Jacob Riggs

Security Researcher

[Jacob Riggs @JacobRiggs]

The bondage you're born into is always weaker than you are.

[Jacob Riggs @JacobRiggs]

Sentiments like this unfortunately miss the point. A VPN only hides internet traffic. It can't stop the device itself from inspecting your content. In 1984 the only place Winston could hide from surveillance was the corner in his room, but that meant they still knew exactly where he was. VPNs are set to become the new corner if only a handful of technically competent individuals are able to use them.

[Jacob Riggs @JacobRiggs]

Senior cybersecurity professional here. This virtue signalling narrative is the modern day siren song. We should never normalise client-side scanning. Today it's "to protect the kids". Tomorrow it'll be scanning for whatever someone other than you deems 'harmful'. Watch carefully for the individuals that support this effort and remember their names - they do not serve the legitimate public interest.

[International Cyber Digest @IntCyberDigest]

‼️🚨 Pwn2Own Berlin 2026 just hit a wall. For the first time in 19-years, ZDI rejected dozens of working zero-day RCE submissions because organizers ran out of contest slots.

Rejected hackers are now going public with PoC demos and direct vendor disclosures, breaking Pwn2Own's usual secrecy.

▪️ AI surfaces a massive wave of 0-day RCEs.
▪️ Submissions overwhelm ZDI past max capacity.
▪️ Slots run out. Researchers with working chains get rejected.
▪️ "Revenge disclosures" begin. ← we are here.

Confirmed casualties so far:
▪️ @xchglabs : 86 vulnerabilities prepared (PyTorch, NVIDIA, Linux KVM, Oracle, Docker, Ollama, Chroma, LiteLLM, llama.cpp). All rejected. Now reporting directly to vendors with writeups dropping as patches land.
▪️ @ggwhyp : full-chain Firefox RCE on Windows. Rejected. Publicly demoed (HTML page → cmd.exe → calc.exe). Responsibly disclosed to Mozilla.
▪️ @yunsu_dev : working RCE chain, rejected. Submitting elsewhere.
▪️ @ryotkak : tried to register for 3+ weeks. ZDI confirmed "at maximum capacity, can't add extra contest days." Considered canceling flight and hotel.
▪️ @anzuukino2802 : Claude Code RCE PoC. Rejected.
▪️ @desckimh : 0-day RCEs in Ollama and LM Studio. Rejected.

Reported impact: a community-estimated 150+ researchers tried to register. Accepted contestants are now being warned about collisions. Rejected vulnerabilities going to bug bounty programs may trigger pre-event patches that invalidate the work of those who got in.

ZDI has not publicly addressed the capacity issue. The event still runs May 14-16 in Berlin.

[Jacob Riggs @JacobRiggs]

Imagine the milky way as a small dark corridor. Each civilisation that has ever arisen is a match struck somewhere along that corridor's length. The match flares, burns for an instant, and then goes out. If you struck a million matches at random points along that corridor over 13 billion years, most of them would burn alone. No two matches would burn at the same time. A visitor walking into the room at any random moment would find only darkness.

The room was never empty - it was full of matches. But none of them lasted long enough to see each other.

We are a match burning for roughly one century. One century out of 13.8 billion years.

[Pavel Durov @durov]

This is how the EU/UK now regulates social media:

🤐 Offer CEOs secret deals to censor dissent.
🚨 If they refuse, open criminal cases against them.
😑 When people push back, say it's "all for the children".

🎭 "Protecting children" has become the standard legal/PR cover.

[Jacob Riggs @JacobRiggs]

@vxunderground So an anti-censorship group walks away from the least censoring platform over shitty reach, yet remains embedded in the ones that throttle the speech they claim to defend?

Ofcourse this has nothing to do with ideology and chasing a woke agenda.

[Jacob Riggs @JacobRiggs]

@maximusgrave I'm happy to pay extortionate prices for RAM to see this type of content.

[Jacob Riggs @JacobRiggs]

@QuinnyPig @getdelve How is this increasingly entertaining to follow.

