Dose of Paranoia - 2025-08-30
It gets worse before it gets worse...
Welcome to the Labor Day edition of the Dose… yeah - that is the Department of Labor building in America in 2025. For those of you who helped us get here (and who haven’t yet tired of my abuse) - fuck you - if this stuff seems OK to you, please do us all a favor and move to someplace that better suits your personality/political beliefs and let the rest of us try to fix the damage you assholes have caused. As our dear leader says - “THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!”
Important Stuff
New Covid shots are still available in some places - I tried making an appointment in NYC with no luck, but CVS in NJ seems to be taking appointments - one of the few times living in NJ has an advantage over NYC. If you are not a fan of viral illness, now seems to be the time to get the latest Covid and Flu jabs before our homicidal federal government slams the door on decades of life saving progress. I would note that the new risk factor list to “qualify” for a Covid shot if you are not 65 yet includes “physical inactivity” and “obesity",” so really, any American should qualify. Again, for the folks who voted for this, please do exercise your (hopefully painful/fatal) freedom to experience Covid fully.
InfoSec/Scam Stuff
Your new AI buddy - While most of the new “AI features” being crammed down our throats are pretty useless to normal folk, they are a bonanza for hackers and scammers. Here’s a cheery story about how hackers can use Gmail’s spiffy new AI summarization feature to aid their attacks. And some other research on how “AI powered browsers” can be subverted by attackers to do their bidding instead of yours. I guess at least someone is benefiting from this stuff… it’s just that it is overpaid AI “experts,” shareholders, and criminals rather than customers.
Score one for honest Uber drivers! - Scammers are increasingly using in person couriers who go to vicitims’ homes to pick up payments and in this case, it was the Uber drivers that they called to transport them who smelled a rat and contacted law enforcement, bringing an end to a scam which took over $5m from hundreds of victims who averaged 84 years old. There are a number of variations on this scam, involving “relatives in trouble” or “helpful bank employees.” We need to get the message out to seniors about these dirtbags - AARP’s Fraudwatch program is trying to do this, but we need to talk to the seniors in our lives about this too.
Feel the need to stalk your ex? Tik Tok has you covered - Apparently, over 100,000 (stupid) psychopaths have purchased cheap GPS trackers from Tik Tok stores. Hopefully the quality of these devices is as low as indicated by the reviews. But this kind of tech can be really dangerous for victims of domestic violence and intelligence services have even adapted seemingly benign tech of this type to aid in murder and genocide.
While at this point, I think that “crypto scammer” is basically the same as “crypto” followed by anything describing anyone other than a “crypto victim,” it was pretty entertaining to see this story of how a South Korean scammer was undone by a cigarette butt. Goes to show you that litterbugs will get their comeuppance!
It is important to remember that scammers are really good at their trade and while it seems totally inconceivable that someone as smart as us would ever fall for the crazy stories used by these folks, smart, savvy people fall for frauds too. Scammers use tried and true tricks to manipulate victims’ emotions and take them up a “ladder” from small, harmless actions, to closing in for the “kill” where they make the big money. These are the exact same techniques that intelligence services use to recruit agents - making a sequence of small, easy, legal requests and gradually flattering the contact until complying with increasingly dangerous/treasonous requests becomes normal. Nothing new here - and it works.
Tech Stuff
For those of you in the dreaded “green bubble” tribe - Wired had a good article on ways to back up your Android phone. It’s amazing how much of our lives is bound up in those pocket sized devices and the level of emotional pain and work involved in recovery.
If you are using Anthropic’s Claude AI thingamajig, you should know that they are going to start using your chats to train their models and that you can opt out. Apparently Claude is very useful - for criminals, according to Anthropic - almost seems like they are trying to market to the one segment that actually has really good, proven profitable use cases for their tech…
Fun Stuff
I wonder if the people who made this commercial had any inkling of what “punk” was or had ever even met a single teenager in their entire lives. It hurts to watch this…
I wonder if this is a preview of what we can expect here in the US after our “idiot revolution” has failed spectacularly - a group of dedicated mouth breathers with enough firing neurons to protect the reputation of a failed dictatorship. I sort of doubt it - I would think that the AI bots will have this type of thing covered.
Want to take a trip back in time and see what NYC looked like back in the 1940s? This map links to photos of just about every building in NYC at that time. It was pretty interesting to see how little the Brooklyn pre war buildings I grew up in changed since then.
For those of you with a Netflix subscription - the new Devo documentary is great… and timely. Interesting to see how the group’s thesis (that humans are busy de-evolving) started with Kent State and is as accurate today as ever. At least the decline of civilization can be entertaining - sort of like the fall of the Roman Empire with wifi.
And if you don’t know what the kids mean when they call something “skibidi” or “delulu” here’s the scoop. Now you can really blend in. You’re welcome.