CrowdStrike Research: Security Flaws in DeepSeek-Generated Code Linked to Political Triggers

CrowdStrike Research: Security Flaws in DeepSeek-Generated Code Linked to Political Triggers
November 20, 2025 | Stefan Stein

CrowdStrike Counter Adversary Operations identifies innocuous trigger words that lead DeepSeek to produce more vulnerable code.
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In January 2025, China-based AI startup DeepSeek (深度求索) released DeepSeek-R1, a high-quality large language model (LLM) that allegedly cost much less to develop and operate than Western competitors’ alternatives.

CrowdStrike Counter Adversary Operations conducted independent tests on DeepSeek-R1 and confirmed that in many cases, it could provide coding output of quality comparable to other market-leading LLMs of the time. However, we found that when DeepSeek-R1 receives prompts containing topics the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) likely considers politically sensitive, the likelihood of it producing code with severe security vulnerabilities increases by up to 50%.

This comes as absolutely no surprise to me.

This should be a lesson to all of us. AIs are not people. Their "intelligence", however you define the term, is a function of the data it was trained on. If you train it with corrupt and biased data, you will get corrupt and biased results.

Models from nation states that believe in using any and all means to take advantage of and corrupt (if not open wage war on) the rest of the world should not be trusted. It should be assumed that those models will generate output in support of their creators' national goals, just as if you had hired a government agent from that nation to do the work.

How macOS tracks file metadata on non-Mac storage

This article is based on a discussion thread on TidBITS Talk: Finding Type/Creator Tags in Old Mac Document Files.

In this thread, one reader asked how Macintosh file metadata (e.g. a file's type and creator codes) are preserved when a file is copied to non-Macintosh storage (e.g. a Windows file server or a FAT formatted hard drive). He observed that he can copy a file to a Windows server, then copy/move the file to several different locations from Windows, and then copy the file back to a Mac and the metadata is preserved.

Here is the result of my analysis.

Thank you, Internet Archive

When I upgraded my Mac last October, Apple's Migration Assistant utility migrated most of my applications to the new computer. As I wrote in December, the various applications all migrated with differing degrees of success.dfsdfgsdfg

One application where I spoke too soon was Snapz Pro X. Despite MacWorld's lackluster review of version 2.5.1, it is still a very good screen capture utility that I consider superior in many ways to the one built-in to macOS.

When I wrote my review in December, I didn't really test Snapz Pro X. I launched it, saw that the menu appeared, then I quit it and assumed that it worked. I was wrong.

Upgrading A Mac System, part 4: Peripheral Hardware

Photo credit: Derorgmas
Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

The Upgrading A Mac System series:

• Part 1: Hardware Purchase
• Part 2: Migration
• Part 3: Apps
• Part 4: Peripheral Hardware

In part 3 of this article series, I described my application migration story. In this part, I'm (finally) finishing up the tale by talking about my various pieces of hardware that either worked or needed to be replaced. All of the work I'm describing here was actually done in October and November, but I'm just getting around to writing about it now.

Ideally, I would like to just swap the computer and leave everything else unchanged. But life is not ideal. Over the years, Apple has changed the port configuration of the Mac mini, so not everything can just plug in. At least not without some adapters. And some devices that were perfectly great 9 years ago are old and slow by today's standards. So it's time to change up several peripherals.

Upgrading A Mac System, part 3: Apps

Photo credit: Derorgmas
Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

The Upgrading A Mac System series:

• Part 1: Hardware Purchase
• Part 2: Migration
• Part 3: Apps
• Part 4: Peripheral Hardware

In part 2 of this article series, I described the migration process to move all my stuff to the new computer. In this article, I want to share my experiences with application support. What just worked, what didn't work and what was easy and hard to make work.

As you probably know, the latest versions of macOS, starting from version 10.15 (Catalina), do not support 32-bit applications. No 32-bit application will work unless you run it on an older version of macOS (e.g. via a virtual machine). Apple has supported 64-bit applications for a very long time, and they have always been supported on Intel processors. Nevertheless, quite a lot of Mac apps in my possession were 32-bit. I'm not sure why, since 64-bit compilers were available on the Intel Mac platform since day-one.

Upgrading A Mac System, part 2: Migration

Photo credit: Derorgmas
Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

The Upgrading A Mac System series:

• Part 1: Hardware Purchase
• Part 2: Migration
• Part 3: Apps
• Part 4: Peripheral Hardware

In part 1 of this article series, I explained why I needed to upgrade my old Mac, what I bought, and the shipping process.

