An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Apple has launched a new legal challenge against a UK government demand to access its customers' highly encrypted data, a year after the Home Office agreed to abandon its previous request. The US tech company launched the legal complaint last month at the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), an independent court that has the power to investigate claims that the UK intelligence services have acted unlawfully. The UK government had made a second request to Apple to grant it a "back door" to encrypted iCloud data belonging to British users, according to an order issued by the court.

Britain backed down on its original demand for access to data from UK and US customers last year, after a heated transatlantic tussle over encryption between London and Washington. UK authorities subsequently issued a new "technical capability notice" (TCN) to Apple that did not apply to American users. Apple is seeking to challenge the British government's powers to issue TCNs under the UK Investigatory Powers Act, according to the details of the new legal case first reported by the Financial Times. [...] The original TCN issued last year asked Apple for the right to see users' encrypted data protected by its advanced data protection (ADP) program in the event of a national security risk.

Apple said the removal of the tool -- which not even it can access -- would make users more vulnerable to data breaches from bad actors and other threats to customer privacy. Creating a "back door" would also mean all data was accessible by Apple, which it could be forced to share with law enforcement possessing a warrant. As a result, Apple withdrew UK customers' access to its ADP program in January 2025. The Home Office has maintained that the Investigatory Powers Act, under which such orders are issued, contains robust safeguards and is used only when absolutely necessary.

Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview has "found flaws in a weakened version of a digital encryption standard that is in pervasive use throughout the internet," reports The New York Times. Researchers said the model discovered novel attacks against weakened versions of AES and the experimental post-quantum HAWK system, including one that was 200 to 1,000 times faster than previous human-developed methods. From the report: The flaws identified do not concern a cryptographic standard currently in use today, which means that modern banking and communication systems are not subject to immediate potential intrusions from A.I. Instead, Anthropic's technology cracked a watered-down version of an algorithm for Advanced Encryption Standard, or A.E.S., a ubiquitous protocol that safeguards web traffic, wireless networks, data storage and more. It is common to perform tests on weaker versions of encryption algorithms to understand whether more powerful computers could someday crack the actual standards, akin to solving a simpler math problem to identify whether patterns may exist for a more complicated one. In the testing, Mythos was able to break the weaker version of Advanced Encryption Standard in a way that Anthropic said made an assault 200 to 1,000 times faster than what previous human research had managed to do. While the immediate ramifications are minimal, the long-term implications could be significant. In previous tests, large-language models seemingly could not match or best what humans can do in the mathematically dense field of cryptographic research, but their rapid advances could suggest a future in which top models can surmount traditional internet security protections that are foundational to just about everything that takes place on the internet.

[...] In addition to the attack on the encryption standard, Mythos also orchestrated another improved attack against a different digital cryptographic system known as HAWK that is designed to be bulletproof against both traditional and quantum computers. HAWK is not currently in use, but under consideration by the National Institute of Standards and Technology to become a new standard. The HAWK attack was validated by its authors, and independent cryptographers reviewed the Advanced Encryption Standard attack, Anthropic said, adding that it had shared its findings with the U.S. government and industry partners ahead of publication. Mythos devised the cryptographic attack on A.E.S. almost entirely autonomously, Anthropic said, but only after first refusing to contemplate the problem because it believed it was impossible to improve on existing methods of analysis. But after some coaxing, the chatbot sat with the puzzle for about a week before engineering its novel attack. Two human researchers then worked for nearly a month to verify that the method appeared correct. "Given that we are constantly underestimating the power and time of availability of future models, are we really comfortable that two years from now strong encryption won't be threatened?" said Glenn S. Gerstell, the former general counsel at the National Security Agency.

"Mathematicians would tell you that it shouldn't be possible given current computing powers to break strong encryption in any meaningful time," added Mr. Gerstell, who helped write a report on cryptology in 2022. "But I don't think the capabilities of future models in the medium term -- before quantum computing or quantum-proof cryptography -- should be dismissed as trivial in this context."

