Tootfinder

So much infosec news, so little time. Check out today's Metacurity for the most critical cybersecurity developments you need to know, including
--ID documents for billionaires and top pols at Abu Dhabi conference were exposed online,
--Angola journalist was hacked with Intellexa spyware,
--Poland arrests Phobos ransomware affiliate,
--Severe flaw found in Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machine,
--Hacker who paid only a penny for a luxury hotel room was busted …

ID documents for billionaires and top politicians at Abu Dhabi conference were exposed online
Angola journalist was hacked with Intellexa spyware, Poland arrests Phobos ransomware affiliate, Severe flaw found in Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machine, Hacker who paid only a penny for a luxury hotel room busted in Spain, Oz financial technology company YouX suffered a massive breach, much more

Recent polling shows the majority disapprove of how ICE operates.
But to truly stop the damage requires going further
– it means eradicating the security logic that ever made people think that arming a secret police on an ethnic cleansing mission could ever make them safe.
Formed in 2003, during the embarrassing and disastrous national excesses of the post-9/11 era
– when the nation launched two ill-fated forever wars, and demonized Muslim immigrants
– ICE’s ma…

Donnerstag: Alpha-Version neuer Xbox erst 2027, Elon Musks KI-Projekt Marcohard
Microsofts Xbox-Annäherung an Windows Macrohard-System von xAI und Tesla Algorithmen als Internet-Zensur Google-Bremse beim Pixel-Aufladen #heiseshow

I have a major new feature for Left Wordle. I am testing the ability to sync settings and game history between devices. This feature is very much beta at this time and everything is subject to change.
My goal is to get as many people testing this as possible to identify any bugs that might cause problems once released. If you have time, please give it a try. Instructions here:

'Limits' to paid customers...
Musk’s xAI limits Grok’s ability to create sexualized images of real people on X after backlash
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/14/musk-xai-blocks-grok-chatbot-from-creating-sexualized-images-of-people.html

Sources: SpaceX and xAI are competing in a $100M DoD contest to make voice-controlled, autonomous drone swarms; OpenAI is helping Applied Intuition's submission (Katrina Manson/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Just finished "Song of A Blackbird" by Maria van Lieshout. It's an excellent and extremely timely historical fiction graphic novel about rediscovering a family connection that was severed by war, and the Dutch Resistance figures under Nazi occupation who saved many lives, in some cases at the cost of their own.
Despite being fiction, it's very closely grounded in historical facts, and the inclusion of photographs within the illustrations is really cool.
Now is an interesting time to be thinking about the fates of Nazis, collaborators, their victims, and the resistance, as well as how we remember them all. I especially liked the section at the end about the real historical figures and their fates. So "fascinating" that none of the Nazis were executed or died in prison (mostly they did serve long terms before their release), even those who oversaw mass killings and deportations to concentration camps. I'm a prison abolitionist and not a fan of state capital punishment, so on *some* level this seems like an outcome I should be happy about, but I somehow doubt that the state was this lenient for all prisoners during this time period...
#AmReading #ReadingNow

Canadian Historical Association president Coates on federal and provincial budget cuts which "have a major impact on our colleagues, on our students who may hope to find work in these fields, and on our abilities to carry out our own research and teaching. The particular historical moment in which we find ourselves, with the threats to Canadian sovereignty... underline the urgency of making available to all citizens the wide knowledge of our past."

And "free" also implies that the worker is supposedly completely free. He is free in the sense that he can sell for as high a price as he can manage.
Himself?
Yes, for as much money as possible. - Now, in this market, the computer replaces the best thing the worker has to offer: knowledge and skill. The machine takes over both, and he himself is degraded to a mere machine operator. His actual abilities have been coaxed out of him and incorporated into the device. Consequently, he has less to sell than before, and what he can still sell is worth less.
He himself loses value?
Yes, because he is not only robbed of the ability to provide bread for his family, but also of one of the signs that prove to him that he is human. Now he is simplified and transformed into an operator. (Almost like in Kafka, where a man is transformed into a beetle; Kafka is a prophet in that regard.)"
Joseph Weizenbaum, Kurs auf den Eisberg, Serie Piper, Munich, 1987

Before you head out for the weekend, don't miss today's Metacurity, which delivers developments that go beyond the usual infosec news echo chamber.
Today's items cover
--The imminent DHS shutdown will hamper US ability to respond to cyber threats,
--CISA will hold town halls on cyber incident reporting regs,
--Palo Alto removed China attribution in fear of retaliation,
--Tianfu Cup returns,
--Ring cancels partnership with Flock,
--TX AG lau…

The imminent DHS shutdown will hamper US ability to respond to cyber threats
CISA will hold town halls on cyber incident reporting regs, Palo Alto removed China attribution in fear of retaliation, Tianfu Cup returns, Ring cancels partnership with Flock, TX AG launches probe into Conduent breach, AI vibe coding platform Orchids has an unfixed flaw, much more