Now that the computer had arrived, the next step was to move all of my data from the old computer to the new one. In the past, I did this the hard way - I manually created user accounts (an administrator, my personal account, and accounts for my wife and daughter). I then copied all of our documents over the LAN, manually installed all the software I require, ending up with a working system. The whole process usually takes a week or two, plus all the time needed to configure my preferences in everything.

This time, I decided to use Apple's Migration Assistant utility to speed up the process. This, as it turns out, was a mixed bag. Some parts of the migration worked flawlessly, and other parts made a mess I had to clean up after.

Upgrading A Mac System, part 1: Hardware Purchase

Photo credit: Derorgmas
Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

The Upgrading A Mac System series:

• Part 1: Hardware Purchase
• Part 2: Migration
• Part 3: Apps
• Part 4: Peripheral Hardware

For the past 9 years, I have been using the same computer for my main home system, a Mid-2011 Mac mini server. Equipped with two 750 GB hard drives and 16 GB of RAM (upgraded from its original 4GB), it has served me very well. Originally shipped with macOS version 10.7 ("Lion"), it has been upgraded several times through macOS 10.12 ("Sierra"). Although still working great today, it has become increasingly obvious that it needs to be replaced.

The main reason is that its system software is no longer supported by Apple. Although I could theoretically get a bit more support by upgrading to macOS 10.13 ("High Sierra"), that's still an old version and it has many known problems that I don't want to have to deal with. More recent versions of macOS are not compatible with this hardware and therefore can't be installed.

Another bigger problem is that some of my applications can't be upgraded. In particular, Microsoft Office dropped support for macOS 10.12. In order to get any new updates, including security updates, I need to move on to a newer version of macOS.

Finally, it's a bit slow. Modern versions of macOS make heavy use of the file system and a SATA hard drive, no matter how well it performs, just can't keep up these days. An SSD is really required for good performance. I could replace the hard drives with SSDs, of course, but that wouldn't solve the other two problems, so it became time to shop for a new Mac.

Michael Tsai Blog: Beware Spinlocks in User Space

This week, the Michael Tsai Blog (a great source of interesting system software discussions) summarized a discussion thread between Malte Skarupke (a game developer) and Linus Torvalds about different kinds of locking primitives.

See Beware Spinlocks in User Space for Tsai's summary.

If you find that interesting, I strongly recommend also reading the original article (Measuring Mutexes, Spinlocks and how Bad the Linux Scheduler Really is) and the discussion thread (on Real World Technologies forum). Although there is a bit of trolling, the discussion has a very high signal-to-noise ratio, including some very good points by Linus Torvalds about why it is incredibly difficult to roll your own locking primitives and not screw it up.

Naked Security: HPE warns of impending SSD disk doom

HPE warns of impending SSD disk doom
by Danny Bradbury, 28 Nov 2019

[HP Enterprise] released a critical firmware patch for its serial-attached SCSI (SAS) SSDs, after revealing that they would permanently fail by default after 32,768 hours of operation. That’s right: assuming they’re left on all the time, three years, 270 days, and eight hours after you write your first bit to one of these drives, your records and the disk itself will become unrecoverable.

All I can say is, "d'Oh!". And if you are using one of these SSDs, get the firmware updated as soon as you're able to.

Security tip: watch out for expired DNS domains

For quite some time, my computer at work has exhibited many signs of a malware infection, but none was ever to be found.

More specifically, at random times (usually when quickly typing a URL into a web browser) I would end up on the wrong page - usually a page trying to convince me that I'm wanted by the FBI, or trying to sell black market Viagra ('scuze me, "V1@gkr4"), or other kinds of annoying spam.

Of course, when you see something like this, you immediately assume you are infected by a virus or have some kind of malware. And I did all the right things - boot from a known-good recovery disk and run all kinds of scanners. And none of them revealed anything.

So what was going on here? The answer is that I got hit by a perfect storm of coincidence.

Adding Dell to the list of companies I will never again do business with

As you may know if you've been reading this blog for a while, I have zero tolerance for incompetence. Especially when it comes from large corporations that allegedly want my money and my business. So far, eBay and PayPal have both demonstrated themselves so incompetent that I will never do business with them ever again.

Today, we can add Dell to that list.

Here's the story of what they did to get me this angry and why I don't think anybody should do business with them ever again.

The story of the Commodore Amiga (updated: now through part 12, the final installment)

Ars Technica has been writing a series of articles about the history of the Commodore Amiga. For those interested in computer history, this is a fascinating story. More interesting, in many respects, than the stories of Microsoft and Apple.

