Tarah Wheeler

For all incident responses from now on, I’m going to get on that Zoom call at 2am and begin by saying “Please state the nature of the computational emergency.”

For all incident responses from now on, I’m going to get on that Zoom call at 2am and begin by saying “Please state the nature of the computational emergency.”

AI’s hacking capabilities are severely underestimated— The unglamorous work of cyber defence is invisible if done right. If it is not, the cost to human health, access to food and goods, transportation and… www.ft.com/content/3f15... @tarah.org @financialtimes.com

Just recreated that scene in True Romance where Bronson Pinchot is frantically yammering on his cellphone and a bag of cocaine explodes all over his face and car but this was in the kitchen and it was a Costco container of ranch powder. Thank you for your thoughts and prayers; no further questions.

Hey, come listen to me talk about how to make AI resilient and fault-tolerant and try to stump me in the q&a as I chat with @ninjaone.bsky.social this next Tuesday! :-) go.ninjaone.com/it-leadershi...

Who has two thumbs and won the 5th annual @eff.org charity poker tournament at @defcon.bsky.social? This fscking guy! Thanks @tarah.org for another amazing year!

Come play poker for digital rights at DEF CON this Friday. The @eff.org Benefit Poker Tournament is Aug 7, noon, Horseshoe Poker Room, Vegas. Total novices are especially welcome; the room is safe, respectful, and the dealers teach. Bring one curious friend. eff.org/poker

Hacker Summer Camp is almost here... and with it comes the Fifth Annual EFF Benefit Poker Tournament @defcon.bsky.social hosted by security expert @tarah.org. Join us on August 7 at the Horseshoe Poker Room and take home new prizes, including bug bounty pins! eff.org/poker

I have a suggestion for folk watching The Odyssey. Treat it like a rock concert and wear earplugs. After the first three minutes I put them in and I heard dialogue much better. The music is So Loud in it, and the dialogue is more intelligible when you’re not wincing.

Missed headline opportunity: “He’s about to publish his results.”

I'm sorry, what? In writing my first monograph, I spent six weeks trying to track down a citation in TWO languages I didn't know. And good thing too, because the citation was wrong. That's scholarship. That's research. You know, the thing we're trained to do?!?

#OTD 1759: birth of #MaryWollstonecraft, author of Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Letters from Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), & many other works; wife of philosophical anarchist #WilliamGodwin, to whom she bore a daughter, #MaryShelley, author of Frankenstein; citizen of the world.

Anne Hathaway optioned and is bringing the novel “Yesteryear” about a tradwife influencer forced to live that life to the big screen. I simply pray that Alison Krauss does a dark af banjo cover of Paris Paloma‘s “Labour” for this. youtu.be/jvU4xWsN7-A?... vogueadria.com/yesteryear-n...

Minnesota Governor Deploys National Guard in a County Following Cyberattack

Corrections to 2nd proof of The Letters of William Godwin, Volume IV (618 pages before indexing), now completed and awaiting collection by OUP van man. Have been working on them since 16 January... Thanks to all those watching and waiting. #TheLongestJourney global.oup.com/academic/pro...

The new US cyber security strategy just dropped. I'm a Claude user, and I suspiciously inquired of Claude as to the # of em-dashes in this 4 pg doc. Then I asked Claude to analyze the probability of this being LLM-written. Claude then throws some naughty shade. www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/u...

Joe Menn is one of the longest serving and most trusted cybersecurity reporters, and his body of recent work speaks for itself.

If I haven’t said this a few times: @zackwhittaker.com is a truly brilliant reporter and mind in cybersecurity and this newsletter is the only thing I read to fully catch up on what I needed to know in the field if I was out on vacation for a week. You should be doing the Patreon thing here.

Thanks, Stepto.

If you enjoy sheer Gothic terror and early feminists wondering why we still have to protest this shit, maybe you'd like the two audiobooks I just released. "On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror" amzn.to/45HoHsR "(On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship)" amzn.to/4aoAuyM

“I, for my own part, cannot think that these latter days of weak experiment, fragmentary theory, and mutual discord are indeed man's culminating time!” ~ H. G. Wells,”The Time Machine”

I don't feel like spending time writing a 300 character explanation of why you should read this blog post. Just go do it.

It's always lovely to have the doubters get their asses academically kicked when it comes to Ada Lovelace's mathematical capabilities, but I am so very tired of reading the "if she'd only been born a man" story. From an open 2017 Historia Mathematica article. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Susan Landau, @mattblaze.org, and Steven Bellovin unpack the U.K. government's latest attempt to access encrypted cloud backups in Apple products and explain how it could make sensitive data more vulnerable to adversarial actors.

I also support Aaron’s work and pay for a subscription. It is always worth reading, always informative. Thanks, @atrupar.com for your tirelessness.

At EFF, we were proud to publicly and loudly support the legal profession and, most importantly, continue to do our work challenging the government’s erosion of digital rights—work that became even more critical as many law firms shied away from pro bono work. eff.org/deeplinks/2...

The holidays persist, but so do we.

So I hacked my way into being Cyber Policy Initiative Senior Fellow at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy. Working on rural water critical infrastructure cybersecurity. Hey, ma, look! I *finally* got into University of Chicago. :D cpi.harris.uchicago.edu/2025/12/23/h...

Happy #WinterSolstice ❄️ Today marks the official start of winter in the astronomical calendar. 📷 Instagram | Juncao_Oxford

It’s clear that trans people face unique, advanced, and persistent threats—online and off. Here are some strategies for resisting the tech-enabled violence that trans people face. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

Inconceivable.

"Only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things." ~TS Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent"

Dear Raul Julia: in whatever Elysian Fields you inhabit, I hope you know that the last movie you filmed & the work that you spent your last moments on has become beloved. A classic not just at the holidays, but a primer on how to selflessly and brilliantly love another person to utter distraction.

I'm just like any modern woman trying to have it all. It's just...I wish I had more time to seek out the dark forces and join their hellish crusade. That's all.

📢 Announcing hacklore.org 📢 It’s time to retire outdated cyber advice! More than 80 cybersecurity veterans have signed an open letter urging a shift from folklore to guidance that actually helps people avoid the most common attacks. 🔐 Blog: medium.com/@boblord/let... Site: www.hacklore.org

i can get malware on my computer by giving it to my 12yo cousin for a day and at a fraction of the cost of letting copilot do it

I do this ish for a living, I am an AI developer and researcher, and *I* don’t fully understand the security implications. What hope do regular users have? www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/wi...

🚨BREAKING NEWS🚨 We're suing the city of San Jose for its pervasive ALPR surveillance program. With nearly 500 ALPRs, the SJPD allows its officers to search millions of records, all without a warrant. These unconstitutional searches must be stopped. Read the complaint: www.eff.org/cases/siren...

I reviewed "Geopolitics at the Internet’s Core" by Fiona Alexander, Laura DeNardis, Ph.D., @nanettelevinson.bsky.social, & Francesca Musiani. It's not a tech spec for Internet Protocol—it's actually a cenotaph for a bygone era of consensus and freedom. www.tarah.org/2025/11/17/a...

For the second time in two years, Cato has sued the DOJ and FBI for records on their use—and abuse—of FISA Section 702 surveillance. The public deserves to know whether this program protects Americans or targets them.

Wonderful (but scary) talk by @tarah.org at #bsideschicago25

Initial reports I’m hearing is that it was not cyber www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Folks, I have a friend's internal hard drive here that is likely still good, but will not mount. There are family photos on it. What are good solutions for this, especially in the Seattle area? I'd like to hand-deliver if possible.