Bruce Schneier

Law professor Dan Solove has a new article on privacy regulation. In his email to me, he writes: “I’ve been pondering privacy consent for more than a decade, and I think I finally made a breakthrough with this article.” His mini-abstract: In this Article I argue that most of the time, privacy consent is fictitious. Instead of futile efforts to try to turn privacy consent from fiction to fact, the better approach is to lean into the fictions. The law can’t stop privacy consent from being a fairy tale, but the law can ensure that the story ends well. I argue that privacy consent should confer less legitimacy and power and that it be backstopped by a set of duties on organizations that process personal data based on consent...

If you ask Alexa, Amazon's voice assistant AI system, whether Amazon is a monopoly, it responds by saying it doesn't know . It doesn't take much to

We should all be paid for it. For four decades, Alaskans have opened their mailboxes to find checks waiting for them, their cut of the black gold beneath their feet.

And they're terrifying. Imagine a future in which A.I.s automatically interpret—and enforce—laws.

Washington needs to take AI investment out of the hands of private companies. Artificial intelligence will bring great benefits to all of humanity.

The web has become so interwoven with everyday life that it is easy to forget what an extraordinary accomplishment and treasure it is. In just a few decades, much of human knowledge...

But all of this is coming to an end. The advent of AI threatens to destroy the complex online ecosystem that allows writers, artists, and other creators to reach human audiences.

This attack has been feasible for over two decades: Researchers have devised an attack against nearly all virtual private network applications that forces them to send and receive some or all traffic outside of the encrypted tunnel designed to protect it from snooping or tampering. TunnelVision, as the researchers have named their attack, largely negates the entire purpose and selling point of VPNs, which is to encapsulate incoming and outgoing Internet traffic in an encrypted tunnel and to cloak the user’s IP address. The researchers believe it affects all VPN applications when they’re connected to a hostile network and that there are no ways to prevent such attacks except when the user’s VPN runs on Linux or Android. They also said their attack technique may have been possible since 2002 and may already have been discovered and used in the wild since then...

Someday, some AI researcher will figure out how to separate the data and control paths. Until then, we're going to have to think carefully about using LLMs in potentially adversarial situations—like on the Internet.

Life is full of hidden bottlenecks that result from logistical trade-offs between efficiency and your unique needs and desires. AI promises to change this taken-for-granted equation.