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This Is AI’s FCC Moment: When the Pentagon Starts Planning for AGI, You Should Pay Attention
Let’s get one thing straight: the Pentagon is now preparing for AGI. Yeah. That Pentagon. Buried inside a $900 billion defense bill is a mandate to create something called the AI Futures Steering Committee — an official U.S. Department of Defense body tasked with, and I quote, “scanning the horizon for frontier AI model threats” and developing “human override protocols” to ensure that even superintelligent systems can be shut down by people. That’s not a Reddit rumor. That’s

Rich Washburn
7 days ago4 min read


THE FOUNDER FILES: VAPORVAULT
Secure Simplicity for the Rest of Us It started as a side feature. A “what if” on a different project. And seventy-some hours later, I’m staring at a fully functional, shipping, hardware-secure text vault — VaporVault 3.0 — wondering how we got from idea to inventory this fast. This isn’t a prototype.This isn’t vaporware. This is VaporVault , and it’s real. The Problem That Shouldn’t Exist You know exactly what I’m talking about. Every IT guy, every cybersecurity professio

Rich Washburn
Dec 63 min read


VaporVault 3.0 — The “It’s Done (No, Really)” Update
I don’t even know if it’s still night or already morning.I just know that VaporVault 3.0 is done — and it’s good . Like, shockingly good. Not “cool prototype” good. Not “it boots without catching fire” good. I mean finished product good. If this thing were in an enclosure instead of hanging off my desk with a spaghetti mess of jumper wires and a button dangling from a breadboard, I’d buy it. Full stop. It’s clean. It’s stable. It’s slick. You connect to it and it just feels

Rich Washburn
Dec 62 min read


When the Safety Net Snaps
It happened again. The one thing that’s not supposed to go down … went down. This morning, Cloudflare — the safety net of the internet, the infrastructure under the infrastructure — tripped over itself and faceplanted. If AWS is the backbone, Cloudflare is the connective tissue. It’s the silent middle layer that makes sure your site doesn’t go dark when other things do. Except today, it did. And when Cloudflare stumbles, it’s not just one site that goes offline — it’s an ent

Rich Washburn
Nov 184 min read


The QR Code Hacker and the Arms Race of Tiny Things
I have just witnessed a masterpiece. A man with a printer, a dream, and apparently way too much free time has done what most cybersecurity professionals spend decades trying to achieve: he hacked the human condition — with stickers. Here’s the play:He prints QR codes — just generic black-and-white codes — and pastes them perfectly over existing ones in the wild. You know, menus, vending machines, parking meters, those tiny “scan me” squares that have become the universal doo

Rich Washburn
Nov 144 min read


PSA: Meta Knows It’s Profiting from Scamming You — and They're Okay With That
Let’s not sugarcoat it: Meta has been knowingly profiting from scam ads on its platforms, and new internal documents show just how deep the rabbit hole goes. According to a bombshell Reuters investigation , Meta (yes, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) internally projected that 10% of its 2024 revenue — roughly $16 billion — would come from ads promoting scams, fraud, or banned products. Not suspected scams. Not accidental ones. These are known bad acto

Rich Washburn
Nov 73 min read


“The Password Was ‘Louvre’?” — How Bad Security, Brilliant Thieves, and One Savage Ad Taught Us All a Lesson
If you want a single, unfiltered example of how the world manages to be simultaneously brilliant and boneheaded, look no further than the Louvre heist. I’ve seen breaches where the defenders did everything right and still lost — that’s life on the wire. This? This wasn’t that. This was a comedy of errors so spectacular it belongs in a heist movie with popcorn and a two-cocktail intermission. Here’s what went down, in plain terms your CISO will be too embarrassed to admit out

Rich Washburn
Nov 74 min read


The XAI Espionage Case: Why This Isn’t Just About One Engineer
The lawsuit Elon Musk’s XAI just filed against a former engineer reads like a spy thriller: a trusted insider cashes out millions in...

Rich Washburn
Sep 92 min read


PSA — Change Your Passwords, Turn On MFA, Move To Passkeys: 16 Billion Credentials Just Hit The Web
1. Why This Matters Imagine every lock on your house, office, and car dumped onto a public sidewalk with name-tags attached. That’s...

Rich Washburn
Jun 192 min read


Turns Out the Trojan Horse Was the Ultimate Human Exploit
I've been sitting here thinking about Trojan horses. Yep, the wooden kind from 3,000 years ago—but also the ones popping up today: drones...

Rich Washburn
Jun 133 min read


Breaching Reality: The Rise of Full-Spectrum Exploit Warfare
On June 12th, at 03:15 IRDT, Israel launched its largest-ever airstrike on Iran’s nuclear sites. But this wasn’t just another military...

Rich Washburn
Jun 132 min read


Spiderweb.exe: When Your Military Has Hackers
On June 1st, Russia got hacked. Not digitally—but operationally. Dozens of drones launched from inside its own borders took out nearly 40...

Rich Washburn
Jun 23 min read


PSA: Facebook “Breach” Claims and Apple’s AirPlay Flaws – What’s Real and What’s Rinse & Repeat
You ever feel like déjà vu in cybersecurity is just Tuesday? Yeah, me too. So let’s break this down: There's a loud claim flying around...

Rich Washburn
May 233 min read


Zero-Click, Wormable, and in Your Living Room: The AirPlay Exploit That Shouldn’t Exist (But Does)
Imagine walking into your house and your Bluetooth speaker silently hacks your phone—no pop-ups, no permissions, no downloads. Just......

Rich Washburn
May 23 min read


Pixelation Is Not Protection: Why Your Blur Tool Might Be Lying to You
Imagine you're caught in a gunfight. You dive behind a cardboard box. It hides you from view, but it won't stop a bullet. That's...

Rich Washburn
Apr 192 min read


Is WordPress the Internet’s Biggest Liability?
For years, WordPress has been the undisputed giant of the web, powering nearly half of the internet. But like a blockbuster sequel that...

Rich Washburn
Jan 53 min read


The Digital Panopticon: AI-Powered Surveillance, Civil Liberties, and the Battle for Privacy
Imagine a world where your every move is logged—where your grocery trips, gym visits, or detours to a favorite coffee shop are...

Rich Washburn
Dec 19, 20243 min read


White House AI Memo Signals U.S. Determination to Lead Global AI Race for National Security
In a sweeping October 2024 memorandum , the Biden administration unveiled a detailed plan to position the United States as the global...

Rich Washburn
Oct 25, 20244 min read


Chinese Scientists Report Using Quantum Computer to Hack Military-grade Encryption
In a development that sounds like something out of a sci-fi thriller, Chinese researchers have made significant strides in using quantum...

Rich Washburn
Oct 12, 20244 min read


BAC Consulting and Gold Apollo Got Caught in the Largest Cyber Explosive Attack in History
The world is still reeling from the shocking cyber attack in Lebanon that turned seemingly ordinary pagers into deadly explosives,...

Rich Washburn
Sep 19, 20245 min read
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