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Cake day: July 13th, 2025

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  • Tools for generating deep fake photographs are proliferating with greater ease of use and prominence in pop culture. Image authentication tools can defeat these deceitful developments by verifying that a digital image was actually produced by a physical camera. The challenge is that these tools must be robust to desirable image transformations.

    Camera attestation uses digital signatures to prove an image’s provenance from a camera. Lossy compression makes minute changes in order to reduce an image’s size, and blurring or redacting regions of an image can protect its subjects. These changes invalidate an image’s signature. Prior works use zero-knowledge (ZK) to prove a published image’s edit history, but they do not survive lossy encoding such as the JPEG format.

    We present \zkjpeg, a cryptographic tool for JPEG compression that proves an image was correctly compressed from a secret, committed input. In addition, our tool can verify a large family of image transformations by integrating them into JPEG compression with minimal cost.





  • Coupled with Russian Economic challenges (GDP shrinking, deficit increasing sharply, unemployment at historic lows, high interest rates…) I am guessing that this is now more of Ukraine War to Lose, as mitigating the windfall puts Putin in a very tight spot. Maybe he can leverage the Arctic ports to ship more oil out, but not enough to make up the deficit by winter. He still has to spend a bunch on the Free Economic Zone they have captured, but it’s entirely a white elephant.

    Ukraine could still fall prey to Trump’s whims, or Putin’s influence (of other countries), or Putin could act rash an pull out the big weapons, but none of that “wins” this war. Conventional manpower is still the major constraint for both sides. I expect some sort of unconventional endgame here (armistice, long-term grey zone warfare, something other than negotiated peace), but one of those possibility is regime change… Not at 66% approval, but that rating will finish asymptotically if he doesn’t figure the money out.


  • Zscaler ThreatLabz researchers recently discovered a highly deceptive campaign leveraging the leak as a social engineering lure to target developers seeking access to the source code.

    In this newly discovered campaign, attackers have established malicious GitHub repositories that masquerade as the authentic leaked repository.

    One prominent page, published by a threat actor named idbzoomh, currently ranks near the top of search engine results for users attempting to find the files.

    The repository promises an unlocked version of the enterprise software featuring no usage limits. Instead of legitimate code, the provided zip archive contains a Rust-based dropper executable.

    Upon execution, this dropper deploys the Vidar information stealer to siphon sensitive credentials and GhostSocks to proxy network traffic.



  • Within minutes of Alex Pretti being shot and killed by a federal immigration officer in Minneapolis on Saturday, the Trump administration, backed by right-wing influencers, launched a smear campaign against the victim, labeling him a “terrorist” and a “lunatic.”

    …

    Minneapolis police chief Brian O’Hara said during a press conference on Saturday that information about what had led up to Pretti’s fatal confrontation was limited, but at a separate press conference, Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol commander overseeing federal operations in Minneapolis, claimed to have a full assessment of what had taken place.

    Bovino claimed Pretti had approached officers with a 9mm handgun, resisted disarmament, and was shot in what he described as a clear act of self-defense. He claimed the man had two loaded magazines and lacked identification, and alleged that Pretti intended to “massacre law enforcement,” while the Border Patrol agent who killed Pretti, he said, had extensive training.

    The Department of Homeland Security reiterated Bovino’s claims in a post on X that has been viewed over 17 million times at the time of publication, and the narrative was carried unquestioningly by right-wing outlets, like the Post Millenial, which published a story headlined: “Armed agitator Alex Pretti appeared to want ‘maximum damage’ and to ‘massacre’ law enforcement when shot by BP in Minnesota.”

    …

    Multiple videos shared on social media in the moments after the shooting show no indication that Pretti’s gun was visible when he was approached by the officers. Analyses by The New York Times and Bellingcat found that Pretti was clearly holding a phone, not a gun, when the federal officers approached him and forced him to the ground.

    …

    Trump’s homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller, went further in a pair of posts, labelling Pretti an “assassin” and a “terrorist.”

    The Trump administration’s smear campaign against the victim was quickly repeated by supporters on social media. Nick Sortor, one of a group of right-wing influencers camped out in Minneapolis to cover ICE’s campaign there, falsely referred to Pretti as an “illegal alien” and added that he “was armed with a gun and attempted to PULL IT on agents as he was being apprehended.”