Here are links to what's been written so far:

• Part 1: Genesis
• Part 2: The birth of Amiga
• Part 3: First prototype
• Part 4: Enter Commodore
• Part 5: Postlaunch Blues
• Part 6: Stopping The Bleeding
• Part 7: Game On!
• Part 8: The Demo Scene
• Part 9: The Video Toaster
• Part 10: The downfall of Commodore
• Part 11: Between an Escom and a Gateway
• Part 12: Red vs. Blue

• People still use the Amiga today, and new Viva Amiga documentary shows why
• The A-EON Amiga X5000: An alternate universe where the Amiga platform never died

I believe this is the complete set of articles - 12 parts plus two sidebar articles. If more are written in the future, I will update this article when I learn about them.

MacRumors: Source Code for Apple's Lisa Operating System to be Released for Free in 2018

Source Code for Apple's Lisa Operating System to be Released for Free in 2018
Wednesday December 27, 2017 5:57 pm PST by Juli Clover

The Apple Lisa, released in 1983, was one of the first personal computers to come equipped with a graphical user interface, and soon the operating system that ran on the Lisa will available for free, courtesy of the Computer History Museum and Apple.

As noted by Gizmodo, Al Kossow, a software curator at the Computer History Museum, recently announced that both the source code for the Lisa operating system and the Lisa apps have been recovered. Apple is reviewing the source code, and once that's done, the museum will be releasing the code publicly.

This is really awesome news. Hopefully it will spur some people in the emulation community to make a Lisa emulator we can run on our modern computers under macOS, Windows and Linux. I, for one, would love to be able to try out this historic computer and compare the experience with what I remember from the early Macs, with the design ideas Jef Raskin developed, and other contemporary computer systems.

The Michelangelo of Microsoft Excel

h/t Daring Fireball

It had never previously occurred to me that Excel's drawing tools could be used for actual art and not just business graphics. I'm impressed.

Naked Security: Google AI teaches itself ‘superhuman’ chess skills in four hours

Google AI teaches itself ‘superhuman’ chess skills in four hours
by Lisa Vaas, 08 Dec 2017

Human chess grandmaster Peter Heine Nielsen tells the BBC that he’s “always wondered how it would be if a superior species landed on earth and showed us how they played chess.”

Well, move aside, ugly, giant bags of mostly water: now we know, because Google’s “superhuman” AlphaZero artificial intelligence (AI) taught itself chess from scratch in four hours. Then, it wiped the floor with the former world-leading chess software, Stockfish 8.
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From the paper, whose authors include DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis: a child chess prodigy who reached the rank of chess master at the age of 13:

Starting from random play, and given no domain knowledge except the game rules, AlphaZero achieved within 24 hours a superhuman level of play in the games of chess and shogi [a similar Japanese board game] as well as Go, and convincingly defeated a world-champion program in each case.

A very impressive achievement. A huge leap forward in the field of machine learning.

Is it actually intelligent? I suppose that's going to depend greatly on how you define the word.

Firefox 57 is out, and you need new add-ons

Yesterday, the Mozilla people released Firefox version 57. And with it, they have removed the old "XUL" based add-on system. So all add-ons must now use the new WebExtension API. Unfortunately, many add-ons (including a lot that I use) have not been updated yet, despite Firefox issuing warnings for the last several revisions. In many cases, the authors have abandoned the code, and in others, I don't think they care enough to want to re-implement it for the new API.

The result is that I've had to remove and replace many of my favorite add-ons. Here's a list of what I had to change and what I think of the results.

Giving an old Mac a new lease on life

Update: August 24, 2017: Added section about enabling TRIM

This weekend, I upgraded my daughter's 2011 MacBook Air with a new SSD and battery and gave it a new lease on life. Although this computer is six years old, it still has no problem handling all the tasks she uses it for: web surfing, photos, Microsoft Office, music, YouTube and other related tasks. But after all this time, the 120G SSD is getting full and the battery only lasts about an hour on a full charge. The computer was also running a pretty old version of macOS - 10.7 ("Lion") was released in 2011 and hasn't seen an update since 2012. Because of this, several other key applications, including Firefox and Chrome were also old and out of date, and were in need of upgrades.

Windows 10 disables ATA Secure Erase

h/t MacInTouch

For those who aren't seriously into computer technology, there are technological issues with erasing an SSD.

With a hard drive, you can use all kinds of standard disk-erase utilities to write zeros to every block. If you're paranoid about leaving magnetic after-images, there are various algorithms for writing various patterns designed to obscure any magnetic residue of old files. They take a long time, but are generally considered secure enough for all but the most sensitive data (which should only be "erased" via physical destruction of the drive.)