[Jacob Riggs @JacobRiggs]

@elonmusk @DannyLimanseta And you can run them all in parallel limited only by the constraints of compute, so if you can accurately simulate all the known conditions of your own environment, you can observe every possible outcome and then adopt the most favourable path forward.

[Jacob Riggs @JacobRiggs]

@alphafox Because for some, the day someone leaves or betrays them is the day they discover pain can either rot them from the inside or forge them into something more.

[Jacob Riggs @JacobRiggs]

There's a quiet kind of exile that comes with noticing too much. You sit down to watch something everyone loves and instead of getting swept away, you see the structure holding it up - the cues, the formulas, the engineered emotions. At a party, you hear the rehearsed anecdotes, the strategic self-deprecation, the careful positioning of status and charm. You remember when it all felt effortless, when a film was just a story and a conversation didn't feel like performance art. Nothing catastrophic happened. You just started recognising patterns, and once you see them, they don't blur again.

It isn't arrogance and it isn't bitterness. It's more like distance. The magic trick still works, but you're aware of the sleight of hand. The news carries subtext. Social media carries choreography. Social gatherings carry unspoken scripts. You participate, you smile, you nod - but part of you stands slightly to the side, watching the machinery turn. And the hardest part isn't seeing it. It's trying to explain that you miss when you didn't.

[Jacob Riggs @JacobRiggs]

@vxunderground Chat is this real lmfao

[Jacob Riggs @JacobRiggs]

I really wish people would substantiate claims like this with evidence when making them, as non-technical audiences will take them at face value, especially when claiming established E2EE platforms are 'not secure' without any supporting cryptographic analysis or independent audit.

[Jacob Riggs @JacobRiggs]

@BasilTheGreat Why do we put up with this shit

[Jacob Riggs @JacobRiggs]

@musalbas @RusGarbageHuman infiltrating

[WikiLeaks @wikileaks]

JULIAN ASSANGE FILES CRIMINAL COMPLAINT AGAINST NOBEL FOUNDATION OVER “INSTRUMENT OF WAR” PEACE PRIZE

WikiLeaks Founder Alleges 2025 Award to María Corina Machado Constitutes Misappropriation, Facilitation of War Crimes Under Swedish Law, Seeks Freeze of 11 million SEK ($1.18 million USD) of Pending Transfers to Machado

STOCKHOLM — 11:00am CET December 17, 2025

Julian Assange today filed a criminal complaint in Sweden accusing 30 individuals associated with the Nobel Foundation, including its leadership, of committing serious suspected crimes, including the crime of gross misappropriation of funds, facilitation of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and the financing of the crime of aggression.

The complaint shows that Alfred Nobel's 1895 will explicitly mandates that the peace prize go to the individual who during the proceeding year “conferred the greatest benefit to humankind” by doing “the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

Assange argues that “The political decision of the Norwegian selection committee does not suspend the fiduciary duty of Swedish funds administrators”. “Any disbursement contradicting this mandate constitutes misappropriation from the endowment”.

The complaint, submitted simultaneously to the Swedish Economic Crime Authority (Ekobrottsmyndigheten) and the Swedish War Crimes Unit (Krigsbrottsenheten), states that the suspects, including Nobel Foundation Chair Astrid Söderbergh Widding and Executive Director Hanna Stjärne, converted “an instrument of peace into an instrument of war,” through suspected “serious criminality” including:

1) Breach of trust, gross misappropriation and conspiracy in relation to the pending 11 million SEK ($1.18 million) disbursement of the Peace prize monies to Maria Corina Machado, whose prior and ongoing actions categorically exclude her from the criteria set out in Alfred Nobel's will;

2) Facilitation of war crimes, including the crime of aggression and crimes against humanity, breaching Sweden's obligations under Article 25(3)(c) of the Rome Statute, because the accused are aware of Machado's incitement and endorsement of the U.S. commission of international crimes, and knew or ought to have known that the disbursement of Nobel monies would contribute to extrajudicial killings of civilians and shipwrecked survivors at sea and are in breach of their obligation to cease disbursements.