GrapheneOS is defending its duress-password feature after an environmental activist used it to wipe his Pixel phone during a U.S. Customs search and was later indicted for allegedly destroying property under government control. The nonprofit says the operating system is "completely legal," cannot recover the erased data, and should not be weakened with encryption backdoors. Meanwhile, the activist faces up to five years in prison if found guilty. PCMag reports: In a post on Saturday, the Canadian nonprofit behind the operating system, the GrapheneOS Foundation, explained that the software offers a range of features to prevent data extraction. For example, one safeguard is the "auto-reboot timer" that'll reboot a locked device after a set period of time to put the data at rest, leaving all files inside encrypted.

The group's post subtly suggests that GrapheneOS phones can withstand law enforcement searches without requiring users to resort to a duress password. "People should carefully consider how to use it in an actual duress situation where there can be physical or legal consequences for wiping the device," the nonprofit wrote. "GrapheneOS doesn't require it to protect data from being extracted from the device, but it takes recovering it completely off the table even with the PIN/password for each profile on the device."

On X, the nonprofit has also said it can do nothing to help US law enforcement recover data from Tunick's phone. "Data cannot be recovered after the key derivation material is reliably wiped. It's not possible and there's nothing we can do to assist with it," the group wrote. "Similarly, it's not possible to assist with bypassing encryption because the hardware and software has been designed to prevent it."

"We need you in the fight," says the American legal expert in privacy, surveillance, AI, and Internet freedom of speech who became the EFF's new executive director in March.

As EFF celebrates the anniversary of its founding 1990, "Each headline is different, but they tell one story: Many of the threats that once seemed hypothetical are now reality, and EFF's work to ensure technology supports rights, justice, freedom, and innovation for all people has never been more critical." Governments and large corporations possess surveillance capabilities that were unimaginable just a few years ago. Ever greater concentrations of power are shaping speech, creativity, markets, and democratic institutions. Governments are increasingly seeking to control the internet and people's ability to access information and communicate freely. Our community's work is fundamental to the future of our countries, our livelihoods, and literally our lives...

These are perilous times. It is also a moment of extraordinary possibility. The future of AI has not been written and we can work together to get it right. We can make sure our laws reflect the needs of the modern digital age. We can build the technologies that empower rather than marginalize communities. For me, the work starts with recognizing that digital rights are not a siloed policy issue. We must fight and win on the digital terrain to organize, speak freely, access healthcare, find work, receive an education, and participate fully in democracy. We can and must reject a false choice between innovation and civil liberties, and build power across movements to make sure technology truly works for people...

EFF's founders understood something remarkably prescient: Technology and civil liberties would become inseparable. Now we all live digital lives, and the important digital rights issues that EFF has worked on since 1990 have become kitchen-table issues all around the world. EFF's founders understood that how technology is built, developed, used, and controlled deeply intersects with rights, justice, freedom, and democracy. EFF's unique combination of world-class lawyers, activists, and public interest technologists pursue change simultaneously in the courts, legislatures, companies, and our communities, and pierce through false choices. This integrated, intersectional approach, grounded in deep legal, policy, and technical expertise, is a linchpin in fighting and winning against some of the most powerful forces in the world — both governments and trillion-dollar companies.

We defend people against unlawful government data collection and challenge license plate and face surveillance in our communities. We shape AI law and policy to protect civil liberties and support creativity and innovation. We push companies to strengthen encryption, fight to ensure you have the right to own what you buy, and build public interest technologies like Privacy Badger and Certbot that millions of people rely on every day. This work matters because it all answers the same question: Will technology empower or control us?
Major battles the executive director sees on the horizon"

• "Challenge increasingly sophisticated government and corporate surveillance systems that endanger our rights, democracy, safety and security."

• "Preserve strong encryption and online anonymity."

• "Ensure AI is developed and used in ways that respect fundamental rights and works for those who build it, use it, and are affected by it."

• "Confront the concentrations of power that limit access to new creativity and defend the rights of developers to build and innovate."

"To meet these challenges, we must not only utilize the powerful levers of successful litigation, smart policy interventions, and effective public interest technology tools. We must also build a broader movement that recognizes that fights on the digital terrain are integral to all our fights for rights and justice... Together, our EFF community can help broaden the public conversation about technology's role in society and continue building the collective power necessary to shape the future rather than react to it....

"I'm looking forward to meeting more of you at my first EFFecting Change livestream on August 12 with Cory Doctorow, and hope this conversation is just the beginning of finding new ways to work together..."

