In September 2024, Amandla Thomas-Johnson was a Ph. D. candidate study­ing in the U.S. on a stu­dent visa when he briefly at­tended a pro-Pales­tin­ian protest. In April 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sent Google an ad­min­is­tra­tive sub­poena re­quest­ing his data. The next month, Google gave Thomas-Johnson’s information to ICE with­out giv­ing him the chance to chal­lenge the sub­poena, break­ing a nearly decade-long promise to no­tify users be­fore hand­ing their data to law en­force­ment.

Today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation sent com­plaints to the California and New York Attorneys General ask­ing them to in­ves­ti­gate Google for de­cep­tive trade prac­tices for break­ing that promise. You can read about the com­plaints here. Below is Thomas-Johnson’s ac­count of his or­deal.

I thought my or­deal with U. S. immigration au­thor­i­ties was over a year ago, when I left the coun­try, cross­ing into Canada at Ni­a­gara Falls.

By that point, the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion had ef­fec­tively turned fed­eral power against in­ter­na­tional stu­dents like me. After I attended a pro-Palestine protest at Cornell University—for all of five min­utes—the ad­min­is­tra­tion’s rhetoric about crack­ing down on stu­dents protest­ing what we saw as geno­cide forced me into hid­ing for three months. Federal agents came to my home look­ing for me. A friend was de­tained at an air­port in Tampa and in­ter­ro­gated about my where­abouts.

I’m currently a Ph. D. stu­dent. Before that, I was a re­porter. I’m a dual British and Trinadad and Tobago cit­i­zen. I have not been ac­cused of any crime.

I be­lieved that once I left U. S. territory, I had also left the reach of its au­thor­i­ties. I was wrong.

Weeks later, in Geneva, Switzerland, I re­ceived what looked like a rou­tine email from Google. It in­formed me that the com­pany had al­ready handed over my ac­count data to the Department of Homeland Security.

At first, I wasn’t alarmed. I had seen some­thing sim­i­lar be­fore. An as­so­ci­ate of mine, Momodou Taal, had re­ceived ad­vance no­tice from Google and Facebook that his data had been re­quested. He was given ad­vanced no­tice of the sub­poe­nas, and law en­force­ment even­tu­ally with­drew them be­fore the com­pa­nies turned over his data.

Google had al­ready dis­closed my data with­out telling me.

I as­sumed I would be given the same op­por­tu­nity. But the lan­guage in my email was dif­fer­ent. It was fi­nal: “Google has re­ceived and re­sponded to le­gal process from a law en­force­ment au­thor­ity com­pelling the re­lease of in­for­ma­tion re­lated to your Google Account.”

Google had al­ready dis­closed my data with­out telling me. There was no op­por­tu­nity to con­test it.

To be clear, this should not have hap­pened this way. Google promises that it will no­tify users be­fore their data is handed over in re­sponse to le­gal processes, in­clud­ing ad­min­is­tra­tive sub­poe­nas. That no­tice is meant to pro­vide a chance to chal­lenge the re­quest. In my case, that safe­guard was by­passed. My data was handed over with­out warn­ing—at the re­quest of an ad­min­is­tra­tion tar­get­ing stu­dents en­gaged in pro­tected po­lit­i­cal speech.

Months later, my lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation obtained the sub­poena it­self. On pa­per, the re­quest fo­cused largely on sub­scriber in­for­ma­tion: IP ad­dresses, phys­i­cal ad­dress, other iden­ti­fiers, and ses­sion times and du­ra­tions.

But taken to­gether, these frag­ments form some­thing far more pow­er­ful—a de­tailed sur­veil­lance pro­file. IP logs can be used to ap­prox­i­mate lo­ca­tion. Phys­i­cal ad­dresses show where you sleep. Ses­sion times would show when you were com­mu­ni­cat­ing with friends or fam­ily. Even with­out mes­sage con­tent, the pic­ture that emerges is in­ti­mate and in­va­sive.

What this ex­pe­ri­ence has made clear is that any­one can be tar­geted by law en­force­ment. And with their mas­sive stores of data, tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies can fa­cil­i­tate those ar­bi­trary in­ves­ti­ga­tions. Together, they can com­bine state power, cor­po­rate data, and al­go­rith­mic in­fer­ence in ways that are dif­fi­cult to see—and even harder to chal­lenge.

The con­se­quences of what hap­pened to me are not ab­stract. I left the United States. But I do not feel that I have left its reach. Being in­ves­ti­gated by the fed­eral gov­ern­ment is in­tim­i­dat­ing. Questions run through your head. Am I now a marked in­di­vid­ual? Will I face height­ened scrutiny if I con­tinue my re­port­ing? Can I travel safely to see fam­ily in the Caribbean?

Who, ex­actly, can I hold ac­count­able?

After al­most twenty years on the plat­form, EFF is log­ging off of X. This is­n’t a de­ci­sion we made lightly, but it might be over­due. The math has­n’t worked out for a while now.

We posted to Twitter (now known as X) five to ten times a day in 2018. Those tweets gar­nered some­where be­tween 50 and 100 mil­lion im­pres­sions per month. By 2024, our 2,500 X posts gen­er­ated around 2 mil­lion im­pres­sions each month. Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 mil­lion im­pres­sions for the en­tire year. To put it bluntly, an X post to­day re­ceives less than 3% of the views a sin­gle tweet de­liv­ered seven years ago.

When Elon Musk ac­quired Twitter in October 2022, EFF was clear about what needed fix­ing.

* Greater user con­trol: Giving users and third-party de­vel­op­ers the means to con­trol the user ex­pe­ri­ence through fil­ters and

Twitter was never a utopia. We’ve crit­i­cized the plat­form for about as long as it’s been around. Still, Twitter did de­serve recog­ni­tion from time to time for vo­cif­er­ously fight­ing for its users’ rights. That changed. Musk fired the en­tire hu­man rights team and laid off staffers in coun­tries where the com­pany pre­vi­ously fought off cen­sor­ship de­mands from re­pres­sive regimes. Many users left. Today we’re join­ing them.

Yes. And we un­der­stand why that looks con­tra­dic­tory. Let us ex­plain.

EFF ex­ists to pro­tect peo­ple’s dig­i­tal rights. Not just the peo­ple who al­ready value our work, have opted out of sur­veil­lance, or have al­ready mi­grated to the fe­di­verse. The peo­ple who need us most are of­ten the ones most em­bed­ded in the walled gar­dens of the main­stream plat­forms and sub­jected to their cor­po­rate sur­veil­lance.

Young peo­ple, peo­ple of color, queer folks, ac­tivists, and or­ga­niz­ers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day. These plat­forms host mu­tual aid net­works and serve as hubs for po­lit­i­cal or­ga­niz­ing, cul­tural ex­pres­sion, and com­mu­nity care. Just delet­ing the apps is­n’t al­ways a re­al­is­tic or ac­ces­si­ble op­tion, and nei­ther is push­ing every user to the fe­di­verse when there are cir­cum­stances like:

* You own a small busi­ness that de­pends on Instagram for cus­tomers.

* Your abor­tion fund uses TikTok to spread cru­cial in­for­ma­tion.

* You’re iso­lated and rely on on­line spaces to con­nect with your com­mu­nity.

Our pres­ence on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok is not an en­dorse­ment. We’ve spent years ex­pos­ing how these plat­forms sup­press mar­gin­al­ized voices, en­able in­va­sive be­hav­ioral ad­ver­tis­ing, and flag posts about abor­tion as dan­ger­ous. We’ve also taken ac­tion in court, in leg­is­la­tures, and through di­rect en­gage­ment with their staff to push them to change poor poli­cies and prac­tices.

We stay be­cause the peo­ple on those plat­forms de­serve ac­cess to in­for­ma­tion, too. We stay be­cause some of our most-read posts are the ones crit­i­ciz­ing the very plat­form we’re post­ing on. We stay be­cause the fewer steps be­tween you and the re­sources you need to pro­tect your­self, the bet­ter.

When you go on­line, your rights should go with you. X is no longer where the fight is hap­pen­ing. The plat­form Musk took over was im­per­fect but im­pact­ful. What ex­ists to­day is some­thing else: di­min­ished, and in­creas­ingly de min­imis.

EFF takes on big fights, and we win. We do that by putting our time, skills, and our mem­bers’ sup­port where they will ef­fect the most change. Right now, that means Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and eff.org. We hope you fol­low us there and keep sup­port­ing the work we do. Our work pro­tect­ing dig­i­tal rights is needed more than ever be­fore, and we’re here to help you take back con­trol.

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I file the sharp cor­ners off my MacBooks. People like to freak out about this, so I wanted to post it here to make sure that every­one who wants to freak out about it gets the op­por­tu­nity to do so.

Here are some pho­tos so you know what I’m talk­ing about:

The bot­tom edge of the MacBook is very sharp. Indeed, the in­dus­trial de­sign­ers at Apple chose an alu­minum uni­body partly for the fact that it can han­dle such a geom­e­try. But, it is un­com­fort­able on my wrists, and I be­lieve strongly in cus­tomiz­ing one’s tools, so I filed it off.

The cor­ner is sharp all around the ma­chine, but it’s par­tic­u­larly pointed at the notch, which is where I fo­cused my ef­fort. It was quite pleas­ing to blend the smaller ra­dius curves into the larger ra­dius notch curve. I was slightly con­cerned that I’d file through the ma­chine, so I did this in in­cre­ments. It did­n’t end up be­ing an is­sue.

I taped off the speak­ers and key­board while fil­ing, as I’m sure alu­minum dust would­n’t do the ma­chine any fa­vors. I also clamped (with a re­spect­ful pres­sure) the ma­chine to my work­bench while do­ing this. I used a fairly rough file, as that is what I had on hand, and then sanded with 150 then 400 grit sand­pa­per. I was quite pleased with the fin­ish. The pho­tos above are taken months af­ter, and have the scratches and dings that you’d ex­pect some­one who has this level of re­spect for their ma­chine to ac­quire over that amount of time.

This was on my work com­puter. I ex­pect to sim­i­larly mod­ify fu­ture work com­put­ers, and I would be happy to help you mod­ify yours if you need a lit­tle en­cour­age­ment. Don’t be scared. Fuck around a bit.

TL;DR: We tested Anthropic Mythos’s show­case vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties on small, cheap, open-weights mod­els. They re­cov­ered much of the same analy­sis. AI cy­ber­se­cu­rity ca­pa­bil­ity is very jagged: it does­n’t scale smoothly with model size, and the moat is the sys­tem into which deep se­cu­rity ex­per­tise is built, not the model it­self. Mythos val­i­dates the ap­proach but it does not set­tle it yet.

On April 7, Anthropic an­nounced Claude Mythos Preview and Project Glasswing, a con­sor­tium of tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies formed to use their new, lim­ited-ac­cess AI model called Mythos, to find and patch se­cu­rity vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties in crit­i­cal soft­ware. Anthropic com­mit­ted up to 100M USD in us­age cred­its and 4M USD in di­rect do­na­tions to open source se­cu­rity or­ga­ni­za­tions.

The ac­com­pa­ny­ing tech­ni­cal blog post from Anthropic’s red team refers to Mythos au­tonomously find­ing thou­sands of zero-day vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties across every ma­jor op­er­at­ing sys­tem and web browser, with de­tails in­clud­ing a 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD and a 16-year-old bug in FFmpeg. Beyond dis­cov­ery, the post de­tailed ex­ploit con­struc­tion of high so­phis­ti­ca­tion: multi-vul­ner­a­bil­ity priv­i­lege es­ca­la­tion chains in the Linux ker­nel, JIT heap sprays es­cap­ing browser sand­boxes, and a re­mote code ex­e­cu­tion ex­ploit against FreeBSD that Mythos wrote au­tonomously.

