This Week in Security — 16/09/2026

This makes a refreshing change from the usual LLM apocalypse: your data is still valuable, especially when there is so much of it! Once again it shows that collecting and storing data long-term is a bad idea. There needs to be strict control on how long personally identifiable information (PII) can be retained, after which it must be deleted. Compared to the publicly available data on LinkedIn, this data source is of much higher value: it is verified, includes complete addresses, and captures people who have never been online at all.

Tech Policy Press — 15/09/2026

Yet another push to ban social media for minors under 15, this time EU-wide, via the forthcoming EU Kids Act. What is striking is how little the announcement engages with the framework that already exists. The EU GDPR already requires parental consent before minors' data can be processed, with the age threshold set between 13 and 16 depending on the member state. And the EU DSA already obliges platforms to put child-protection measures in place. In other words, the legal scaffolding for protecting minors online is already here. The gap is enforcement, not legislation.

The Register — 14/09/2026

Barely registering above the din of AI doomsayers are the voices reminding the public that legal and regulatory mechanisms, like consumer protection laws and anti-competition regimes, already exist to address many of the damages and harms caused by AI. The article offers hypotheses for why this line of conversation isn’t more front and center. But the more important question is how do we create the political will in citizens and their representatives to come together and use these legal instruments to hold frontier labs accountable.

The Guardian — 09/09/2026

If you think cases like these are regrettable exceptions, think again. With technology permeating more and more of our daily lives, it has become a go-to tool for domestic abusers. We often talk about the security and trustworthiness of these systems in very sophisticated scenarios, yet forget that a less tech-savvy person relinquishing control over them to their partner can lead to a very real danger for many as well. We urgently need to include these considerations into our evaluations of the societal impacts of new technologies.

Trail of Bits — 09/09/2026

This is a lighthearted article about formal verification in software and mathematics. Formal verification takes a mathematical statement or a software program as input. In this article, that statement is Fermat's last theorem: a^n + b^n != c^n. You then add the constraints you want verified, in this case that all numbers must be natural numbers greater than 0, and that n must be greater than 2. Lean, the formal verification program, then tries to construct a proof of why this is true. For Fermat's last theorem, the proof is usually very long, but due to a bug in Lean, you can produce a surprisingly short one. This shows that trusting provers is not always straightforward, and that the provers themselves need to be verified!