Greetings from Sunny Weehawken… my recovery from ACL surgery continues and I am now able to hobble around the neighborhood spreading sunshine and cheer.
InfoSec/Scam Stuff
If you are an Apple user, it is time to update all the things… Apple released updates for IPhones, iPads, and Macs this past week - make sure you have updated to the latest versions with the security fix goodness….
Abandoned landlines lead to fraud - Maybe you have ditched your landline phone like many other folks. Well, that old number may come back to haunt you… scammers can port unused phone numbers to new lines and use them to interact with banks and other important accounts. Take a few minutes to log in to your online banking, investment, medical, utilities, phone, and email providers and make sure that the phone numbers you have listed as contact information are current and correct.
Bank insider fraud seems to be on the rise - In one recent case, bank employees with access to customer information were caught colluding with criminals to target senior citizens with high value accounts. These kinds of frauds are super insidious due to the scammer’s possession of inside knowledge of the victims’ accounts making them seem more legitimate when they contact victims. It is really important to talk to the seniors in your life about this kind of fraud and encourage them to immediately hang up on anyone who is calling “from their bank” and call back on a known good customer service line. And remind them that their bank will NEVER send someone to their house - the days of that level of customer service are looooong gone.
Real commitment to the bit - If you are going to be a fraudster, be like this guy, who really jumped into his scam with both feet - and more. It is really rare to see this level of dedication to your fraud these days. My hat (and pants) are off to him!
Tech Stuff
(No) Total Recall - If you are upgrading your Windows PC to Windows 11, do yourself a favor and disable the Orwellian nightmare and hacker tool that is the “Recall” feature. This is another one of those really stupid and dangerous product ideas that simply won’t die. Like Google’s AI search enhancements or the continuing enshittification of just about every online service we used to love.
Like lemmings over the cliff - An interesting survey from the AP details how US adults are using artificial intelligence and I am not happy with the results - AI is NOT A SEARCH ENGINE, PEOPLE. It basically Google Autocomplete on steroids and it has an unfortunate tendency to hallucinate. Please stop using it to search or to write legal briefs. It does seem good at some tasks, like simple coding to a degree. Or maybe not even that. But the worst part is the last group mentioned - people who are using AI for “companionship” - this a huge flashing red warning light that something is seriously wrong with society.
If you want to know the most valuable killer app for AI, look no further…. and if you want to help your kids pick a job which is unlikely to be replaced by AI, check out page 13 of this Microsoft study. The Dredging Operators of the world will be employed long after the rest of us have been replaced by robots.
Fun Stuff
NYC, text searchable - This is really cool on it’s own and I can imagine all sorts of research projects that could be done with it. Take all those Google Street View photos of NYC, identify all the visible words on them, geotag them and make the data available for searching and mapping. This is awesome! You can now see the 21 places that Google saw the word “antelope” in NYC. Or you can see how well my NYC mayoral candidacy is doing in the LatinX community, at least.
We really need to bring back automobile polo. In addition to being batshit crazy, it would seem to fit in with the whole Gilded Age thing we’ve got going here in the US. Maybe this could be a use for all those unsold Cybertrucks.
Maybe not exactly fun, but very cool - the Ukrainian military claims to have managed to rescue one of their soldiers from behind enemy lines by sending him an e-bike using a drone.
In Japan, you know you have arrived when your town makes a manhole cover in your honor….
A final thought
We need a new Manhattan Project… when I was a kid, the “F Word” was something that you just didn’t say. It was taboo. It was a BAD word used by BAD people. But over the years, its power has been diluted to the point where the national motto of the US is basically “What the fucking fuck?” and the default response to pretty much everything that Donald Trump and his minions do on a daily basis is “Fuck that guy/gal". (Unless you are a fucking horrible person, that is.) It just doesn’t have the impact needed for the guy who deports innocent people, uses the Constitution for toilet tissue, kills the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and fires people who give him bad news. We need a new, super obscene word that surpasses “fuck” to express the level of disgust anyone with a brain and/or conscience is feeling multiple times each and every day. We need a team of linguists to scour the dictionaries of all languages, alive and dead. We need to dedicate a bunch of AIs to compute a new uber-obscenity that is suitable for these times. Maybe if we can crack that puzzle, sanity will return. Or this is all just a stupid fucking idea. Do you have an idea? I want to hear it!
Have a great fucking week!
Remember, the thing about lemmings going over a cliff is a myth created by the Disney Company.