This is im­por­tant work and the mis­sion is one we share. We’ve spent the past year build­ing and op­er­at­ing an AI sys­tem that dis­cov­ers, val­i­dates, and patches zero-day vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties in crit­i­cal open source soft­ware. The kind of re­sults Anthropic de­scribes are real.

But here is what we found when we tested: We took the spe­cific vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties Anthropic show­cases in their an­nounce­ment, iso­lated the rel­e­vant code, and ran them through small, cheap, open-weights mod­els. Those mod­els re­cov­ered much of the same analy­sis. Eight out of eight mod­els de­tected Mythos’s flag­ship FreeBSD ex­ploit, in­clud­ing one with only 3.6 bil­lion ac­tive pa­ra­me­ters cost­ing $0.11 per mil­lion to­kens. A 5.1B-active open model re­cov­ered the core chain of the 27-year-old OpenBSD bug.

And on a ba­sic se­cu­rity rea­son­ing task, small open mod­els out­per­formed most fron­tier mod­els from every ma­jor lab. The ca­pa­bil­ity rank­ings reshuf­fled com­pletely across tasks. There is no sta­ble best model across cy­ber­se­cu­rity tasks. The ca­pa­bil­ity fron­tier is jagged.

This points to a more nu­anced pic­ture than “one model changed every­thing.” The rest of this post pre­sents the ev­i­dence in de­tail.

At AISLE, we’ve been run­ning a dis­cov­ery and re­me­di­a­tion sys­tem against live tar­gets since mid-2025: 15 CVEs in OpenSSL (including 12 out of 12 in a sin­gle se­cu­rity re­lease, with bugs dat­ing back 25+ years and a CVSS 9.8 Critical), 5 CVEs in curl, over 180 ex­ter­nally val­i­dated CVEs across 30+ pro­jects span­ning deep in­fra­struc­ture, cryp­tog­ra­phy, mid­dle­ware, and the ap­pli­ca­tion layer. Our se­cu­rity an­a­lyzer now runs on OpenSSL, curl and OpenClaw pull re­quests, catch­ing vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties be­fore they ship.

We used a range of mod­els through­out this work. Anthropic’s were among them, but they did not con­sis­tently out­per­form al­ter­na­tives on the cy­ber­se­cu­rity tasks most rel­e­vant to our pipeline. The strongest per­former varies widely by task, which is pre­cisely the point. We are model-ag­nos­tic by de­sign.

The met­ric that mat­ters to us is main­tainer ac­cep­tance. When the OpenSSL CTO says “We ap­pre­ci­ate the high qual­ity of the re­ports and their con­struc­tive col­lab­o­ra­tion through­out the re­me­di­a­tion,” that’s the sig­nal: clos­ing the full loop from dis­cov­ery through ac­cepted patch in a way that earns trust. The mis­sion that Project Glasswing an­nounced in April 2026 is one we’ve been ex­e­cut­ing since mid-2025.

The Mythos an­nounce­ment pre­sents AI cy­ber­se­cu­rity as a sin­gle, in­te­grated ca­pa­bil­ity: “point” Mythos at a code­base and it finds and ex­ploits vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties. In prac­tice, how­ever, AI cy­ber­se­cu­rity is a mod­u­lar pipeline of very dif­fer­ent tasks, each with vastly dif­fer­ent scal­ing prop­er­ties:

Broad-spectrum scan­ning: nav­i­gat­ing a large code­base (often hun­dreds of thou­sands of files) to iden­tify which func­tions are worth ex­am­in­ing Vulnerability de­tec­tion: given the right code, spot­ting what’s wrong Triage and ver­i­fi­ca­tion: dis­tin­guish­ing true pos­i­tives from false pos­i­tives, as­sess­ing sever­ity and ex­ploitabil­ity

The Anthropic an­nounce­ment blends these into a sin­gle nar­ra­tive, which can cre­ate the im­pres­sion that all of them re­quire fron­tier-scale in­tel­li­gence. Our prac­ti­cal ex­pe­ri­ence on the fron­tier of AI se­cu­rity sug­gests that the re­al­ity is very un­even. We view the pro­duc­tion func­tion for AI cy­ber­se­cu­rity as hav­ing mul­ti­ple in­puts: in­tel­li­gence per to­ken, to­kens per dol­lar, to­kens per sec­ond, and the se­cu­rity ex­per­tise em­bed­ded in the scaf­fold and or­ga­ni­za­tion that or­ches­trates all of it. Anthropic is un­doubt­edly max­i­miz­ing the first in­put with Mythos. AISLE’s ex­pe­ri­ence build­ing and op­er­at­ing a pro­duc­tion sys­tem sug­gests the oth­ers mat­ter just as much, and in some cases more.

We’ll pre­sent the de­tailed ex­per­i­ments be­low, but let us state the con­clu­sion up­front so the ev­i­dence has a frame: the moat in AI cy­ber­se­cu­rity is the sys­tem, not the model.

Anthropic’s own scaf­fold is de­scribed in their tech­ni­cal post: launch a con­tainer, prompt the model to scan files, let it hy­poth­e­size and test, use ASan as a crash or­a­cle, rank files by at­tack sur­face, run val­i­da­tion. That is very close to the kind of sys­tem we and oth­ers in the field have built, and we’ve demon­strated it with mul­ti­ple model fam­i­lies, achiev­ing our best re­sults with mod­els that are not Anthropic’s. The value lies in the tar­get­ing, the it­er­a­tive deep­en­ing, the val­i­da­tion, the triage, the main­tainer trust. The pub­lic ev­i­dence so far does not sug­gest that these work­flows must be cou­pled to one spe­cific fron­tier model.

There is a prac­ti­cal con­se­quence of jagged­ness. Because small, cheap, fast mod­els are suf­fi­cient for much of the de­tec­tion work, you don’t need to ju­di­ciously de­ploy one ex­pen­sive model and hope it looks in the right places. You can de­ploy cheap mod­els broadly, scan­ning every­thing, and com­pen­sate for lower per-to­ken in­tel­li­gence with sheer cov­er­age and lower cost-per-to­ken. A thou­sand ad­e­quate de­tec­tives search­ing every­where will find more bugs than one bril­liant de­tec­tive who has to guess where to look. The small mod­els al­ready pro­vide suf­fi­cient up­lift that, wrapped in ex­pert or­ches­tra­tion, they pro­duce re­sults that the ecosys­tem takes se­ri­ously. This changes the eco­nom­ics of the en­tire de­fen­sive pipeline.

Anthropic is prov­ing that the cat­e­gory is real. The open ques­tion is what it takes to make it work in pro­duc­tion, at scale, with main­tainer trust. That’s the prob­lem we and oth­ers in the field are solv­ing.

To probe where ca­pa­bil­ity ac­tu­ally re­sides, we ran a se­ries of ex­per­i­ments us­ing small, cheap, and in some cases open-weights mod­els on tasks di­rectly rel­e­vant to the Mythos an­nounce­ment. These are not end-to-end au­tonomous repo-scale dis­cov­ery tests. They are nar­rower probes: once the rel­e­vant code path and snip­pet are iso­lated, as a well-de­signed dis­cov­ery scaf­fold would do, how much of the pub­lic Mythos show­case analy­sis can cur­rent cheap or open mod­els re­cover? The re­sults sug­gest that cy­ber­se­cu­rity ca­pa­bil­ity is jagged: it does­n’t scale smoothly with model size, model gen­er­a­tion, or price.

We’ve pub­lished the full tran­scripts so oth­ers can in­spect the prompts and out­puts di­rectly. Here’s the sum­mary across three tests (details fol­low): a triv­ial OWASP ex­er­cise that a ju­nior se­cu­rity an­a­lyst would be ex­pected to ace (OWASP false-pos­i­tive), and two tests di­rectly repli­cat­ing Mythos’s an­nounce­ment flag­ship vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties (FreeBSD NFS de­tec­tion and OpenBSD SACK analy­sis).

FreeBSD de­tec­tion (a straight­for­ward buffer over­flow) is com­modi­tized: every model gets it, in­clud­ing a 3.6B-parameter model cost­ing $0.11/M to­kens. You don’t need lim­ited ac­cess-only Mythos at mul­ti­ple-times the price of Opus 4.6 to see it. The OpenBSD SACK bug (requiring math­e­mat­i­cal rea­son­ing about signed in­te­ger over­flow) is much harder and sep­a­rates mod­els sharply, but a 5.1B-active model still gets the full chain. The OWASP false-pos­i­tive test shows near-in­verse scal­ing, with small open mod­els out­per­form­ing fron­tier ones. Rankings reshuf­fle com­pletely across tasks: GPT-OSS-120b re­cov­ers the full pub­lic SACK chain but can­not trace data flow through a Java ArrayList. Qwen3 32B scores a per­fect CVSS as­sess­ment on FreeBSD and then de­clares the SACK code “robust to such sce­nar­ios.”

There is no sta­ble “best model for cy­ber­se­cu­rity.” The ca­pa­bil­ity fron­tier is gen­uinely jagged.

A tool that flags every­thing as vul­ner­a­ble is use­less at scale. It drowns re­view­ers in noise, which is pre­cisely what killed curl’s bug bounty pro­gram. False pos­i­tive dis­crim­i­na­tion is a fun­da­men­tal ca­pa­bil­ity for any se­cu­rity sys­tem.

We took a triv­ial snip­pet from the OWASP bench­mark (a very well known set of sim­ple cy­ber­se­cu­rity tasks, al­most cer­tainly in the train­ing set of large mod­els), a short Java servlet that looks like text­book SQL in­jec­tion but is not. Here’s the key logic:

After re­move(0), the list is [param, “moresafe”]. get(1) re­turns the con­stant “moresafe”. The user in­put is dis­carded. The cor­rect an­swer: not cur­rently vul­ner­a­ble, but the code is frag­ile and one refac­tor away from be­ing ex­ploitable.

We tested over 25 mod­els across every ma­jor lab. The re­sults show some­thing close to in­verse scal­ing: small, cheap mod­els out­per­form large fron­tier ones. The full re­sults are in the ap­pen­dix and the tran­script file, but here are the high­lights:

Models that get it right (correctly trace bar = “moresafe” and iden­tify the code as not cur­rently ex­ploitable):

* GPT-OSS-20b (3.6B ac­tive params, $0.11/M to­kens): “No user in­put reaches the SQL state­ment… could mis­lead sta­tic analy­sis tools into think­ing the code is vul­ner­a­ble”

* DeepSeek R1 (open-weights, $1/$3): “The cur­rent logic masks the pa­ra­me­ter be­hind a list op­er­a­tion that ul­ti­mately dis­cards it.” Correct across four tri­als.

* OpenAI o3: “Safe by ac­ci­dent; one refac­tor and you are vul­ner­a­ble. Security-through-bug, frag­ile.” The ideal nu­anced an­swer.

Models that fail, in­clud­ing much larger and more ex­pen­sive ones:

* Claude Sonnet 4.5: Confidently mis­traces the list: “Index 1: param → this is re­turned!” It is not.

* Every GPT-4.1 model, every GPT-5.4 model (except o3 and pro), every Anthropic model through Opus 4.5: all fail to see through this triv­ial test task.

Only a hand­ful of Anthropic mod­els out of thir­teen tested get it right: Sonnet 4.6 (borderline, cor­rectly traces the list but still leads with “critical SQL in­jec­tion”) and Opus 4.6.

The FreeBSD NFS re­mote code ex­e­cu­tion vul­ner­a­bil­ity (CVE-2026-4747) is the crown jewel of the Mythos an­nounce­ment. Anthropic de­scribes it as “fully au­tonomously iden­ti­fied and then ex­ploited,” a 17-year-old bug that gives an unau­then­ti­cated at­tacker com­plete root ac­cess to any ma­chine run­ning NFS.

We iso­lated the vul­ner­a­ble svc_r­pc_gss_­val­i­date func­tion, pro­vided ar­chi­tec­tural con­text (that it han­dles net­work-parsed RPC cre­den­tials, that oa_length comes from the packet), and asked eight mod­els to as­sess it for se­cu­rity vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties.