The blog post ends by noting that "We need you and others in the fight. Please renew your membership, become a recurring monthly supporter, and introduce someone new to EFF by snagging them a gift membership.

"Everything we accomplish — every lawsuit, every policy victory, every public interest technology tool, every campaign — is possible because people like you are committed to ensuring technology strengthens freedom, privacy, creativity, and opportunity for everyone.

"The future we want and need will be built by people and movements working together to ensure technology empowers rather than oppresses.

"Let's build that future together."

Starting with macOS 28, Apple will no longer support encrypted Mac OS Extended, or HFS+, volumes. Users will need to decrypt them or reformat them as APFS to keep using them. 9to5Mac reports: In a new support document, Apple explains that starting with macOS 28, "the Mac OS Extended file system format will be supported only for volumes (disks and other storage devices) that aren't encrypted." In practice, this means users who currently rely on encrypted HFS+ external drives or other encrypted legacy Mac-formatted volumes will need to "either decrypt or reformat any encrypted Mac OS Extended volumes."

Apple doesn't explain the reason for the change. Still, the move appears to be another step in Apple's transition to APFS, its file system with built-in encryption support, which replaced Mac OS Extended as the default Mac file system in macOS High Sierra. As a result of this change, Apple says that starting with macOS 26, Macs might notify users when they're using an encrypted Mac OS Extended disk that won't be compatible with macOS 28 or later.

According to the support page, "the notification will identify the volume by name." However, Apple says users can manually confirm whether a volume is both using Mac OS Extended format and encrypted by following these steps [...]. Apple adds that "macOS 28 and later will continue to support unencrypted volumes that use Mac OS Extended format," and notes "Mac OS Extended is also known as HFS Plus (or HFS+)."

Sysdig says it has documented the first ransomware attack carried out end to end by an AI agent, which autonomously exploited exposed systems, stole credentials, established persistence, compromised a production database, and destroyed data. The research team named the attacker "JadePuffer" and said it gained initial access to an internet-facing Langflow instance by exploiting CVE-2025-3248. "The most striking characteristic, however, was the LLM's behavior," Sysdig director of threat research Michael Clark said in a blog post. An anonymous reader quotes an excerpt from The Register: JadePuffer's "self-narrating" payloads "contained natural language reasoning, target prioritization, and the kind of detailed annotations that human operators don't often write but LLM-generated code produces reflexively," Clark added. "The operation also adapted in real time, retrying failed steps within refined parameters. In one sequence, it went from a failed login to a working fix in 31 seconds." After exploiting CVE-2025-3248, a missing authentication vulnerability in Langflow that allows remote, unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary Python on the host, the AI agent began scanning for and collecting secrets, including LLM provider API keys, cloud credentials "with explicit coverage of Chinese providers" including Alibaba, Aliyun, Tencent, and Huawei, while also scanning for AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform, cryptocurrency wallets, and database credentials.

The AI also installed a crontab entry on the Langflow server to maintain persistence and call back to the attacker's infrastructure every 30 minutes. JadePuffer's intended target was a separate internet-exposed production server running a MySQL database and an Alibaba Nacos configuration service, we're told. Nacos is an open-source service-discovery and dynamic configuration platform developed by Alibaba and used in the cloud provider's microservices applications. The agent connected to the server's exposed MySQL port using root credentials, although Sysdig doesn't know how the attacker obtained them. These credentials weren't stolen from the victim's environment.

JadePuffer then attacked Nacos via multiple vectors including an authorization bypass flaw (CVE-2021-29441) and forging a valid JSON web token (JWT) using Nacos's default signing key. Additionally, using its root database access, the LLM injected a backdoor administrator into the Nacos backing database. It ultimately encrypted all 1,342 Nacos service configuration items using MySQL's built-in AES encryption function, and created an extortion demand, ransom note, Bitcoin payment address, and a Proton Mail contact [...]. However, according to the threat hunters, the victim can't recover the encrypted data, even if they paid the ransom demand, because the agent escalated "from row-level deletion to dropping entire database schemas, narrating its own targeting rationale," without backing up any of the encrypted data.

