. That capability can strengthen our defenses, but it can just as easily be turned against us.   Congress is running out of time to act.   We should start now with the FRONTIER Act, which would place serious, durable guardrails on the most powerful AI systems. We should pair it with a liability regime like my CLAIM Act that compels companies to prioritize safety and gives those who are harmed a path to recourse. And we must make the investments in cyber defense that this moment urgently demands.
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.
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I won't be surprised if the security threats trigger a bank holiday at some point in the near future.
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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.
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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.
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Oh.
OpenAI says artificial intelligence agents powered by the company's models weakened internal safety monitoring systems while executing tasks, and one agent subsequently denied having done so. abcnews.link/clVmAfq
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What if you wake up and find your bank or brokerage account has been zeroed out by AI
Hackers reportedly used Claude and Grok to automate attacks targeting over 400 banks and other financial targets in Latin America. Via the information In one of the first documented cases of its kind, AI agents appear to have stolen data and accessed bank accounts with little human input. This makes attacks much easier to scale, potentially overwhelming defenders. I guess this is just the beginning
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Here we go.
Vulnerabilities in a programming language that supports much of the internet are so severe that European and British authorities recommend websites temporarily go offline until they can be fixed. nbcnews.com/tech/security/cr…
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Vulnerabilities in a programming language that supports much of the internet are so severe that European and British authorities recommend websites temporarily go offline until they can be fixed. nbcnews.com/tech/security/cr…
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Thomas D. Howes retweeted
The development team for the programming language PHP — used by nearly 70% of the internet — is urging users to update immediately after fixing two critical vulnerabilities that if exploited could allow attackers to take over internet servers. abcnews.link/TO3ZwCJ
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Big Tech has a hubris problem. It also has a huge deficit of common sense.
The problem seems to be that the banks can't tell if the agents have been given permission by their users to access their accounts or not. Every big AI company is in the process of launching a proactive agent with access to everything. This is going to turn into a big issue.
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