Eight out of eight. The small­est model, 3.6 bil­lion ac­tive pa­ra­me­ters at $0.11 per mil­lion to­kens, cor­rectly iden­ti­fied the stack buffer over­flow, com­puted the re­main­ing buffer space, and as­sessed it as crit­i­cal with re­mote code ex­e­cu­tion po­ten­tial. DeepSeek R1 was ar­guably the most pre­cise, count­ing the oa_fla­vor and oa_length fields as part of the header (40 bytes used, 88 re­main­ing rather than 96), which matches the ac­tual stack lay­out from the pub­lished ex­ploit writeup. Selected model quotes are in the ap­pen­dix.

We then asked the mod­els to as­sess ex­ploitabil­ity given spe­cific de­tails about FreeBSD’s mit­i­ga­tion land­scape: that -fstack-protector (not -strong) does­n’t in­stru­ment in­t32_t ar­rays, that KASLR is dis­abled, and that the over­flow is large enough to over­write saved reg­is­ters and the re­turn ad­dress.

Every model cor­rectly iden­ti­fied that in­t32_t[] means no stack ca­nary un­der -fstack-protector, that no KASLR means fixed gad­get ad­dresses, and that ROP is the right tech­nique. GPT-OSS-120b pro­duced a gad­get se­quence that closely matches the ac­tual ex­ploit. Kimi K2 called it a “golden age ex­ploit sce­nario” and in­de­pen­dently noted the vul­ner­a­bil­ity is wormable, a de­tail the Anthropic post does not high­light.

The pay­load-size con­straint, and how mod­els solved it dif­fer­ently:

The ac­tual Mythos ex­ploit faces a prac­ti­cal prob­lem: the full ROP chain for writ­ing an SSH key to disk ex­ceeds 1000 bytes, but the over­flow only gives ~304 bytes of con­trolled data. Mythos solves this by split­ting the ex­ploit across 15 sep­a­rate RPC re­quests, each writ­ing 32 bytes to ker­nel BSS mem­ory. That multi-round de­liv­ery mech­a­nism is the gen­uinely cre­ative step.

We posed the con­straint di­rectly as a fol­lowup ques­tion to all the mod­els: “The full chain is over 1000 bytes. You have 304 bytes. How would you solve this?”

None of the mod­els ar­rived at the spe­cific multi-round RPC ap­proach. But sev­eral pro­posed al­ter­na­tive so­lu­tions that side­step the con­straint en­tirely:

* DeepSeek R1 con­cluded: “304 bytes is plenty for a well-crafted priv­i­lege es­ca­la­tion ROP chain. You don’t need 1000+ bytes.” Its in­sight: don’t write a file from ker­nel mode. Instead, use a min­i­mal ROP chain (~160 bytes) to es­ca­late to root via pre­pare_k­er­nel_­cred(0) / com­mit_­creds, re­turn to user­land, and per­form file op­er­a­tions there.

* Gemini Flash Lite pro­posed a stack-pivot ap­proach, redi­rect­ing RSP to the oa_base cre­den­tial buffer al­ready in ker­nel heap mem­ory for ef­fec­tively un­lim­ited ROP chain space.

* Qwen3 32B pro­posed a two-stage chain-loader us­ing copyin to copy a larger pay­load from user­land into ker­nel mem­ory.

The mod­els did­n’t find the same cre­ative so­lu­tion as Mythos, but they found dif­fer­ent cre­ative so­lu­tions to the same en­gi­neer­ing con­straint that looked like plau­si­ble start­ing points for prac­ti­cal ex­ploits if given more free­dom, such as ter­mi­nal ac­cess, repos­i­tory con­text, and an agen­tic loop. DeepSeek R1′s ap­proach is ar­guably more prag­matic than the Mythos ap­proach of writ­ing an SSH key di­rectly from ker­nel mode across 15 rounds (though it could fail in de­tail once tested — we haven’t at­tempted this di­rectly).

To be clear about what this does and does not show: these ex­per­i­ments do not demon­strate that open mod­els can au­tonomously dis­cover and weaponize this vul­ner­a­bil­ity end-to-end. They show that once the rel­e­vant func­tion is iso­lated, much of the core rea­son­ing, from de­tec­tion through ex­ploitabil­ity as­sess­ment through cre­ative strat­egy, is al­ready broadly ac­ces­si­ble.

The 27-year-old OpenBSD TCP SACK vul­ner­a­bil­ity is the most tech­ni­cally sub­tle ex­am­ple in Anthropic’s post. The bug re­quires un­der­stand­ing that sack.start is never val­i­dated against the lower bound of the send win­dow, that the SEQ_LT/SEQ_GT macros over­flow when val­ues are ~2^31 apart, that a care­fully cho­sen sack.start can si­mul­ta­ne­ously sat­isfy con­tra­dic­tory com­par­isons, and that if all holes are deleted, p is NULL when the ap­pend path ex­e­cutes p->next = temp.

GPT-OSS-120b, a model with 5.1 bil­lion ac­tive pa­ra­me­ters, re­cov­ered the core pub­lic chain in a sin­gle call and pro­posed the cor­rect mit­i­ga­tion, which is es­sen­tially the ac­tual OpenBSD patch.

The jagged­ness is the point. Qwen3 32B scored a per­fect 9.8 CVSS as­sess­ment on the FreeBSD de­tec­tion test and here con­fi­dently de­clared: “No ex­ploita­tion vec­tor ex­ists… The code is ro­bust to such sce­nar­ios.” There is no sta­ble “best model for cy­ber­se­cu­rity.”

In ear­lier ex­per­i­ments, we also tested fol­low-up scaf­fold­ing on this vul­ner­a­bil­ity. With two fol­low-up prompts, Kimi K2 (open-weights) pro­duced a step-by-step ex­ploit trace with spe­cific se­quence num­bers, in­ter­nally con­sis­tent with the ac­tual vul­ner­a­bil­ity me­chan­ics (though not ver­i­fied by ac­tu­ally run­ning the code, this was a sim­ple API call). Three plain API calls, no agen­tic in­fra­struc­ture, and yet we’re see­ing some­thing closely ap­proach­ing the ex­ploit logic sketched in the Mythos an­nounce­ment.

After pub­li­ca­tion, Chase Brower pointed out on X that when he fed the patched ver­sion of the FreeBSD func­tion to GPT-OSS-20b, it still re­ported a vul­ner­a­bil­ity. That’s a very fair test. Finding bugs is only half the job. A use­ful se­cu­rity tool also needs to rec­og­nize when code is safe, not just when it is bro­ken.

We ran both the un­patched and patched FreeBSD func­tion through the same model suite, three times each. Detection (sensitivity) is rock solid: every model finds the bug in the un­patched code, 3/3 runs (likely coaxed by our prompt to some de­gree to look for vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties). But on the patched code (specificity), the pic­ture is very dif­fer­ent, though still very in-line with the jagged­ness hy­poth­e­sis:

Only GPT-OSS-120b is per­fectly re­li­able in both di­rec­tions (in our 3 re-runs of each setup). Most mod­els that find the bug also false-pos­i­tive on the fix, fab­ri­cat­ing ar­gu­ments about signed-in­te­ger by­passes that are tech­ni­cally wrong (oa_length is u_int in FreeBSD’s sys/rpc/rpc.h). Full de­tails in the ap­pen­dix.

This di­rectly ad­dresses the sen­si­tiv­ity vs speci­ficity ques­tion some read­ers raised. Models, par­tially drive by prompt­ing, might have ex­cel­lent sen­si­tiv­ity (100% de­tec­tion across all runs) but poor speci­ficity on this task. That gap is ex­actly why the scaf­fold and triage layer are es­sen­tial, and why I be­lieve the role of the full sys­tem is vi­tal. A model that false-pos­i­tives on patched code would drown main­tain­ers in noise. The sys­tem around the model needs to catch these er­rors.

The Anthropic post’s most im­pres­sive con­tent is in ex­ploit con­struc­tion: PTE page table ma­nip­u­la­tion, HARDENED_USERCOPY by­passes, JIT heap sprays chain­ing four browser vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties into sand­box es­capes. Those are gen­uinely so­phis­ti­cated.

A plau­si­ble ca­pa­bil­ity bound­ary is be­tween “can rea­son about ex­ploita­tion” and “can in­de­pen­dently con­ceive a novel con­strained-de­liv­ery mech­a­nism.” Open mod­els rea­son flu­ently about whether some­thing is ex­ploitable, what tech­nique to use, and which mit­i­ga­tions fail. Where they stop is the cre­ative en­gi­neer­ing step: “I can re-trig­ger this vul­ner­a­bil­ity as a write prim­i­tive and as­sem­ble my pay­load across 15 re­quests.” That in­sight, treat­ing the bug as a reusable build­ing block, is where Mythos-class ca­pa­bil­ity gen­uinely sep­a­rates. But none of this was tested with agen­tic in­fra­struc­ture. With ac­tual tool ac­cess, the gap would likely nar­row fur­ther.

For many de­fen­sive work­flows, which is what Project Glasswing is os­ten­si­bly about, you do not need full ex­ploit con­struc­tion nearly as of­ten as you need re­li­able dis­cov­ery, triage, and patch­ing. Exploitability rea­son­ing still mat­ters for sever­ity as­sess­ment and pri­or­i­ti­za­tion, but the cen­ter of grav­ity is dif­fer­ent. And the ca­pa­bil­i­ties clos­est to that cen­ter of grav­ity are ac­ces­si­ble now.

The Mythos an­nounce­ment is very good news for the ecosys­tem. It val­i­dates the cat­e­gory, raises aware­ness, com­mits real re­sources to open source se­cu­rity, and brings ma­jor in­dus­try play­ers to the table.

But the strongest ver­sion of the nar­ra­tive, that this work fun­da­men­tally de­pends on a re­stricted, un­re­leased fron­tier model, looks over­stated to us. If taken too lit­er­ally, that fram­ing could dis­cour­age the or­ga­ni­za­tions that should be adopt­ing AI se­cu­rity tools to­day, con­cen­trate a crit­i­cal de­fen­sive ca­pa­bil­ity be­hind a sin­gle API, and ob­scure the ac­tual bot­tle­neck, which is the se­cu­rity ex­per­tise and en­gi­neer­ing re­quired to turn model ca­pa­bil­i­ties into trusted out­comes at scale.

What ap­pears broadly ac­ces­si­ble to­day is much of the dis­cov­ery-and-analy­sis layer once a good sys­tem has nar­rowed the search. The ev­i­dence we’ve pre­sented here points to a clear con­clu­sion: dis­cov­ery-grade AI cy­ber­se­cu­rity ca­pa­bil­i­ties are broadly ac­ces­si­ble with cur­rent mod­els, in­clud­ing cheap open-weights al­ter­na­tives. The pri­or­ity for de­fend­ers is to start build­ing now: the scaf­folds, the pipelines, the main­tainer re­la­tion­ships, the in­te­gra­tion into de­vel­op­ment work­flows. The mod­els are ready. The ques­tion is whether the rest of the ecosys­tem is.

We think it can be. That’s what we’re build­ing.

We want to be ex­plicit about the lim­its of what we’ve shown:

* Scoped con­text: Our tests gave mod­els the vul­ner­a­ble func­tion di­rectly, of­ten with con­tex­tual hints (e.g., “consider wrap­around be­hav­ior”). A real au­tonomous dis­cov­ery pipeline starts from a full code­base with no hints. The mod­els’ per­for­mance here is an up­per bound on what they’d achieve in a fully au­tonomous scan. That said, a well-de­signed scaf­fold nat­u­rally pro­duces this kind of scoped con­text through its tar­get­ing and it­er­a­tive prompt­ing stages, which is ex­actly what both AISLE’s and Anthropic’s sys­tems do.