Last week, AMD was found to have stripped memory encryption from its consumer CPUs without any warning or notice. Now, following a wave of backlash on social media, the chipmaker has now reinstated the protection, though it still hasn't explained why the safeguard was disabled in the first place. Ars Technica reports: Following the revelation, social media was deluged by comments from AMD consumers decrying the move. They noted that AMD's quiet removal of TSME after supporting it for so long seemed underhanded. The move came solely as a result of firmware changes made in a recent update. With no physical changes required to silicon, continued support was largely, if not purely, a matter of will rather than a necessity required by changes to hardware. The critics called on AMD to reverse the move.

Over the weekend, AMD said it planned to do just that in a firmware update scheduled for release next month. More often than not, the chipmaker refers to TSME as Memory Guard. "Regarding certain non-PRO Ryzen 9000-series desktop processors, a BIOS option to enable Memory Guard was previously available but was removed in a recent update," AMD said in an email. "Based on valuable community feedback, we will reinstate this option in an upcoming BIOS release in July."

The company has yet to explain why it removed the protection. Critics speculate that AMD dropped it in an attempt to steer customers toward more costly CPUs. It's possible, though, that there were less nefarious reasons, such as the difficulty of continued support as chip designs changed. Another possibility is that AMD made the move for performance reasons. Encrypting and decrypting data in memory creates latency. Slowdowns are the enemy of gamers, one of the more popular customer segments using the 9000-line of Ryzen processors. Since many gamers already voluntarily disabled TSME and had little need for it in the first place, AMD may not have considered the change of much consequence.

Long-time Slashdot reader smooth wombat writes: Alan Turing, one of the more famous people who worked at Bletchley Park to decipher the German Enigma coding machine, was also working on a separate project. His private papers, known as the Bayley papers for his assistant Donald Bayley who held onto the papers until his death in 2020, reveal Turning had produced a working model of a portable voice encryption device. He even demonstrated it by using a Winston Churchill speech recording.

"Weighing just 39 kg, including its power pack," Jack Copeland wrote in an article for IEEE Spectrum, "Delilah would be at home in a truck, a trench, or a large backpack."
More from Popular Mechanics: Turingâ(TM)s work at Bletchley Park actually informed the Delilah experimentation he was doing at Hanslope Park, and not just because he used Red Forms, the Army-issue sheets Hanslope staffers were meant to use to alert Bletchley staffers to enemy signals, as his personal scrap paper for Delilah experiments. He drew inspiration from one of the German cipher machines they had decoded at Bletchley; not the famed Enigma machine, but rather the SZ42. While the former relied on Morse Code, the latter utilized a 5-bit telegraph code, which Copeland notes âoewas a forerunner of ASCII and Unicode and is still used by some ham radio operators.â The SZ42 produced an obscuring key of telegraph characters, with an identical key produced to both the sender and receiver. If it could be done for text, Turing reasoned it could be done for sound as well...

[T]he reason Delilah fell to the wayside of history isnâ(TM)t because it was a failure, but rather because it simply wasnâ(TM)t needed anymore. By the time Turing had built and demonstrated his device, the war was over. What good was a portable voice encryptor if you had no major enemies trying to intercept your calls, the government reasoned. So funding for the project stopped, and Turingâ(TM)s two-year experiment ended with a whimper. Turingâ(TM)s time as an electrical engineer at Hanslope Park became a footnote in his story, if even that.

Starting in 2027, France's cybersecurity agency ANSSI will stop certifying security products that lack quantum-resistant encryption, effectively forcing government agencies and critical infrastructure operators to phase out older cryptographic systems. Reuters reports: Samih Souissi, ANSSI's chief of staff, said at the France Quantum conference that the agency would halt such certifications from 2027, and that businesses should be buying only quantum-safe products by 2030. ANSSI approval is required for use in French government agencies and critical infrastructure, making the policy a de facto phase-out of older encryption.