Assange notes that the members of the Nobel Foundation have previously exercised their supervisory authority over the prizes and their disbursements by withholding Literature Prize disbursements in 2018. “Failure to intervene here, despite U.S. war crimes off the Venezuelan coast and Machado’s key role in furthering aggression” incurs criminal liability.

“Alfred Nobel's endowment for peace cannot be spent on the promotion of war,” Assange states. The accused have concrete legal obligations because they are tasked with “ensuring the fulfillment of the intended purpose of Alfred Nobel’s will, that is, to end wars and war crimes, and not to enable them.”

MACHADO'S INCITEMENT OF THE LARGEST U.S. MILITARY BUILDUP SINCE THE IRAQ WAR MAKE HER CATEGORICALLY INELIGIBLE

The complaint notes how the Nobel announcement and ceremony have occurred in what military analysts describe as “the largest U.S. military deployment in the Caribbean since the Cuban Missile Crisis”—now exceeding 15,000 personnel, including the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford. The escalation continues as President Trump announced on December 10, two days after the Nobel ceremony, that U.S. strikes would be “starting by land.” The Venezuela strategy is part of what Trump’s Secretary for War, Peter Hegseth, calls a shift toward “maximum lethality, not tepid legality” and “going on the offence”.

Against this backdrop, Assange states that “Machado has continued to incite the Trump Administration to pursue its escalatory path”, including by entering into a conspiracy to give the U.S. administration access to $1.7 trillion in oil reserves and other natural resources through privatization once Maduro is ousted.

“Using her elevated position as the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, Machado may well have tipped the balance in favour of war, facilitated by the named suspects.” Assange states in the criminal complaint.

The complaint lists evidence of this incitement of U.S. military intervention, as well as praising Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's conduct in Gaza. Her statements include:

- “Military escalation may be the only way... the United States may need to intervene directly” (30 October 2025)
- Machado called U.S. military strikes on civilian vessels, which have killed at least 95 people to date, “justified” and “visionary”.
- Machado dedicated the prize to U.S. President Trump, because he “finally has put Venezuela... in terms of a priority for the United States national security”
- Historical statements including 2014 testimony before U.S. Congress where she said: “The only path left is the use of force”

The filing cites extensive third-party expert and institutional opposition to Machado receiving the award:

- 21 Norwegian peace organizations declared: “Machado is the opposite of a peace laureate.”
- Nobel Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel stated: “Giving the prize to someone who calls for foreign invasion is a mockery of Alfred Nobel's will.”
- The Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) confirmed Machado “has called for military intervention in Venezuela.”

REQUESTED ACTION

The complaint notes that “There is a real risk that the funds derived from Nobel’s endowment have been or will be intentionally or negligently diverted from their charitable purpose to facilitate aggression, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.”

Assange requests that Swedish authorities:

1. Immediately freeze of the pending SEK 11,000,000 monetary prize transfer and any remaining related budget and secure return of the medal.
2. Investigate the named persons and Foundation officers and associated entities for breach of trust, facilitation of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and conspiracy.
3. Seize of board minutes, emails, group chats, financial records.
4. Interrogate Widding, Stjärne and other suspects.
5. Fully investigate domestically or refer the matter to the ICC (Rome Statute Art. 25(3)(c)).

“This complaint seeks the immediate freezing of all remaining funds and a full criminal investigation lest the Nobel Peace Prize be permanently converted from an instrument of peace into an instrument of war,” Assange concludes.

[Jacob Riggs @JacobRiggs]

My long shot journey to Australia's rarest visa https://t.co/enOUB81TD0

[Jacob Riggs @JacobRiggs]

Comfort kills more men than hardship ever will.

[Jacob Riggs @JacobRiggs]

This is actually possible through correlation of various signals, rather than Meta being able to directly access chat content (which some people still get confused about). E.g their tracking pixel triggers for a specific page one of your contacts visited combined with an instagram reel you paused on briefly before engaging in a high volume WhatsApp chat/call with that contact. Meta then correlates those signals with characteristics you both share to derive a confidence score you might be interested in the same product/service, then serves up ads it deems relevant. This is why the ability to harvest metadata still holds so much value to any surveillance state and big tech monopoly, and also why metadata can often be more revealing than content.