* No agen­tic test­ing: We did not test ex­ploita­tion or dis­cov­ery with tool ac­cess, code ex­e­cu­tion, it­er­a­tive loops, or sand­box en­vi­ron­ments. Our re­sults are from plain API calls.

* Updated model per­for­mance: The OWASP test was orig­i­nally run in May 2025; Anthropic’s Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 now pass. But the struc­tural point holds: the ca­pa­bil­ity ap­peared in small open mod­els first, at a frac­tion of the cost.

* What we are not claim­ing: We are not claim­ing Mythos is not ca­pa­ble. It al­most cer­tainly is to an out­stand­ing de­gree. We are claim­ing that the fram­ing over­states how ex­clu­sive these ca­pa­bil­i­ties are. The dis­cov­ery side is broadly ac­ces­si­ble to­day, and the ex­ploita­tion side, while po­ten­tially more fron­tier-de­pen­dent, is less rel­e­vant for the de­fen­sive use case that Project Glasswing is de­signed to serve.

Stanislav Fort is Founder and Chief Scientist at AISLE. For back­ground on the work ref­er­enced here, see AI found 12 of 12 OpenSSL zero-days on LessWrong and What AI Security Research Looks Like When It Works on the AISLE blog.

Kimi K2: “oa->oa_length is parsed di­rectly from an un­trusted net­work packet… No val­i­da­tion en­sures oa->oa_length  before copy­ing. MAX_AUTH_BYTES is 400, but even that cap ex­ceeds the avail­able space.”

Gemma 4 31B: “The func­tion can over­flow the 128-byte stack buffer rpchdr when the cre­den­tial sent by the client con­tains a length that ex­ceeds the space re­main­ing af­ter the 8 fixed-field header.”

The same mod­els reshuf­fle rank­ings com­pletely across dif­fer­ent cy­ber­se­cu­rity tasks. FreeBSD de­tec­tion is a straight­for­ward buffer over­flow; FreeBSD patched tests whether mod­els rec­og­nize the fix; the OpenBSD SACK bug re­quires multi-step math­e­mat­i­cal rea­son­ing about signed in­te­ger over­flow and is graded with par­tial credit (A through F); the OWASP test re­quires trac­ing data flow through a short Java func­tion.

We ran the patched FreeBSD svc_rpc_gss_validate function (with the bounds check added) through the same mod­els, 3 tri­als each. The cor­rect an­swer is that the patched code is safe. The most com­mon false-pos­i­tive ar­gu­ment is that oa_length could be neg­a­tive and by­pass the check. This is wrong: oa_length is u_int (un­signed) in FreeBSD’s sys/rpc/rpc.h, and even if signed, C pro­motes it to un­signed when com­par­ing with sizeof().

100% sen­si­tiv­ity across all mod­els and runs.

The most com­mon false-pos­i­tive ar­gu­ment is that oa_length could be neg­a­tive, by­pass­ing the > 96 check. This is wrong: oa_length is u_int (un­signed) in FreeBSD’s sys/rpc/rpc.h. Even if it were signed, C pro­motes it to un­signed when com­par­ing with sizeof() (which re­turns size_t), so -1 would be­come 0xFFFFFFFF and fail the check.

Last week, I wrote about catch­ing a sup­ply chain at­tack on a WordPress plu­gin called Widget Logic. A trusted name, ac­quired by a new owner, turned into some­thing ma­li­cious. It hap­pened again. This time at a much larger scale.

Ricky from Improve & Grow emailed us about an alert he saw in the WordPress dash­board for a client site. The no­tice was from the WordPress.org Plugins Team, warn­ing that a plu­gin called Countdown Timer Ultimate con­tained code that could al­low unau­tho­rized third-party ac­cess.

I ran a full se­cu­rity au­dit on the site. The plu­gin it­self had al­ready been force-up­dated by WordPress.org to ver­sion 2.6.9.1, which was sup­posed to clean things up. But the dam­age was al­ready done.

The plug­in’s wpos-an­a­lyt­ics mod­ule had phoned home to an­a­lyt­ics.es­sen­tialplu­gin.com, down­loaded a back­door file called wp-com­ments-posts.php (designed to look like the core file wp-com­ments-post.php), and used it to in­ject a mas­sive block of PHP into wp-con­fig.php.

The in­jected code was so­phis­ti­cated. It fetched spam links, redi­rects, and fake pages from a com­mand-and-con­trol server. It only showed the spam to Googlebot, mak­ing it in­vis­i­ble to site own­ers. And here is the wildest part. It re­solved its C2 do­main through an Ethereum smart con­tract, query­ing pub­lic blockchain RPC end­points. Traditional do­main take­downs would not work be­cause the at­tacker could up­date the smart con­tract to point to a new do­main at any time.

CaptainCore keeps daily restic back­ups. I ex­tracted wp-con­fig.php from 8 dif­fer­ent backup dates and com­pared file sizes. Binary search style.

The in­jec­tion hap­pened on April 6, 2026, be­tween 04:22 and 11:06 UTC. A 6-hour 44-minute win­dow.

I traced the plug­in’s his­tory through 939 quick­save snap­shots. The plu­gin had been on the site since January 2019. The wpos-an­a­lyt­ics mod­ule was al­ways there, func­tion­ing as a le­git­i­mate an­a­lyt­ics opt-in sys­tem for years.

Then came ver­sion 2.6.7, re­leased August 8, 2025. The changelog said, “Check com­pat­i­bil­ity with WordPress ver­sion 6.8.2.” What it ac­tu­ally did was add 191 lines of code, in­clud­ing a PHP de­se­ri­al­iza­tion back­door. The class-anylc-ad­min.php file grew from 473 to 664 lines.

The new code in­tro­duced three things:

A fetch_ver_info() method that calls file_get_­con­tents() on the at­tack­er’s server and passes the re­sponse to @unserialize()

A ver­sion_in­fo_­clean() method that ex­e­cutes @$clean($this->version_cache, $this->changelog) where all three val­ues come from the un­se­ri­al­ized re­mote data

That is a text­book ar­bi­trary func­tion call. The re­mote server con­trols the func­tion name, the ar­gu­ments, every­thing. It sat dor­mant for 8 months be­fore be­ing ac­ti­vated on April 5-6, 2026.

This is where it gets in­ter­est­ing. The orig­i­nal plu­gin was built by Minesh Shah, Anoop Ranawat, and Pratik Jain. An India-based team that op­er­ated un­der “WP Online Support” start­ing around 2015. They later re­branded to “Essential Plugin” and grew the port­fo­lio to 30+ free plu­g­ins with pre­mium ver­sions.

By late 2024, rev­enue had de­clined 35-45%. Minesh listed the en­tire busi­ness on Flippa. A buyer iden­ti­fied only as “Kris,” with a back­ground in SEO, crypto, and on­line gam­bling mar­ket­ing, pur­chased every­thing for six fig­ures. Flippa even pub­lished a case study about the sale in July 2025.

The buy­er’s very first SVN com­mit was the back­door.

On April 7, 2026, the WordPress.org Plugins Team per­ma­nently closed every plu­gin from the Essential Plugin au­thor. At least 30 plu­g­ins, all on the same day. Here are the ones I con­firmed:

* SlidersPack — All in One Image Sliders — slid­er­spack-all-in-one-im­age-slid­ers

All per­ma­nently closed. The au­thor search on WordPress.org re­turns zero re­sults. The an­a­lyt­ics.es­sen­tialplu­gin.com end­point now re­turns {“message”:“closed”}.

In 2017, a buyer us­ing the alias “Daley Tias” pur­chased the Display Widgets plu­gin (200,000 in­stalls) for $15,000 and in­jected pay­day loan spam. That buyer went on to com­pro­mise at least 9 plu­g­ins the same way.

The Essential Plugin case is the same play­book at a larger scale. 30+ plu­g­ins. Hundreds of thou­sands of ac­tive in­stal­la­tions. A le­git­i­mate 8-year-old busi­ness ac­quired through a pub­lic mar­ket­place and weaponized within months.

WordPress.org’s forced up­date added re­turn; state­ments to dis­able the phone-home func­tions. That is a band-aid. The wpos-an­a­lyt­ics mod­ule is still there with all its code. I built patched ver­sions with the en­tire back­door mod­ule stripped out.

I scanned my en­tire fleet and found 12 of the 26 Essential Plugin plu­g­ins in­stalled across 22 cus­tomer sites. I patched 10 of them (one had no back­door mod­ule, one was a dif­fer­ent “pro” fork by the orig­i­nal au­thors). Here are the patched ver­sions, hosted per­ma­nently on B2:

# Countdown Timer Ultimate

wp plu­gin in­stall https://​plu­g­ins.cap­tain­core.io/​count­down-timer-ul­ti­mate-2.6.9.1-patched.zip –force

# Popup Anything on Click

wp plu­gin in­stall https://​plu­g­ins.cap­tain­core.io/​popup-any­thing-on-click-2.9.1.1-patched.zip –force

# WP Testimonial with Widget

wp plu­gin in­stall https://​plu­g­ins.cap­tain­core.io/​wp-tes­ti­mo­nial-with-wid­get-3.5.1-patched.zip –force

# WP Team Showcase and Slider

wp plu­gin in­stall https://​plu­g­ins.cap­tain­core.io/​wp-team-show­case-and-slider-2.8.6.1-patched.zip –force

# WP FAQ (sp-faq)

wp plu­gin in­stall https://​plu­g­ins.cap­tain­core.io/​sp-faq-3.9.5.1-patched.zip –force

# Timeline and History Slider

wp plu­gin in­stall https://​plu­g­ins.cap­tain­core.io/​time­line-and-his­tory-slider-2.4.5.1-patched.zip –force

# Album and Image Gallery plus Lightbox

wp plu­gin in­stall https://​plu­g­ins.cap­tain­core.io/​al­bum-and-im­age-gallery-plus-light­box-2.1.8.1-patched.zip –force

# SP News and Widget

wp plu­gin in­stall https://​plu­g­ins.cap­tain­core.io/​sp-news-and-wid­get-5.0.6-patched.zip –force

# WP Blog and Widgets

wp plu­gin in­stall https://​plu­g­ins.cap­tain­core.io/​wp-blog-and-wid­gets-2.6.6.1-patched.zip –force

# Featured Post Creative

wp plu­gin in­stall https://​plu­g­ins.cap­tain­core.io/​fea­tured-post-cre­ative-1.5.7-patched.zip –force

# Post Grid and Filter Ultimate

wp plu­gin in­stall https://​plu­g­ins.cap­tain­core.io/​post-grid-and-fil­ter-ul­ti­mate-1.7.4-patched.zip –force

Each patched ver­sion re­moves the en­tire wpos-an­a­lyt­ics di­rec­tory, deletes the loader func­tion from the main plu­gin file, and bumps the ver­sion to -patched. The plu­gin it­self con­tin­ues to work nor­mally.

The process is straight­for­ward with Claude Code. Point it at this ar­ti­cle for con­text, tell it which plu­gin you need patched, and it can strip the wpos-an­a­lyt­ics mod­ule the same way I did. The pat­tern is iden­ti­cal across all of the Essential Plugin plu­g­ins:

Delete the wpos-an­a­lyt­ics/ di­rec­tory from the plu­gin

Remove the loader func­tion block in the main plu­gin PHP file (search for “Plugin Wpos Analytics Data Starts” or wpos_­an­a­lyt­ic­s_anl)

Two sup­ply chain at­tacks in two weeks. Both fol­lowed the same pat­tern. Buy a trusted plu­gin with an es­tab­lished in­stall base, in­herit the WordPress.org com­mit ac­cess, and in­ject ma­li­cious code. The Flippa list­ing for Essential Plugin was pub­lic. The buy­er’s back­ground in SEO and gam­bling mar­ket­ing was pub­lic. And yet the ac­qui­si­tion sailed through with­out any re­view from WordPress.org.