"It's not only a technical issue," Souissi said. "It's a matter of governance, industrial planning, regulation, and sovereignty." The move reflects concern that attackers may store encrypted data now and unlock it later when quantum computers become strong enough to crack today's protections, a risk known as "harvest now, decrypt later."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A decade ago, AMD added a protection to its high-end CPUs to protect them against cold boot attacks and other types of physical exploits that siphon sensitive data out of the connected memory chips. Short for Transparent Secure Memory Encryption, TSME encrypts the entire contents stored in memory, making the data useless to physical attackers. Over time, AMD added TSME to lower-end processors, including the consumer version of its Ryzen chips, a CPU that costs less than the Pro version. Over the years, users of these lower-end chips have gotten used to the added security. Recently and without warning or notice, this lower-end line of AMD chips suddenly dropped the protection, and did so in a way that was impossible to detect on Windows machines and required a fair amount of technical work when using Linux.

AMD has yet to say why TSME worked on these CPUs, or even to confirm the change. AMD declined to answer questions sent by email other than to say TSME "is a security feature only applied to PRO CPUs as part of AMD PRO Technologies." The statement is the first known time the chipmaker has explicitly made this restriction public. [...] There's no indication that AMD ever advertised or marketed TSME as being available in consumer CPUs. AMD has long said that a related memory protection, Secure Memory Encryption (SME), is available only in the Pro and Epyc CPU tiers. SME is OS-managed. It uses a single key and allows the OS to selectively encrypt individual memory pages. TSME is firmware-managed. It encrypts all RAM with no OS involvement. When active, it provides protection against physical attacks, including cold boot exploits, DRAM interface snooping, and memory module removal. It activates silently when enabled in the BIOS, making it the more practically useful of the two protections. Ben Kilpatrick, a self-described "privacy-conscious Linux hobbyist," discovered that TSME had stopped working on his consumer Ryzen processor despite remaining enabled in the BIOS. He spent months investigating, persuaded MSI engineers to test multiple CPUs, motherboards, and firmware versions, and filed a public AMD bug report that traced the change to newer AGESA firmware apparently disabling TSME on consumer chips while retaining it on Pro and EPYC models.

"AMD engineers' comments, such as those mentioned above, and the years of TSME working just fine in the lower-cost tier processors, have understandably conditioned Kilpatrick and other users to reasonably regard it as an expected part of the chip package," reports Ars Technica. "AMD quietly removing it and providing no acknowledgment or explanation strikes these users as something of a betrayal."

Joe Fitzgerald, an expert in silicon-level security, said in an interview: "They could have not realized they did it leading to their cagey responses, or they could have done it intentionally and tried to get away with it, leading to the same cagey responses. But I really feel like an explanation should be in order, even if it was 'TSME was never supposed to be supported. We did ship some firmwares that erroneously enabled it, but you shouldn't use them since we can't guarantee it'll work properly.'"

A security researcher says evidence suggests the U.S. military has been using an obscure GPS message field for nearly 20 years to broadcast encrypted key-distribution data, effectively turning GPS satellites into a global "numbers station." The hidden-looking 176-bit messages appear tied to the Pentagon's Over-the-Air Distribution system for remotely updating cryptographic keys, meaning ordinary GPS receivers may have been receiving the traffic all along without anyone outside the military noticing. The findings have been detailed by Steven Murdoch, an information security expert, in a new article in Inside GNSS. 404 Media reports: [...] From the beginning, he suspected that the subframe field contained encrypted transmissions because the data was so random. "Random data is actually very unusual to get in nature," Murdoch said. "If you see it, either it's been carefully designed to be random -- but then, why is someone sending out random data? -- or it's encrypted data. I thought encrypted data is by far the most likely explanation." He returned to the subframe on and off over the years, and solicited guesses about its content on Stack Exchange in 2023. Ahmed Kamruddin, a master's student at UCL, developed the project further in 2025. Then, this year, Murdoch put the last pieces of the puzzle together over several weeks by analyzing open archive Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) recordings collected since 2007 and kept by GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences.

This dataset included more than 12 million observations of Subframe 4, Page 17, yielding 3,994 unique 176-bit messages. Within this corpus, Murdoch pinpointed key-repeating "sentinels" including a pattern that appeared in February 2010 and was broadcast on and off across dozens of satellites for more than a decade. Murdoch discovered that this particular sentinel was transmitted by all 31 operational satellites within a window of a few hours on May 26, 2011, potentially heralding the activation of a new operational system. He confirmed that this timeline coincided with the rollout of the military's Over-the-Air Distribution (OTAD) and the Over-the-Air Rekeying (OTAR) by cross-referencing declassified documents, including a 2015 presentation about the dates of the operation.