With an SSD, however, erasure by overwriting new data is not effective. Tehnologies like wear leveling, garbage collection and TRIM make it difficult or impossible to know if data has truly been erased. Writing zeros to a logical block of data does not necessarily overwrite the flash memory containing the old data - it is more likely that the flash memory will be marked as "garbage" for collection (which will truly erase it) at some non-deterministic time in the future. That time might be quickly, or it might not be for days or even months, depending on the SSD controller's algorithm and the drive's usage pattern.

Mind you, this "garbage" data is not accessible using any software-accessible interface (SATA, SCSI, USB, etc.) The only way to read garbage data is to install special firmware into the SSD controller or to physically remove the chips. But both options are possible for someone willing to pay a data recovery company or some other similarly capable forensics lab.

Which is where the ATA secure erase command comes into play. The ATA specification (at the heart of all ATA and SATA devices) includes a command for explicitly and securely erasing a device. When supported on an SSD, it performs a flash-level erase on every single block, ensuring that no data will be available to recover.

And now, with this background material in mind, the linked MacInTouch posting now make sense. It would appear that the act of installing Windows 8 or 10 on an SSD involves writing some data to the drive that disables the secure erase command. Why they do this may be an interesting topic for discussion, but doesn't really matter if you've got a retired drive that you want to erase.

To get around this problem, you need to get a copy of the SSD manufacturer's drive utility. You can use this utility to reset the SSD's firmware, which will re-enable the secure erase command. Unfortunately, in order for this to work, you need the drive's PSID code - this is a secure ID designed to prevent malware from bypassing security features. Fortunately, most SSDs print the PSID on the drive's label. Unfortunately, if your label is removed or damaged, you may not be able to read it and there is usually no other way to get this number.

I suppose the important lesson here is that when you install a new SSD into a computer, photograph the cover to make a record of the PSID number. If you are concerned that a hacker might get this image, print a few copies and store them in a secure location (like a file cabinet) and then erase the image file.

If all this seems like too much, there's another alternative - use whole-drive disk encryption before you copy any data to the SSD. Later on, when it's time to retire the SSD, blow away the decryption key. A simple drive-erase (without decrypting it) will do it just fine. Or if you want to make it even simpler, change the drive's password to a long string of gibberish characters (30-50 characters should do nicely) and promptly forget what they are. Anybody who gets the drive in the future will not be able to access the data without this string, and it is highly unlikely that they will ever be able to provide it. Of course, you can also delete all the files and empty-trash before changing the string, to provide an additional level of protection.

Finally, you might want to encrypt the drive anyway. This way you will be protected in case the drive controller fails, since you won't be able to perform any kind of secure erase operation at that point, but your encrypted data will not be recoverable through forensic analysis without the decryption key.

$70 hackintosh outperforms new laptop

Snazzy Labs builds a $70 hackintosh—or, as he calls it, crapintosh—computer for those who want a super tight budget PC build. Can a $70 hackintosh be any good? Can a cheap hackintosh outbench a MacBook Pro? Do Apple's iMac, MacBook Pro, and Mac Pro blow this 5-year-old computer into outer space or does the hackintosh give it a run for its money?

Fascinating. Scrounge used parts (government surplus, Craigslist, etc.) to assemble a PC for $70, hack macOS 10.12 "Sierra" onto it and find that it outperforms Apple's low-end laptops and is surprisingly good at just about everything other than high-end gaming.

Now, clearly, the pricing is not realistic. Used and surplus equipment is cheap because the seller's goal is to get rid of it, not to make a profit. And it is sold as-is with no warranty, support or anything else. A company like Apple selling new equipment with the same specs would have to charge a lot more, but it is still a fascinating experiment nonetheless.

Actually, it sounds like a fun hobby project for me if I can clear out some space in my office :-)

Happy Apple ][ Day!

Apple II Day

Today in 1977, the Apple II was released, joining the ranks of the TRS-80 and the Commodore PET in home computing power. Best known as the adorable lovechild of Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, the Apple II came in two forms: fully functional, with all the bells and whistles of a color monitor, power supply, keyboard and case, or just the brain in circuitboard form so you could have all the fun of building it yourself. The computer operated on BASIC programming, so you could go totally off the reservation and even build your own applications.

The Apple II became hugely popular, especially since it had a spreadsheet program people could use instead of lugging around ledgers. Within ten years, the computer would evolve into the Apple IIe and end up in schools across the country because of some brilliant and crafty marketing. Whether you were one of those geeks building it in your own garage or a later generation learning the joys of dot-matrix graphics and programming, Apple II still has a place in your solder-covered heart.

I'll be celebrating tonight with a game of Spare Change or maybe Hard Hat Mack on my (still working beautifully) Apple IIGS.