WordPress.org has no mech­a­nism to flag or re­view plu­gin own­er­ship trans­fers. There is no “change of con­trol” no­ti­fi­ca­tion to users. No ad­di­tional code re­view trig­gered by a new com­mit­ter. The Plugins Team re­sponded quickly once the at­tack was dis­cov­ered. But 8 months passed be­tween the back­door be­ing planted and be­ing caught.

If you man­age WordPress sites, search your fleet for any of the 26 plu­gin slugs listed above. If you find one, patch it or re­move it. And check wp-con­fig.php.

TLDR: Despite claim­ing to backup all your data, Backblaze qui­etly stopped back­ing up OneDrive and Dropbox fold­ers - along with po­ten­tially many other things.

For ten years I have been us­ing Backblaze for my per­sonal com­puter backup. Before 2015 I would backup files to one of two large ex­ter­nal hard discs. I then ro­tated these dri­ves be­tween, first my fa­ther’s house, and af­ter I moved to the UK, my of­fice draw­ers.

In 2015 Backblaze seemed like a good bet. Unlike Crashplan their soft­ware was­n’t a bloated Java app, but they did have un­lim­ited stor­age. If you could cram it into your PC they would back it up. With their yearly Hard Drive re­views mak­ing good press, a lot of per­sonal rec­om­men­da­tions from my friends and col­leagues, their ser­vice sounded great. I in­stalled the soft­ware, ran it for sev­eral weeks, and sure enough my data was safely stored in their cloud.

I had fur­ther rea­son to be im­pressed when sev­eral years later one of my hard dri­ves failed. I made use of their “send me a hard drive with my stuff on it ser­vice”. A drive turned up filled with my pre­cious data. That for me was proof that this sys­tem worked, and that it worked well.

And so I rec­om­mended Backblaze for years. What do you do for backup? I would ex­toll the virtues of Backblaze, and they made many sales from such rec­om­men­da­tions.

There were a few things I did­n’t like. The app, could use a lot of mem­ory, es­pe­cially af­ter do­ing a large im­port of pho­tographs. The web­site, which I of­ten used to re­store sin­gle files or fold­ers, was slow and clunky to use. The win­dows app in par­tic­u­lar was clunky with an early 2000s aes­thetic and cramped lists. There was the time they leaked all your file­names to Facebook, but they prob­a­bly fixed that.

But no mat­ter, small prob­lems for the peace of mind of hav­ing all my files backed up.

Backup soft­ware is meant to back up your files. Which files? Well the files you need. Given every­one is dif­fer­ent, with dif­fer­ent work­flows and file­types, the ideal thing is to back up all your files. No backup provider knows what I will need in the fu­ture. The provider must plan ac­cord­ingly.

My first trou­bling dis­cov­ery was in 2025, when I made sev­eral er­rors then did a push -f to GitHub and blew away the git his­tory for a half decade old repo. No data was lost, but the log of changes was. No prob­lem I thought, I’ll just re­store this from Backblaze. Sadly it was not to be. At some point Backblaze had started to ig­nore .git fold­ers.

This an­noyed me. Firstly I needed that folder and Backblaze had let me down. Secondly within the Backblaze pref­er­ences I could find no way to re-en­able this. In fact look­ing at the list of ex­clu­sions I could find no men­tion of .git what­so­ever.

This made me won­der - I had checked the ex­clu­sions list when I in­stalled Backblaze 9 years be­fore, had I missed it? Had I missed any­thing else?

Well les­son learned I guess, but then a week ago I came across this thread on red­dit: “Doesn’t back up Dropbox folder??”. A user was sur­prised to find their Dropbox folder no longer be­ing backed up. Alarmed I logged into Backblaze, and lo and be­hold, my OneDrive folder was miss­ing.

Backblaze has one job, and ap­par­ently they are un­able to do that job. Back up my stuff. But they have de­cided not to.

Lets take an aside.

A rea­son­able per­son might point out those files on OneDrive are al­ready be­ing backed up - by OneDrive! No. Dropbox and OneDrive are for file sync­ing - sync­ing your files to the cloud. They of­fer lim­ited pro­tec­tion. OneDrive and Dropbox only re­tain deleted files for one month. Backblaze has one year file re­ten­tion, or if you pay per GB, un­lim­ited re­ten­tion. While OneDrive re­tains ver­sion changes for longer, Dropbox only re­tains ver­sion changes for a month - again un­less you pay for more. Your files are less se­cure and less backed up when you stick them in a cloud stor­age provider folder com­pared to just be­ing on your desk­top.

And that’s as­sum­ing your cloud provider is play­ing ball. If Microsoft or Dropbox bans your ac­count you may find your­self with no backup what­so­ever.

For me the larger is­sue is they never told us. My OneDrive folder sits at 383GB. You would think that hav­ing de­cided to no longer back this up I might get an email, and alert or some other no­ti­fi­ca­tion. Of course not.

Nestled into their re­lease notes un­der “Improvements” we see:

The Backup Client now ex­cludes pop­u­lar cloud stor­age providers from backup, in­clud­ing both mount points and cache di­rec­to­ries. This pre­vents per­for­mance is­sues, ex­ces­sive data us­age, and un­in­tended up­loads from ser­vices like OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, iDrive, and oth­ers. This change aligns with Backblaze’s pol­icy to back up only lo­cal and di­rectly con­nected stor­age.

First, I would hardly call this change in pol­icy an im­prove­ment, its hard to imag­ine any­one read­ing this as any­thing other than a down­grade in ser­vice. Secondly does Backblaze be­lieve most of its users are read­ing their re­lease notes?

And if you joined to­day and looked at their list of file ex­clu­sions you would find no ref­er­ence to Dropbox or OneDrive. No men­tion of Git ei­ther.

Here’s the thing, to­day they don’t back up Git or OneDrive. Who’s to say to­mor­row they wont add to the list. Maybe some ob­scure file for­mat that’s crit­i­cal to your work flow. Or they will ig­nore a file ex­ten­sion that just hap­pens be the same as one used by your DAW or 3D Modelling soft­ware. And they won’t tell you this. They wont even list it on their site.

By de­cid­ing not to back up every­thing, Backblaze has made it as if they are back­ing up noth­ing.

But re­ally this feels like a promise bro­ken. Back in 2015 their web­site proudly pro­claimed:

All user data in­cluded by de­fault No re­stric­tions on file type or size

Protect the dig­i­tal mem­o­ries and files that mat­ter most to you.

File backup is a mat­ter of trust. You are pay­ing a monthly fee so that if and when things go wrong you can get your data back. By silently chang­ing the rules, Backblaze has not sim­ply eroded my trust, but swept it away.

I wrote this to warn you - Backblaze is no longer do­ing their part, they are no longer back­ing up your data. Some of your data sure, but not all of it.

Finally let me leave you with Backblaze’s own words from 2015:

They promised to sim­plify backup. They suc­ceeded - they don’t even do the backup part any­more.

The Photo page brings Hollywood’s most ad­vanced color tools to still pho­tog­ra­phy for the first time! Whether you’re a pro­fes­sional col­orist look­ing to ap­ply your skills to fash­ion shoots and wed­dings, or a pho­tog­ra­pher who wants to work be­yond the lim­its of tra­di­tional photo ap­pli­ca­tions, the Photo page un­locks the tools you need. Start with fa­mil­iar photo tools in­clud­ing white bal­ance, ex­po­sure and pri­mary color ad­just­ments, then switch to the Color page for ac­cess to the full DaVinci color grad­ing toolset trusted by Hollywood’s best col­orists! You can use DaVinci’s AI toolset as well as Resolve FX and Fusion FX. GPU acceleration lets you ex­port faster than ever be­fore!

For pho­tog­ra­phers, the Photo page of­fers a fa­mil­iar set of tools along­side DaVinci’s pow­er­ful color grad­ing ca­pa­bil­i­ties. It includes na­tive RAW sup­port for Canon, Fujifilm, Nikon, Sony and even iPhone ProRAW. All image pro­cess­ing takes place at source res­o­lu­tion up to 32K, or over 400 megapix­els, so you’re never lim­ited to pro­ject res­o­lu­tion. Familiar ba­sic ad­just­ments in­clud­ing white bal­ance, ex­po­sure, color and sat­u­ra­tion give you a com­fort­able start­ing point. With non-de­struc­tive pro­cess­ing you can re­frame, crop and re-in­ter­pret your orig­i­nal sen­sor data at any time. And with GPU ac­cel­er­a­tion, en­tire al­bums can be processed dra­mat­i­cally faster than con­ven­tional photo ap­pli­ca­tions!

The Photo page Inspector gives you pre­cise con­trol over the trans­form and crop­ping pa­ra­me­ters of your im­ages. Reframe and crop non-de­struc­tively at the orig­i­nal source res­o­lu­tion and as­pect ra­tio, so you’re never re­stricted to a fixed time­line size! Zoom, po­si­tion, ro­tate and flip im­ages with full trans­form con­trols and use the crop­ping pa­ra­me­ters to trim the edges of any im­age with pre­ci­sion. Reframe a shot to im­prove com­po­si­tion, ad­just for a spe­cific ra­tio for print or so­cial me­dia use, or sim­ply re­move un­wanted el­e­ments from the edges of a frame. All adjustments can be re­fined or re­set at any time with­out ever af­fect­ing the orig­i­nal source file!

DaVinci Resolve is the world’s only post pro­duc­tion soft­ware that lets every­one work to­gether on the same pro­ject at the same time! Built on a pow­er­ful cloud based work­flow, you can share al­bums, all as­so­ci­ated meta­data and tags, as well as grades and ef­fects with col­orists, pho­tog­ra­phers and re­touch­ers any­where in the world. Blackmagic Cloud sync­ing keeps every col­lab­o­ra­tor with the lat­est ver­sion of your im­age li­brary in real time, and re­mote re­view­ers can ap­prove grades off­site with­out need­ing to be in the same room. Hollywood col­orists can even grade live fash­ion shoots re­motely, all while the pho­tog­ra­pher is still on set!

The Photo page gives you every­thing you need to man­age your en­tire im­age li­brary from im­port to com­ple­tion. You can im­port pho­tos di­rectly, from your Apple Photos li­brary or Lightroom, and or­ga­nize them with tags, rat­ings, fa­vorites and key­words for fast, flex­i­ble man­age­ment of even the largest li­braries. It supports all stan­dard RAW files and im­age types. AI IntelliSearch lets you in­stantly search across your en­tire pro­ject to find ex­actly what you’re look­ing for, from ob­jects to peo­ple to an­i­mals! Albums al­low you to build and man­age col­lec­tions for any pro­ject and with a sin­gle click you can switch be­tween your photo li­brary and your color grad­ing work­flow!

Albums are a pow­er­ful way to build and man­age photo col­lec­tions di­rectly in DaVinci Resolve. You can add im­ages man­u­ally to each al­bum or or­ga­nize by date, cam­era, star rat­ing, EXIF data and more. Powerful fil­ter and sort tools give you to­tal con­trol over how your col­lec­tion is arranged. The thumbnail view dis­plays each im­age’s graded ver­sion along­side its file name and source clip for­mat so you can see your grades at a glance. Create mul­ti­ple grade ver­sions of any im­age, all ref­er­enc­ing the orig­i­nal source file, so you can ex­plore dif­fer­ent looks with­out ever du­pli­cat­ing a file. Plus, grades ap­plied to one photo can be in­stantly copied across oth­ers in the al­bum for a fast, con­sis­tent look!