"There was a perfect match between the timeline and that presentation and the change points that were automatically identified from the data," Murdoch said. "That was the smoking gun that made me think: This is what it's for." These automated systems replaced the cumbersome manual distribution of cryptographic keying material, allowing military GPS receivers around the world to be rekeyed remotely through satellite broadcasts rather than through onsite procedures. For the next 11 years, this expansive rekeying operation was overlooked in public GPS data. In 2022, the system entered a new phase, according to Murdoch's analysis. The shift was characterized by a slowing in the message rotation rate. Later, in December 2023, broadcasts carrying a distinctive "TEXT" prefix emerged then gradually spread across the constellation.

Murdoch isn't sure what explains the recent transition, though it could be a possible modernization of the infrastructure or the introduction of a new protocol. But to him, the bigger takeaway is that the signals were always available for anyone willing to take a closer look, a discovery that suggests that there could be more revelations hidden for the cryptographically curious among us. "Every receiver in the world decodes Subframe 4, Page 17," Murdoch said in his new article. "Almost none of them have ever looked at it. The lesson generalizes: There is more to learn from the bytes already arriving at our antennas than from the bytes we wish were specified differently. The data are publicly available. The signal is overhead, twice a day, every day."

BrianFagioli writes: Fedora Linux 43 users upgrading to the latest Dovecot mail server discovered something rather unsettling: some older Microsoft Outlook configurations may have been silently ignoring SSL/TLS settings for POP3 email connections for years. According to a Fedora community blog post, affected Outlook clients reportedly continued using insecure port 110 connections even when encryption was enabled in the application settings. The issue surfaced after Dovecot 2.4 disabled plaintext authentication on non secure connections by default, causing Outlook users to suddenly lose mailbox access after the Fedora 43 upgrade.

The report suggests the behavior may date back as far as Outlook 2007, although modern Outlook builds were not fully tested. Fedora admins stress that the problem could be limited to legacy account configurations rather than current versions of Outlook itself. Still, the discovery has sparked discussion among Linux admins and security folks because many users likely assumed their email traffic was encrypted simply because Outlook claimed SSL/TLS was enabled. The incident also highlights how stricter defaults in modern open source infrastructure can expose ancient assumptions and questionable behaviors that quietly survived for decades.

"A security researcher published a series of unpatched bugs in Microsoft products," reports TechCrunch, "along with code to exploit them."

Microsoft's response to the researcher? "Threatening to take legal action and call the cops on them." On Wednesday, Microsoft published a blog post criticizing the researcher, who goes by the handle "Nightmare Eclipse," for publicly disclosing a series of bugs, including BlueHammer, RedSun, UnDefend, and YellowKey. The flaws affected products such as the Windows built-in antivirus engine Defender and the disk-encryption tool BitLocker.

The core of Microsoft's complaints is that the researcher did not attempt to report the bugs so that the company could fix them. That would have been "responsible," as Microsoft's blog put it. The other side of the company's argument is that by publishing the details of the bugs and how to exploit them before they were patched, Nightmare Eclipse may have aided malicious hackers. Some of the vulnerabilities Nightmare Eclipse disclosed have since been used by hackers in real-world attacks, according to Microsoft, as well as the U.S. cybersecurity agency CISA. "Our Digital Crimes Unit will continue bringing cases against these actors and those that enable their criminal activity — coordinating as needed with law enforcement around the world," Microsoft wrote...

In a series of blog posts published in the last couple of weeks — without providing many specific details — Nightmare Eclipse claimed to have been in contact with Microsoft, but the company allegedly mistreated them, including revoking access to their Microsoft Security Response Center account, the portal where researchers can report vulnerabilities to the tech giant. Nightmare Eclipse's implication was that they had no choice but to release the vulnerabilities publicly... The researchers published the bugs on open source repositories GitHub (owned by Microsoft) and GitLab. The researchers' accounts on those platforms have been banned...

In response to this latest controversy with Nightmare Eclipse, countless researchers have shared their bad experiences reporting bugs to Microsoft.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Elektroschock for sharing the news.

