Squid of the Week is a long-running tradition on schneier-on-security-blog in which Schneier publishes a photograph or link related to cephalopods — octopuses, squids, cuttlefish, nautiluses — every Friday. The tradition began in the mid-2000s, shortly after the blog launched in 2004, and has continued with remarkable consistency for two decades, becoming one of the most recognizable features of the blog and a small emblem of Schneier's personality.
Origin and Practice
The precise origin is informal: Schneier's genuine interest in marine biology, and in cephalopods particularly, led him to begin sharing cephalopod-related content at the end of each week's security posts. The posts typically consist of a brief caption, a photograph, a link to a scientific article, or a short note about a cephalopod behavior or species, followed by the invitation for readers to discuss anything in the comments — making the squid post a de facto weekly open thread on the blog.
The Friday framing — ending the week's security content with something unrelated to security — has a structural role on the blog. It acknowledges that readers are human, that the week's security news can be relentlessly grim, and that there are other things worth noticing in the world. The squid posts function as a palate cleanser and a community gathering point.
Community Function
The comments on Friday squid posts became a well-established open forum where regular blog readers discuss security news, technical topics, current events, and genuinely anything else. This community feature is unusual for an expert's technical blog — most such blogs do not sustain active comment communities over decades — and the squid tradition is partly responsible for cultivating it. The squid posts signal that Schneier is not exclusively performing expertise; he's also a person with personal enthusiasms, which lowers the social barriers for readers to engage.
Over time, the squid posts have generated a running inside joke and a kind of subcultural identity among regular readers. Schneier has acknowledged on the blog that reader attachment to the tradition is part of why it continues — stopping it would disappoint a significant portion of his readership.
Significance in Schneier's Profile
In the broader context of Schneier's intellectual identity, the squid tradition is a small but revealing data point. It demonstrates that his public persona includes genuine intellectual curiosity beyond security — he finds cephalopods genuinely interesting, which he has explained in terms of their remarkable intelligence, their alien nervous system architecture (distributed across their arms), and their behavioral complexity. The connection to systems thinking is not forced: cephalopods are fascinating partly because they represent a radically different solution to the problem of intelligent behavior, one in which "the self" is distributed across semi-autonomous agents.
The tradition also illustrates how Schneier has maintained a direct relationship with his readership over two decades without intermediaries — something that became increasingly rare as social media platforms consolidated online community around algorithmic feeds rather than individual blogs.
Duration
As of 2026, the Friday squid posts have continued for approximately 20 years, making this one of the longest-running regular features of any expert technical blog in the security field. The consistency itself — showing up every Friday for two decades — is a minor piece of evidence about Schneier's character: reliable, methodical, attentive to community norms he has established, and genuinely committed to the practice rather than treating it as disposable content.