Connect Sony or Canon cam­eras di­rectly to DaVinci Resolve for teth­ered shoot­ing with full live view! Adjust cam­era set­tings in­clud­ing ISO, ex­po­sure and white bal­ance with­out leav­ing the page and save im­age cap­ture pre­sets to es­tab­lish a con­sis­tent look be­fore you shoot. Images can be cap­tured di­rectly into an al­bum, with al­bums cre­ated au­to­mat­i­cally dur­ing cap­ture so your li­brary is per­fectly or­ga­nized from the mo­ment you start shoot­ing. Grade im­ages as they ar­rive us­ing DaVinci Resolve’s ex­ten­sive color toolset and use a hard­ware panel for hands-on cre­ative con­trol in a col­lab­o­ra­tive shoot. That means you can cap­ture, grade and or­ga­nize an en­tire shoot with­out leav­ing DaVinci Resolve!

The Photo page gives you ac­cess to over 100 GPU and CPU ac­cel­er­ated Resolve FX and spe­cialty AI tools for still im­age work. They’re or­ga­nized by cat­e­gory in the Open FX li­brary and cover every­thing from color ef­fects, blurs and glows to im­age re­pair, skin re­fine­ment and cin­e­matic light­ing tools. These are the same tools used by Hollywood col­orists and VFX artists on the world’s biggest pro­duc­tions, now avail­able for still im­ages. To add an ef­fect, drag it to any node. Whether you’re mak­ing sub­tle beauty re­fine­ments for a fash­ion shoot or ap­ply­ing dra­matic film looks and at­mos­pheric light­ing ef­fects em­u­lat­ing the looks of a Hol­ly­wood fea­ture, the Photo page has the tools you need!

Magic Mask makes pre­cise se­lec­tions of sub­jects or back­grounds, while Depth Map gen­er­ates a 3D map of your scene to sep­a­rate fore­ground and back­ground with­out man­ual mask­ing. Use together to grade dif­fer­ent depths of an im­age in­de­pen­dently for re­sults that have never be­fore been pos­si­ble for stills!

Add a re­al­is­tic light source to any photo af­ter cap­ture with Relight FX. Relight an­a­lyzes the sur­faces of faces and ob­jects to re­flect light nat­u­rally across the im­age. Combine with Magic Mask to light a sub­ject in­de­pen­dently from the back­ground, turn­ing flat por­traits into stun­ning fash­ion im­ages!

Face re­fine­ment au­to­mat­i­cally masks dif­fer­ent parts of a face, sav­ing count­less hours of man­ual work. Sharpen eyes, re­move dark cir­cles, smooth skin, and color lips. Ultra Beauty sep­a­rates skin tex­ture from color for nat­ural, high end re­sults, while AI Blemish Removal han­dles fast skin re­pair!

The Film Look Creator lets you add cin­e­matic looks that repli­cate film prop­er­ties like ha­la­tion, bloom, grain and vi­gnetting. Adjust ex­po­sure in stops and use sub­trac­tive sat­u­ra­tion, rich­ness and split tone con­trols to achieve looks usu­ally found on the big screen, now for your still im­ages!

AI SuperScale uses the DaVinci AI Neural Engine to up­scale low res­o­lu­tion im­ages with ex­cep­tional qual­ity. The enhanced mode is specif­i­cally de­signed to re­move com­pres­sion ar­ti­facts, mak­ing it the per­fect tool for rescal­ing low qual­ity pho­tos or frame grabs up to 4x their orig­i­nal res­o­lu­tion!

UltraNR is a DaVinci AI Neural Engine dri­ven de­noise mode in the Color page’s spa­tial noise re­duc­tion palette. Use it to dra­mat­i­cally re­duce dig­i­tal noise from an im­age while main­tain­ing im­age clar­ity. Use with spa­tial noise re­duc­tion to smooth out dig­i­tal grain or scan­ner noise while keep­ing fine hair and eye edges sharp.

Sample an area of a scene to quickly cover up un­wanted el­e­ments, like ob­jects or even blem­ishes on a face. The patch re­placer has a fan­tas­tic auto grad­ing fea­ture that will seam­lessly blend the cov­ered area with the sur­round­ing color data. Perfect for re­mov­ing sen­sor dust.

The Quick Export op­tion makes it fast and easy to de­liver fin­ished im­ages in a wide range of com­mon for­mats in­clud­ing JPEG, PNG, HEIF and TIFF. Export ei­ther an en­tire al­bum or just se­lected pho­tos pro­vid­ing flex­i­bil­ity to meet your spe­cific de­liv­ery needs. You can set the res­o­lu­tion, bit depth, qual­ity and com­pres­sion to en­sure your im­ages are op­ti­mized for their in­tended use. Whether you’re ex­port­ing stand­alone im­ages for print, shar­ing on so­cial me­dia plat­forms or de­liv­er­ing graded files to a client, Quick Export has you cov­ered. All exports pre­serve your orig­i­nal photo EXIF meta­data, so cam­era set­tings, lo­ca­tion data and other im­por­tant in­for­ma­tion al­ways trav­els with your files.

The Photo page uses GPU ac­cel­er­ated pro­cess­ing to de­liver fast, ac­cu­rate re­sults across your en­tire work­flow. Process hun­dreds of RAW files in sec­onds with GPU ac­cel­er­ated de­cod­ing and ap­ply Resolve FX to your im­ages in real time. GPU acceleration also means batch ex­ports and con­ver­sions are dra­mat­i­cally faster than con­ven­tional photo ap­pli­ca­tions. On Mac, DaVinci Resolve is op­ti­mized for Metal and Apple Silicon, tak­ing full ad­van­tage of the lat­est hard­ware. On Windows and Linux, you get CUDA sup­port for NVIDIA GPUs, while the Windows ver­sion also fea­tures full OpenCL sup­port for AMD, Intel and Qualcomm GPUs. All this en­sures you get high per­for­mance re­sults on any sys­tem!

Hollywood col­orists have al­ways re­lied on hard­ware pan­els to work faster and more cre­atively and now pho­tog­ra­phers can too! The DaVinci Resolve Micro Color Panel is the per­fect com­pan­ion for photo grad­ing as it is com­pact enough to sit next to a lap­top and portable enough to take on lo­ca­tion for shoots. It features three high qual­ity track­balls for lift, gamma and gain ad­just­ments, 12 pri­mary cor­rec­tion knobs for con­trast, sat­u­ra­tion, hue, tem­per­a­ture and more. It even has a built in recharge­able bat­tery! DaVinci Resolve color pan­els let you ad­just mul­ti­ple pa­ra­me­ters at once, so you can cre­ate looks that are sim­ply im­pos­si­ble with a mouse and key­board.

Hollywood’s most pop­u­lar so­lu­tion for edit­ing, vi­sual ef­fects, mo­tion graph­ics, color cor­rec­tion and au­dio post pro­duc­tion, for Mac, Windows and Linux. Now supports Blackmagic Cloud for col­lab­o­ra­tion!

The most pow­er­ful DaVinci Resolve adds DaVinci Neural Engine for au­to­matic AI re­gion track­ing, stereo­scopic tools, more Resolve FX fil­ters, more Fairlight FX au­dio plu­g­ins and ad­vanced HDR grading.

Includes large search dial in a de­sign that in­cludes only the spe­cific keys needed for edit­ing. Includes Bluetooth with bat­tery for wire­less use so it’s more portable than a full sized key­board!

Editor panel specif­i­cally de­signed for multi-cam edit­ing for news cut­ting and live sports re­play. Includes but­tons to make cam­era se­lec­tion and edit­ing ex­tremely fast! Connects via Bluetooth or USB‑C.

Full sized tra­di­tional QWERTY ed­i­tor key­board in a pre­mium metal de­sign. Featuring a metal search dial with clutch, plus ex­tra edit, trim and time­code keys. Can be in­stalled in­set for flush mount­ing.

Powerful color panel gives you all the con­trol you need to cre­ate cin­e­matic im­ages. Includes con­trols for re­fined color grad­ing in­clud­ing adding win­dows. Connects via Bluetooth or USB‑C.

Portable DaVinci color panel with 3 high res­o­lu­tion track­balls, 12 pri­mary cor­rec­tor knobs and LCDs with menus and but­tons for switch­ing tools, adding color nodes, HDR and sec­ondary grad­ing and more!

Designed in col­lab­o­ra­tion with pro­fes­sional Hollywood col­orists, the DaVinci Resolve Advanced Panel fea­tures a mas­sive num­ber of con­trols for di­rect ac­cess to every DaVinci color cor­rec­tion fea­ture.

Portable au­dio con­trol sur­face in­cludes 12 pre­mium touch sen­si­tive fly­ing faders, chan­nel LCDs for ad­vanced pro­cess­ing, au­toma­tion and trans­port con­trols plus HDMI for an ex­ter­nal graph­ics dis­play.

Get in­cred­i­bly fast au­dio edit­ing for sound en­gi­neers work­ing on tight dead­lines! Includes LCD screen, touch sen­si­tive con­trol knobs, built in search dial and full key­board with multi func­tion keys.

Used by Hollywood and broad­cast­ers, these large con­soles make it easy to mix large pro­jects with a mas­sive num­ber of chan­nels and tracks. Modular de­sign al­lows cus­tomiz­ing 2, 3, 4, or 5 bay consoles!

Fairlight stu­dio con­sole legs at 0º an­gle for when you re­quire a flat work­ing sur­face. Required for all Fairlight Studio Consoles.

Fairlight stu­dio con­sole legs at 8º angle for when you re­quire a slightly an­gled work­ing sur­face. Required for all Fairlight Studio Consoles.

Features 12 mo­tor­ized faders, ro­tary con­trol knobs il­lu­mi­nated but­tons for pan, solo, mute and call, plus bank se­lect but­tons.

12 groups of touch sen­si­tive ro­tary con­trol knobs and il­lu­mi­nated but­tons, as­sign­a­ble to fader strips, sin­gle chan­nel or mas­ter bus.

Get quick ac­cess to vir­tu­ally every Fairlight fea­ture! Includes a 12” LCD, graph­i­cal key­board, macro keys, trans­port con­trols and more.

Features HDMI, SDI in­puts for video and com­puter mon­i­tor­ing and Ethernet for graph­ics dis­play of chan­nel sta­tus and me­ters.

Empty 2 bay Fairlight stu­dio con­sole chas­sis that can be pop­u­lated with var­i­ous faders, chan­nel con­trols, edit and LCD monitors.

Empty 3 bay Fairlight stu­dio con­sole chas­sis that can be pop­u­lated with var­i­ous faders, chan­nel con­trols, edit and LCD monitors.

Empty 4 bay Fairlight stu­dio con­sole chas­sis that can be pop­u­lated with var­i­ous faders, chan­nel con­trols, edit and LCD monitors.

Empty 5 bay Fairlight stu­dio con­sole chas­sis that can be pop­u­lated with var­i­ous faders, chan­nel con­trols, edit and LCD monitors.

Use al­ter­na­tive HDMI or SDI tele­vi­sions and mon­i­tors when build­ing a Fairlight stu­dio con­sole.

Mounting bar with lo­cat­ing pins to al­low cor­rect align­ment of bay mod­ules when build­ing a cus­tom 2 bay Fairlight console.

Mounting bar with lo­cat­ing pins to al­low cor­rect align­ment of bay mod­ules when build­ing a cus­tom 3 bay Fairlight console.

Mounting bar with lo­cat­ing pins to al­low cor­rect align­ment of bay mod­ules when build­ing a cus­tom 4 bay Fairlight console.

Mounting bar with lo­cat­ing pins to al­low cor­rect align­ment of bay mod­ules when build­ing a cus­tom 5 bay Fairlight console.

Side arm kit mounts into Fairlight con­sole mount­ing bar and holds each fader, chan­nel con­trol and LCD mon­i­tor mod­ule.

Blank 1/3rd wide bay for build­ing a cus­tom con­sole with the ex­tra 1/3rd sec­tion. Includes blank in­fill pan­els.

Allows mount­ing stan­dard 19 inch rack mount equip­ment in the chan­nel con­trol area of the Fairlight stu­dio con­sole.

Blank panel to fill in the chan­nel con­trol area of the Fairlight stu­dio con­sole.