ETH Zurich researchers say they have generated certified "perfect randomness" for the first time by using a quantum Bell-test setup with two entangled superconducting chips connected by a 30-meter cooled link. "In the long term, this work could play a similar role in digital security as atomic clocks do for timekeeping: a physically certified source of randomness that other systems can rely on," reports Phys.org. "Possible applications range from the encryption of sensitive communications and digital identities to public randomness services for lotteries and blockchain applications." From the report: They call their method randomness amplification. "This was made possible by an improved so-called Bell-Test with simultaneously high quality and high data rate," says [Renato Renner and Andreas Wallraff]. He and his coworkers use a complex setup that consists of two superconducting chips, which they cool down to very low temperatures close to absolute zero. Each chip represents a quantum bit or qubit, which can take on the states "0" or "1" or any arbitrary superposition of these states. A 30-meter-long tube, which is also cooled down, connects the two chips.

Microwave photons can fly back and forth between them, thus creating quantum mechanical entanglement. This means that a quantum measurement on one qubit, which randomly yields the values "0" or "1," influences automatically and at a distance whether "0" or "1" is measured on the second qubit. The separation of 30 meters ensures that, during the measurement, even at the speed of light, no information can be exchanged between the qubits. This would disturb the perfect randomness.

Wallraff and his team made the choice of the exact type of measurement (or "measurement basis" in technical jargon) on the two qubits depending on an imperfect random number generator. Renner's coworkers could then amplify the randomness of the measurement results further using a special algorithm. "The resulting sequence of zeros and ones is now really perfectly random, and we can even certify that," says Renner. He likens this result to crossing a ridge: "The technical improvements allowed us, for the first time, to create random numbers that will remain perfectly random for all eternityâ"no matter what analytical methods are used to assess their randomness." The findings have been published in the journal Nature.

Apple says end-to-end encryption for RCS messages between iPhone and Android is now available in iOS 26.5, though the feature is still considered beta and depends on carrier support on both sides. MacRumors reports: Apple says that it worked with Google to lead a cross-industry effort to add E2EE to RCS. iOS users will need iOS 26.5, while Android users will need the latest version of Google Messages. End-to-end encryption is on by default, and there is a toggle for it in the Messages section of the Settings app. Encrypted messages are denoted with a small lock symbol. On iPhones not running iOS 26.5, RCS messages between iPhone and Android users do not have E2EE, but the new update will put Android to iPhone conversations on par with iPhone to iPhone conversations that are encrypted through iMessage.

Along with Google, Apple worked with the GSM Association to implement E2EE for RCS messages. E2EE is part of the RCS Universal Profile 3.0, published with Apple's help and built on the Messaging Layer Security protocol. RCS Universal Profile 3.0 also includes editing and deleting messages, cross-platform Tapback support, and replying to specific messages inline during cross-platform conversations.

"Ransomware activity jumped again in Q1 2026," writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli, "with 2,638 victim posts on leak sites, up 22% year over year," according to a report from cybersecurity company ReliaQuest. But the bigger shift is how messy the ecosystem has become. Established groups like Akira and Qilin are still active, while newer players like The Gentlemen surged into the top tier with a 588 percent spike in activity. At the same time, questionable leak sites such as 0APT and ALP-001 are muddying the waters by posting possibly fake breach claims, forcing companies to investigate incidents that may not even be real.

Meanwhile, actors like ShinyHunters are showing that ransomware does not always need encryption anymore. By targeting identity systems and SaaS platforms, attackers can steal data using legitimate access, often through phishing or even phone-based social engineering, and then extort victims without deploying traditional malware. With a record 91 active leak sites and faster attack timelines, the report suggests defenders should focus less on tracking specific groups and more on stopping common tactics like credential theft, remote access abuse, and large-scale data exfiltration.

Apple has fixed a bug that could cause parts of Signal notifications to remain stored on iPhones even after messages disappeared and the app was deleted. "Affected users concerned about push notifications can update their devices to stop what Apple characterized as 'notifications marked for deletion' that 'could be unexpectedly retained on the device,'" reports Ars Technica. "According to Apple, the push notifications should never have been stored, but a 'logging issue' failed to redact data." From the report: Vulnerable users hoping to evade law enforcement surveillance often use encrypted apps like Signal to communicate sensitive information. That's why users felt blindsided when 404 Media reported that Apple was unexpectedly storing push notifications displaying parts of encrypted messages for up to a month. This occurred even after the message was set to disappear and the app itself was deleted from the device.

