Congratulations to the pal @adambonica.bsky.social on being named a 2026 Carnegie Fellow. A well-deserved honor for a brilliant political scientist with a real commitment to the public good. news.stanford.edu/stories/2026...

Adam Bonica named a 2026 Andrew Carnegie Fellow

The Stanford political scientist is one of 24 outstanding scholars and writers to receive the honor. This year’s fellows will focus on political polarization in the U.S. and solutions to mitigate it.

news.stanford.edu

Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (‪@berkeleylab.lbl.gov‬) Computing Sciences (@cs.lbl.gov‬) is accepting applications for two distinguished postdoctoral fellowships: Luis W. Alvarez Fellowship, and Admiral Grace M. Hopper Fellowship. Applications due Oct. 24, 2025. More information: go.lbl.gov/2026.

China has started filtering and censoring internet traffic taking place over the QUIC protocol. The filtering started in April last year. The Great Firewall now decrypts QUIC packets at scale and uses a separate blocklist for QUIC traffic, separate from its main filters gfw.report/publications...

🆕 GreyNoise Research: Early Warning Signals Before CVEs Drop In our latest research, we examined dozens of incidents where attacker activity — often in the form of exploit attempts — spiked weeks before a new CVE was disclosed. One chart shows what we found (much more in the report):

Today's newsletter: The Wall Street Journal says ChatGPT had a "stunning moment of self reflection." NBC says Grok "issued an apology." This lazy language isn't just bad writing — it's helping tech companies dodge responsibility for real harm. www.readtpa.com/p/stop-prete...

Stop Pretending Chatbots Have Feelings: Media's Dangerous AI Anthropomorphism Problem

When AI causes harm, headlines blame the bot instead of the billion-dollar companies that built them. This anthropomorphic coverage is tech journalism at its worst.

readtpa.com

ICYMI, yesterday we released a report providing a first look at how we found traces of spyware on two journalists' iPhones, traces which we can attribute with high confidence to Paragon's Graphite spyware:

Graphite Caught: First Forensic Confirmation of Paragon’s iOS Mercenary Spyware Finds Journalists Targeted - The Citizen Lab

On April 29, 2025, a select group of iOS users were notified by Apple that they were targeted with advanced spyware. Among the group were two journalists who consented to the technical analysis of the...

citizenlab.ca

Academics have discovered a local Great Firewall-like censorship system deployed exclusively in China's Henan region, working independently and about ten times more aggressively than China's main Great Firewall gfw.report/publications...

Enigma will be back as a track at USENIX Security: https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity25/enigma-cfp

USENIX Security '25 Enigma Track Call for Participation

Submissions due: Wednesday, March 5, 2025 Notification to submitters: Wednesday, May 7, 2025

usenix.org

New paper that analyzes MrDeepFakes, the largest open marketplace for sexual deepfakes (to appear at USENIX Security). The work covers increased consumption, buyer/seller economics, depicted targets, creator motivations, community dynamics, video creation, and use of academic papers/tools.

We're excited to tag ZDNS 2.0-RC1! 🎉 The release is packed with fixes and features. It brings ZDNS into a stable semantically versioned state, breaks apart the CLI and resolver logic, and adds support for IPv6, DNSSEC, DOH, DOT, global CNAME/DNAME following, and logic to try every name servers.

Release v2.0.0-RC1 · zmap/zdns

v2.0.0 introduces several major changes for ZDNS. Highlights include: The largest change was a refactor to split ZDNS into a core library and a CLI wrapper that utilizes the library. With this cha...

github.com

Incredibly excited to see Liz Izhikevich named to the Forbes 30 under 30 today for her work on LEO satellite network performance! www.forbes.com/profile/liz-.... See the cornerstone work here: lizizhikevich.github.io/assets/paper... and lizizhikevich.github.io/assets/paper....

Liz Izhikevich

Liz Izhikevich on the 2025 30 Under 30 - Science - Liz Izhikevich focuses on improving the internet's performance and security - on this world and in space.

forbes.com

We released Censeye today, an open source CLI tool that makes it dramatically easier to pivot and find related assets when threat hunting on Censys instead of manually checking for potential identifying characteristics like an SSH host key. github.com/Censys-Resea...

When we first released ZMap, we drafted best practices for minimizing harm when conducting large active Internet measurements. 10 years later, with more experience and shifted norms, we have updated our recommendations for researchers in Section 6 of our recent ZMap retrospective.

Last week at CSCW, Catherine Han presented our work on journalists' unmet needs for protecting against harassment online. While the work targeted Twitter/X, it surfaces several nuances in users' needs that span future platforms as well (e.g., not wanting to filter out threats or visibly block users)

Let's Encrypt is now used by more than 500,000,000 websites!!! I could not be more happy and proud of everyone who has played a part in this colossal contribution to online safety, integrity, and confidentiality:

Let's Encrypt Stats

Please note that the Let's Encrypt Growth and Let's Encrypt Certificates Issued Per Day charts are undergoing updates and may not reflect the most recent data. Let's Encrypt Growth Percentage of Web…

letsencrypt.org