Dose of Paranoia - 07-Dec-2024
It gets worse before it gets worse
Good morning and Happy Weekend… this week seems to have had at least two normal weeks’ worth of news in it… one president pardons his kid, another one declares martial law until he doesn’t, a health care CEO gunned down on the way to the shareholders meeting. And in less covered news, a new ‘Disease X’ brewing in the DRC and the USDA ordering testing of milk as bird flu cases continue to percolate in the US. I think we have had enough news for December, don’t you?
Infosec, Crimes, Scams
You 2.0 - A study conducted by researchers at Stanford and Google claims that training a large language model with the results of a structured 2 hour interview yielded chatbots which were able to answer questions the same way that the interview subject would in 85% of cases. The training interview asked subjects a variety of questions about their lives and opinions on contemporary social issues. According to the lead researcher “you can have a bunch of small ‘yous’ running around and actually making the decisions that you would have made.” Chew on that for a moment. While this process currently requires the cooperation of the person being “cloned,” I can foresee a more advanced version of this that uses social media, audio, video, and other publicly available information to do this without the consent of the subject, making deepfakes much more convincing. On a more philosophical note, it also seems to point to a more mechanistic view of our minds and personalities. Maybe we aren’t the special little unique snowflakes we all think our personalities make us. Ugh - too early in the morning for such existential thoughts.
Deepfake detection - On the positive side of the AI/deepfake arms race, some other researchers have shown off some technology which they claim can help identify faked images. This is important work, and the US Department of Defense is also working in this area. But it is important to remember that in many cases, the people who want to believe that a deepfake image confirms their particular view of the world are not going to be swayed by such inconveniences as facts and (ugh) scientific proof.
Mobile phone phollies - In this version of “scareware",” the software displays an image on the victim’s phone simulating a cracked or (better yet) malfunctioning screen or a “virus/malware” “alert,” along with a phone number for “technical support” to get “help” with this “problem.” You know the drill… the sender then extracts payment card or personal info from the victim.
In another telephonic scam, the baddies call their victim posing as a bank or payment card company and get the victim to hang up and key in *72 and some digits on their phone’s keypad to “secure their account.” This actually activates call forwarding on the device, sending incoming calls to the scammer and allowing them to contact the bank and make money transfers. When the bank calls the “customer” for “verification",” they are talking to the scammer.
There’s gold in them thar scam texts - Sticking with the mobile phone theme, a gentleman in Bangkok was recently arrested with a car mounted fake cellular base station which he was using to blanket areas of the city with scam text messages. The effort and expense he put into this is impressive - there must be some serious money in this…
Apparently, if Shikoku Bank in Japan loses customer funds due to fraud, they will take it really seriously. REALLY seriously. Yeah, this pledge appears to be a part of a “treasured historical artifact” from the days of the samurai, but given the increasing prevalence of fraud, maybe something to consider bringing back. I’d bet those Fraud/AML people would take their jobs even more seriously.
Crap app alerts - Google’s Play Store may soon be providing warnings when apps you are about to download have attributes suggesting they might be useless/scammy. A good idea as attackers often use malicious or lookalike apps as part of their plans.
Organized crime takes a stand - against slightly less organized crime - The rise of “yamibaito” (dark part time jobs - think TaskRabbit crossed with a really low rent version of “Ocean’s 11”) has been making the news in Japan - and I’m glad to say that not everyone is sitting still for this new criminal innovation - the Eleventh Generation Himonya Family of the Inagawa-kai Yakuza wants you to know that this new, uh, less organized crime, is a bad thing. Yay… ?
Remember “Hawk Tuah Girl?” - well, it seems she has joined the ranks of influencers who decided to cosplay as finance people, spun up a shitcoin, and fleeced her (really really really stupid) followers. I have a hard time generating much sympathy for the victims on this one, but it does seem wrong that she and tons of other dirtbags keep getting away with this. If this is where crypto is taking finance, well, I’m glad to be out of the industry. Yeah, this was a documentary.
Tech Stuff
More great news about AI/self driving cars - Apparently, emergency vehicles’ flashing lights can cause some self driving cars’ guidance systems to flip out and be less able to identify objects in their vicinity. Great job setting up test cases, people… what are the chances that a car driving on a road might encounter a police car/fire truck/ambulance anyway? A million to one. Never gonna happen. Regulation of tech is just innovation killing socialism!
Fun Stuff
I am definitely going to be using these backgrounds for my upcoming video meetings.
A reminder that while tech history may not repeat itself, it most definitely rhymes. While the TiVO is rapidly becoming yesterday’s technology (thank you cable companies for killing cablecards which allowed these to work and totally coincidentally offering paid cloud DVR services), I’ll bet you weren’t aware of its great great granddaddy!
Book of the Week
This week’s book is The Case for Open Borders - I admit that I had some trouble getting past the title at first, but there is a lot of good information here about the actual economics (and morality) of immigration policy (based on evidence rather than feelings) that I found really compelling. Want to actually make America great again? Some ideas worth considering here - especially if (like me) the title initially makes you uncomfortable.
In China you can actually get the death penalty for fraud.