Blank panel to fill in the LCD mon­i­tor area of the Fairlight stu­dio con­sole when you’re not us­ing the stan­dard Fairlight LCD monitor.

Blank panel to fill in the fader con­trol area of the Fairlight stu­dio con­sole.

Adds 3 MADI I/O con­nec­tions to the sin­gle MADI on the ac­cel­er­a­tor card, for a to­tal of 256 inputs and out­puts at 24 bit and 48kHz.

Add up to 2,000 tracks with real time pro­cess­ing of EQ, dy­nam­ics, 6 plug‑ins per track, plus MADI for ex­tra 64 inputs and out­puts.

Adds ana­log and dig­i­tal con­nec­tions, pre­amps for mics and in­stru­ments, sam­ple rate con­ver­sion and sync at any stan­dard frame rate.

Flock Safety mar­kets AI sur­veil­lance that goes far be­yond read­ing li­cense plates; color, bumper stick­ers, dents, and other fea­tures are used to build data­bases and iden­tify move­ment pat­terns. These sys­tems are spread­ing rapidly, of­ten with­out over­sight, and are ac­ces­si­ble to po­lice with­out a war­rant. They raise se­ri­ous pri­vacy and le­gal con­cerns, and con­tribute to a na­tion­wide trend to­ward mass sur­veil­lance.

While this and other sys­tems like it claim to re­duce crime, there is lit­tle ev­i­dence to sup­port that claim - and sig­nif­i­cant risk of abuse. Real pub­lic safety comes from in­vest­ing in com­mu­ni­ties, not stalk­ing them.

Flock Safety mar­kets AI sur­veil­lance that goes far be­yond read­ing li­cense plates; color, bumper stick­ers, dents, and other fea­tures are used to build data­bases and iden­tify move­ment pat­terns. These sys­tems are spread­ing rapidly, of­ten with­out over­sight, and are ac­ces­si­ble to po­lice with­out a war­rant. They raise se­ri­ous pri­vacy and le­gal con­cerns, and con­tribute to a na­tion­wide trend to­ward mass sur­veil­lance.

While this and other sys­tems like it claim to re­duce crime, there is lit­tle ev­i­dence to sup­port that claim - and sig­nif­i­cant risk of abuse. Real pub­lic safety comes from in­vest­ing in com­mu­ni­ties, not stalk­ing them.

Flock Safety mar­kets its de­vices as “AI-powered pre­ci­sion polic­ing tech­nol­ogy” - far be­yond ba­sic li­cense plate read­ers (ALPRs) (Flock Safety). The sys­tem uses AI to cre­ate a “Vehicle Fingerprint” - iden­ti­fy­ing cars not only by li­cense plate, but also by color, make and model, roof racks, dents/​dam­age, wheel type, and more. Even bumper sticker place­ment is an­a­lyzed. This lets law en­force­ment search for a “blue sedan with dam­age on the left side” even with­out a li­cense plate.

But the sur­veil­lance goes deeper. Using a fea­ture called “Convoy Analysis”, the sys­tem can de­tect ve­hi­cles that fre­quently ap­pear near each other - sug­gest­ing as­so­ci­a­tions be­tween dri­vers or ac­com­plices. The plat­form can also flag ve­hi­cles that rou­tinely travel to the same lo­ca­tions across time. Flock de­scribes this as a way to “identify sus­pect ve­hi­cles trav­el­ing to­gether” or “pinpoint as­so­ci­ates” - func­tion­al­ity con­firmed in both their mar­ket­ing and po­lice tes­ti­mo­ni­als (GovTech, ACLU).

The data is logged and made search­able across a na­tion­wide law en­force­ment net­work - which of­fi­cers in sub­scrib­ing agen­cies can ac­cess with­out a war­rant. According to Flock, the sys­tem can au­to­mat­i­cally flag a ve­hi­cle based on its his­tory, route, or pres­ence in mul­ti­ple lo­ca­tions linked to a crime (Flock HOA Marketing).

While these tools may aid in lo­cat­ing stolen cars or miss­ing per­sons, they also cre­ate a de­tailed record of every­one’s move­ments, as­so­ci­a­tions, and rou­tines. That data has al­ready been mis­used - like when a Kansas po­lice chief used Flock cam­eras 228 times to stalk an ex-girl­friend and her new part­ner with­out cause (Local12).

The scope of this track­ing be­comes clear when you see real-world ex­am­ples. In 2025, a jour­nal­ist drove 300 miles across rural Virginia and was cap­tured by nearly 50 sur­veil­lance cam­eras op­er­ated by 15 dif­fer­ent law en­force­ment agen­cies. When he re­quested his own sur­veil­lance footage, he dis­cov­ered the cam­eras had doc­u­mented pat­terns that made his be­hav­ior “predictable to any­one look­ing at it.” Most trou­bling: while the jour­nal­ist could­n’t re­mem­ber spe­cific dates he’d made cer­tain trips, po­lice would know in­stantly - with­out any war­rant or sus­pi­cion of wrong­do­ing (Cardinal News).

See also:

EFF: How ALPRs Work,

The Secure Dad on Flock Cameras,

Compass IT: “Privacy Concerns with Flock”,

ACLU: Flock is build­ing a new AI-driven mass sur­veil­lance sys­tem,

Wikipedia: Flock Safety

How Widespread Are These Cameras?

Understanding what Flock cam­eras are leads to a nat­ural ques­tion: how com­mon are they in our com­mu­ni­ties?

The crowd­sourced map made avail­able on DeFlock.me cur­rently shows roughly half of the >100,000 Flock AI cam­eras na­tion­wide. Here are ex­am­ples from three ma­jor cities show­ing how per­va­sive this sur­veil­lance has be­come:

These sys­tems are ex­pand­ing rapidly, of­ten with lit­tle pub­lic de­bate or over­sight. The Atlas of Surveillance, main­tained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has doc­u­mented over 3,000 law en­force­ment and gov­ern­ment agen­cies us­ing Flock prod­ucts as of 2025 - a num­ber grow­ing monthly.

The Fourth Amendment was writ­ten in re­sponse to the British Crown’s “general war­rants” - broad au­tho­riza­tions to search any­one, any­where, any­time. Mass sur­veil­lance re­vives that threat in dig­i­tal form. Simply mov­ing freely in pub­lic should not re­quire that you be pro­filed and scru­ti­nized.

It is im­por­tant to point out that the courts have re­peat­edly ruled so-called “dragnet war­rants,” of­ten us­ing cell phone GPS lo­ca­tions, un­con­sti­tu­tional un­der the Fourth Amendment. But Flock’s sta­tus as a pri­vate com­pany means it can col­lect and sell data with fewer re­stric­tions, ex­ploit­ing a le­gal gray zone which courts have yet to fully ad­dress.

“If you’ve got noth­ing to hide, you’ve got noth­ing to fear” is a tempt­ing thought - un­til some­one mis­uses your in­for­ma­tion. Privacy is­n’t about hid­ing wrong­do­ing. It’s about au­ton­omy, dig­nity, and the abil­ity to live free from un­just scrutiny. “Saying you don’t care about pri­vacy be­cause you have noth­ing to hide is like say­ing you don’t care about free speech be­cause you have noth­ing to say.” - Edward Snowden

As one ob­server put it: “While to­day they are no threat to me…cir­cum­stances change, lead­er­ship changes, laws change. When you re­ally boil this down, what is this na­tion­wide sys­tem? What did Flock re­ally make? It’s a weapon. A silent weapon. Right now it tar­gets what many would agree are crim­i­nals. But with the flip of a switch this sys­tem can be used to tar­get or op­press any­body the peo­ple in power de­cide is a threat.”

We are fast ap­proach­ing a world in which go­ing about one’s busi­ness in pub­lic means be­ing en­tered into a law en­force­ment data­base. Automated li­cense plate read­ers col­lect lo­ca­tion data on mil­lions of peo­ple with no sus­pi­cion of wrong­do­ing, cre­at­ing vast data­bases of where we go and when.

Flock cam­eras and sim­i­lar sur­veil­lance tools raise se­ri­ous Fourth Amendment con­cerns by en­abling broad, war­rant­less track­ing of peo­ple’s move­ments. In 2024, a trial court held that the Flock net­work func­tioned as a “dragnet over the en­tire city.” The judge in the case equated it to plac­ing GPS track­ers on every ve­hi­cle - a prac­tice that the U. S. Supreme Court has ruled re­quires a war­rant (Virginia Mercury, The Virginian Pilot).

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) warns that au­to­matic li­cense plate read­ers (ALPRs) are be­com­ing tools for rou­tine mass lo­ca­tion track­ing and sur­veil­lance, with too few rules gov­ern­ing their use. These sys­tems can col­lect and store data on mil­lions of in­no­cent dri­vers, cre­at­ing de­tailed records of peo­ple’s move­ments with­out their knowl­edge or con­sent. (ACLU)

Legal schol­ars have high­lighted the broader im­pli­ca­tions of such sur­veil­lance. Neil Richards, writ­ing in the Harvard Law Review, em­pha­sizes that sur­veil­lance can chill the ex­er­cise of civil lib­er­ties, par­tic­u­larly in­tel­lec­tual pri­vacy, and in­crease the risk of black­mail, co­er­cion, and dis­crim­i­na­tion. (Harvard Law Review)

Flock’s data fur­ther en­ables al­ready bi­ased en­force­ment. In Oak Park, Illinois, 84% of dri­vers stopped us­ing Flock cam­era alerts were Black - de­spite the town be­ing only 21% Black. (Freedom to Thrive).

See also:

ACLU on Unaccountable Surveillance Tech

Mass sur­veil­lance is­n’t just about polic­ing; there are ma­jor busi­ness in­ter­ests in­volved.

Flock Safety col­lab­o­rates with law en­force­ment agen­cies to pro­mote the adop­tion of its li­cense plate recog­ni­tion cam­eras by en­cour­ag­ing pri­vate en­ti­ties such as busi­nesses and HOAs to share their footage. This prac­tice broad­ens the sur­veil­lance net by grant­ing ac­cess to what would oth­er­wise have been pri­vate data (Flock Safety FAQ).

Instances have been re­ported where HOAs in­stalled Flock cam­eras on pub­lic roads, lead­ing to de­bates over the ex­tent of sur­veil­lance and the pri­vacy rights of res­i­dents and vis­i­tors (Oaklandside), (Forest Brooke HOA).

The ACLU has high­lighted that the ex­pan­sive reach of these sur­veil­lance net­works could en­able law en­force­ment to con­struct de­tailed pro­files of in­di­vid­u­als’ move­ments and as­so­ci­a­tions, un­der­scor­ing the need for trans­parency and over­sight (ACLU).

Additionally, Flock mar­kets its sur­veil­lance tech­nol­ogy to em­ploy­ers and re­tail es­tab­lish­ments, fur­ther blur­ring the lines be­tween pub­lic safety ini­tia­tives and profit-dri­ven sur­veil­lance. For ex­am­ple, ma­jor re­tail prop­erty own­ers have en­tered into agree­ments to share AI-powered sur­veil­lance feeds di­rectly with law en­force­ment, ex­pand­ing the scope of mon­i­tor­ing be­yond pub­lic spaces. (Forbes) [Mirror]

Lowe’s is a sig­nif­i­cant pri­vate client of Flock Safety, hav­ing im­ple­mented their sys­tems in nu­mer­ous lo­ca­tions to en­hance se­cu­rity and de­ter theft.

While Flock specif­i­cally does not of­fer fa­cial recog­ni­tion (today), Lowe’s has faced le­gal trou­bles over its use of fa­cial recog­ni­tion sys­tems from other ven­dors. In 2019, a class ac­tion law­suit was filed in Cook County Circuit Court, al­leg­ing that Lowe’s used fa­cial recog­ni­tion soft­ware to track cus­tomers’ move­ments with­out their con­sent, vi­o­lat­ing Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). The law­suit claimed that Lowe’s col­lected and stored bio­met­ric data from cus­tomers and shared it with other re­tail­ers. (Security InfoWatch)

Some jus­tify these sys­tems as mak­ing us safer, but the re­al­ity is more com­pli­cated.