404 Media flagged the issue after speaking to multiple people who attended a hearing where the FBI testified that it "was able to forensically extract copies of incoming Signal messages from a defendant's iPhone, even after the app was deleted, because copies of the content were saved in the device's push notification database." The shocking revelation came in a case that 404 Media noted was "the first time authorities charged people for alleged 'Antifa' activities after President Trump designated the umbrella term a terrorist organization." "We're grateful to Apple for the quick action here, and for understanding and acting on the stakes of this kind of issue," Signal's post said. "It takes an ecosystem to preserve the fundamental human right to private communication."

In their post, Signal confirmed that after users update their devices, "no action is needed for this fix to protect Signal users on iOS. Once you install the patch, all inadvertently-preserved notifications will be deleted and no forthcoming notifications will be preserved for deleted applications."

BrianFagioli writes: Mozilla's email subsidiary MZLA Technologies just introduced Thunderbolt, an open-source AI client aimed at organizations that want to run AI on their own infrastructure instead of relying entirely on cloud services. The idea is to give companies full control over their data, models, and workflows while still offering things like chat, research tools, automation, and integration with enterprise systems through the Haystack AI framework. Native apps are planned for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android. Thunderbolt allows organizations to do the following:
- Run AI with their choice of models, from leading commercial providers to open-source and local models
- Connect to systems and data: Integrate with pipelines and open protocols, including: deepset's Haystack platform, Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, and agents with the Agent Client Protocol (ACP)
- Automate workflows and recurring tasks: Generate daily briefings, monitor topics, compile reports, or trigger actions based on events and schedules
- Work seamlessly across devices with native applications for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android
- Maintain security with self-hosted deployment, optional end-to-end encryption, and device-level access controls

The biotech industry's engineered cells could become an $8 trillion market by 2035, notes Phys.org. But how do you keep them from being stolen? Their article notes "an uptick in the theft and smuggling of high-value biological materials, including specially engineered cells." In Science Advances, a team of U.S. researchers present a new approach to genetically securing precious biological material. They created a genetic combination lock in which the locking or encryption process scrambled the DNA of a cell so that its important instructions were non-functional and couldn't be easily read or used. The unlocking, or decryption, process involves adding a series of chemicals in a precise order over time — like entering a password — to activate recombinases, which then unscramble the DNA to their original, functional form...

They created a biological keypad with nine distinct chemicals, each acting as a one-digit input. By using the same chemicals in pairs to form two-digit inputs, where two chemicals must be present simultaneously to activate a sensor, they expanded the keypad to 45 possible chemical inputs without introducing any new chemicals. They also added safety penalties — if someone tampers with the system, toxins are released — making it extremely unlikely for an unauthorized person to access the cells.
"The researchers conducted an ethical hacking exercise on the test lock and found that random guessing yielded a 0.2% success rate, remarkably close to the theoretical target of 0.1%."

Gmail's end-to-end encryption is now available on all Android and iOS devices, letting enterprise users send and read encrypted emails directly in the app without any extra tools. "This launch combines the highest level of privacy and data encryption with a user-friendly experience for all users, enabling simple encrypted email for all customers from small businesses to enterprises and public sector," Google announced in a blog post. BleepingComputer reports: Starting this week, encrypted messages will be delivered as regular emails to Gmail recipients' inboxes if they use the Gmail app. Recipients who don't have the Gmail mobile app and use other email services can read them in a web browser, regardless of the device and service they're using.

[...] This feature is now available for all client-side encryption (CSE) users with Enterprise Plus licenses and the Assured Controls or Assured Controls Plus add-on after admins enable the Android and iOS clients in the CSE admin interface via the Admin Console. Gmail's end-to-end encryption (E2EE) feature is powered by the client-side encryption (CSE) technical control, which allows Google Workspace organizations to use encryption keys they control and are stored outside Google's servers to protect sensitive documents and emails.