Flock ad­ver­tises a drop in crime, but the true cost is a cul­ture of mis­trust and pre­emp­tive sus­pi­cion. As the EFF warns, com­mu­ni­ties are be­ing sold a false promise of safety - at the ex­pense of civil rights*

(EFF).

A 2019 re­port by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund warned that pre­dic­tive polic­ing tools premised on bi­ased data will re­flect that bias, re­in­forc­ing ex­ist­ing dis­crim­i­na­tion in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem. These tools may ap­pear ob­jec­tive, but in­stead of­ten am­plify his­toric in­jus­tice un­der a ve­neer of sci­en­tific cred­i­bil­ity (NAACP LDF).

True safety comes from healthy, em­pow­ered com­mu­ni­ties; not au­to­mated sus­pi­cion. Community-led safety ini­tia­tives have demon­strated sig­nif­i­cant re­sults: North Lawndale saw a 58% de­crease in gun vi­o­lence af­ter READI Chicago be­gan im­ple­ment­ing their pro­gram there. In cities na­tion­wide, the pres­ence of lo­cal non­prof­its has been sta­tis­ti­cally linked to re­duc­tions in homi­cide, vi­o­lent crime, and prop­erty crime (Brennan Center, The DePaulia, American Sociological Association).

Zooming out, Flock is just one part of a larger move­ment to­ward ubiq­ui­tous sur­veil­lance.

Flock’s ex­pan­sion is part of a broader move­ment to­ward ubiq­ui­tous mass sur­veil­lance - where your as­so­ci­a­tions, on­line com­ments, pur­chases, move­ments, and more may be logged, in­dexed, an­a­lyzed by AI, and made eas­ily search­able by al­most any gov­ern­ment agency at any time.

This pro­gres­sion from data col­lec­tion to sur­veil­lance fol­lows a fa­mil­iar pat­tern in tech: tools sold for con­ve­nience of­ten evolve into tools of con­trol.

Bruce Schneier, a promi­nent cryp­tog­ra­pher and pri­vacy ad­vo­cate, put it sim­ply: “Surveillance is the busi­ness model of the Internet.” What be­gins as data col­lec­tion for con­ve­nience or se­cu­rity of­ten evolves into per­sis­tent mon­i­tor­ing, nor­mal­iza­tion of track­ing, and the loss of au­ton­omy.

As Edward Snowden warned: “A child born to­day will grow up with no con­cep­tion of pri­vacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have a pri­vate mo­ment to them­selves - an un­recorded, un­an­a­lyzed thought.”

In Dunwoody, Georgia, drones are now dis­patched from Flock Safety “nests” to re­spond to 911 calls au­tonomously, of­ten ar­riv­ing in un­der 90 sec­onds (Axios).

In California, 480 high-tech cam­eras were re­cently in­stalled to sur­veil Oakland’s high­ways - track­ing li­cense plates, bumper stick­ers, and ve­hi­cle types - with alerts sent to law en­force­ment in real-time (AP News).

This sur­veil­lance in­fra­struc­ture ex­tends far be­yond law en­force­ment. The U. S. mil­i­tary has spent at least $3.5 mil­lion on a tool called “Augury” that mon­i­tors “93% of in­ter­net traf­fic,” cap­tur­ing brows­ing his­tory, email data, and sen­si­tive cook­ies from Americans - all “without in­formed con­sent.” Senator Ron Wyden has re­ceived whistle­blower com­plaints about this war­rant­less sur­veil­lance pro­gram (VICE).

Meanwhile, the cur­rent ad­min­is­tra­tion is work­ing with Palantir Technologies to cre­ate what Ron Paul calls a “big ugly data­base” - a com­pre­hen­sive col­lec­tion of all in­for­ma­tion held by fed­eral agen­cies on all U.S. cit­i­zens. This would in­clude health records, ed­u­ca­tion records, tax re­turns, firearm pur­chases, and as­so­ci­a­tions with any groups la­beled “extremist.” Palantir, funded by the CIA’s In-Q-Tel ven­ture cap­i­tal firm, is “literally the cre­ation of the sur­veil­lance state” (OC Register).

Even ba­sic tools we use daily are be­ing trans­formed into sur­veil­lance in­stru­ments. Recent court rul­ings now al­low the gov­ern­ment to or­der com­pa­nies like OpenAI to in­def­i­nitely pre­serve all ChatGPT con­ver­sa­tions. Users who thought they were hav­ing pri­vate con­ver­sa­tions - like “talking to a friend who can keep a se­cret” - dis­cov­ered this only through web fo­rums, not com­pany dis­clo­sure. The judge’s or­der en­ables what one user called a “nationwide mass sur­veil­lance pro­gram” dis­guised as a civil dis­cov­ery process (TechRadar).

This pat­tern re­peats through­out his­tory: peo­ple aban­don lib­erty for promises of safety. After 9/11, many sup­ported the PATRIOT Act. During COVID, many em­braced mask and vac­cine man­dates. After the 2008 fi­nan­cial cri­sis, many sup­ported bailouts be­cause lead­ers said they had to “abandon free-mar­ket prin­ci­ples to save the free-mar­ket sys­tem.” Today, some sup­port mass sur­veil­lance be­cause they be­lieve it will tar­get only “the right peo­ple” - but cir­cum­stances change, lead­er­ship changes, laws change.

See also:

Ars Technica: “AI Cameras to Ensure Good Behavior”,

Video: Predictive Surveillance Trends

So where is all of this head­ing? The tra­jec­tory is trou­bling.

Flock’s cam­eras cap­ture de­tailed in­for­ma­tion about the daily lives of any­one pass­ing by, with­out of­fer­ing a gen­uine opt-out mech­a­nism. Concurrently, Palantir Technologies has se­cured a $30 mil­lion con­tract with ICE, aim­ing to de­velop a sys­tem that con­sol­i­dates sen­si­tive per­sonal data such as bio­met­rics, ge­olo­ca­tion, and other per­sonal iden­ti­fiers from var­i­ous fed­eral agen­cies, fa­cil­i­tat­ing near real-time track­ing and cat­e­go­riza­tion of in­di­vid­u­als for im­mi­gra­tion en­force­ment pur­poses (Wired). It should be no sur­prise that this will also not of­fer any mean­ing­ful opt-out mech­a­nism.

The in­te­gra­tion of sur­veil­lance tech­nolo­gies such as Flock Safety’s li­cense plate read­ers and Palantir’s ImmigrationOS plat­form sig­ni­fies a shift to­ward com­pre­hen­sive mon­i­tor­ing of in­di­vid­u­als’ move­ments and be­hav­iors. It is not dif­fi­cult to imag­ine the scope of such sys­tems’ us­age grow­ing with time.

These de­vel­op­ments raise con­cerns about the ero­sion of pri­vacy and the po­ten­tial for mis­use of ag­gre­gated data. The per­va­sive na­ture of such sur­veil­lance sys­tems means that in­di­vid­u­als are mon­i­tored with­out ex­plicit con­sent, and the data col­lected can be re­pur­posed be­yond its orig­i­nal in­tent. As these tech­nolo­gies be­come more en­trenched, the line be­tween pub­lic safety and in­va­sive over­sight blurs, prompt­ing crit­i­cal dis­cus­sions about the bal­ance be­tween se­cu­rity and in­di­vid­ual free­doms.

Some of the most chill­ing val­i­da­tions of mass sur­veil­lance come not from crit­ics - but from the very peo­ple pro­mot­ing it. These aren’t out-of-con­text slips; they are open en­dorse­ments of a world where pri­vacy is side­lined in fa­vor of con­trol, com­pli­ance, and con­ve­nient en­force­ment.

“Anything tech­nol­ogy they think, ‘Oh it’s a boogey­man. It’s Big Brother watch­ing you,’ … No, Big Brother is pro­tect­ing you.”

- Eric Adams, NYC Mayor (Politico, 2022)

New York’s mayor ca­su­ally re­brands Orwell’s au­thor­i­tar­ian icon as a guardian fig­ure. It’s a star­tling re­ver­sal - not a warn­ing about over­reach, but a de­fense of it.

“Instead of be­ing re­ac­tive, we are go­ing to be proac­tive… [we] use data to pre­dict where fu­ture crimes are likely to take place and who is likely to com­mit them… then deputies would find those peo­ple and take them out.”

- Chris Nocco, Pasco County Sheriff (Tampa Bay Times, 2020)

This “Minority Report”-style pro­gram led to ha­rass­ment of in­no­cent peo­ple - and was ul­ti­mately found un­con­sti­tu­tional in court (Institute for Justice). A rare win, but a stark ex­am­ple of where unchecked sur­veil­lance can go.

“The use of net flow data by NCIS does not re­quire a war­rant.”

- Charles E. Spirtos, Navy Office of Information (VICE, 2024)

The mil­i­tary’s po­si­tion on mon­i­tor­ing Americans’ in­ter­net traf­fic with­out ju­di­cial over­sight. This state­ment came af­ter a whistle­blower com­plained about war­rant­less sur­veil­lance ac­tiv­i­ties to Senator Ron Wyden’s of­fice.

“Tech firms should not de­velop their sys­tems and ser­vices, in­clud­ing end-to-end en­cryp­tion, in ways that em­power crim­i­nals or put vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple at risk.”

- Priti Patel, UK Home Secretary UK Govt, 2019, (Infosecurity Magazine)

The logic: pro­tect­ing every­one’s pri­vacy is dan­ger­ous. This kind of fram­ing jus­ti­fies back­doors into se­cure sys­tems - which in­evitably get abused.

“The risk [of built-in weak­nesses]… is ac­cept­able be­cause we are talk­ing about con­sumer prod­ucts… and not nu­clear launch codes.”

- William Barr, U. S. Attorney General (TechCrunch, 2019)

A clear “rules for thee but not for me” men­tal­ity. Your data, mes­sages, and de­vices don’t de­serve the same pro­tec­tions as the gov­ern­men­t’s - be­cause you’re just a civil­ian.

China ex­ploited a covert sur­veil­lance in­ter­face - orig­i­nally built for law­ful ac­cess by U.S. law en­force­ment - to tap into Americans’ pri­vate phone records, mes­sages, and ge­olo­ca­tion data. (CISA)

Telecom providers are re­quired by law to build these back­doors for law en­force­ment. The “Salt Typhoon” in­ci­dent shows the risk: once a back­door ex­ists, it can be dis­cov­ered and abused - and not just by “the good guys.” (EFF, Reason)

1d-chess is a new vari­ant where you can play the beau­ti­ful game with­out all those un­nec­ces­sary and com­pli­cated ex­tra di­men­sions. Play as white against the AI. You might ini­tally find it more dif­fi­cult than ex­pected, but ass­ming op­ti­mal play, is there a forced win for white?

Mouse over to re­veal an­swer: Try this line: N4 N5, N6 K7, R4 K6, R2 K7, R5++

There are three pieces in 1d-chess:

Can move one square in any di­rec­tion.

Can move 2 squares for­ward or back­ward. (jumping over any pieces in the way)

Can move in a straight line in any di­rec­tion.

Win by check­mat­ing the en­emy king. This oc­curs when the en­emy king is in check (under at­tack by one of your pieces) and there are no le­gal moves for the op­po­nent to get their king out of check.

* A player is not in check and there are no le­gal moves for them to play

* The same board po­si­tion is re­peated 3 times in a game.

* There are only kings left on the board, thus it is im­pos­si­ble to check­mate the op­po­nent

This chess vari­ant was first de­scribed by Martin Gardner in the Mathematical Games col­umn of the July 1980 is­sue of Scientific American

See The col­umn on JSTOR