Important Stuff
Get your Covid (and other) vaccines now (unless you are a fan of preventable diseases) as the murderous lunatics put in charge of public health by brainwashed, stupid, evil Trump voters are still trying to kill you.
InfoSec/Scam Stuff
Senior fraud continues to evolve - Scammers are upping their game with sophisticated, multi layer social engineering scams (usually targeting senior citizens) in which victims are contacted by multiple fraudulent personas - tech support staff, bank employees, and law enforcement. These scams take victims through a carefully scripted multi step story which can result in the emptying of bank accounts. The availability of inexpensive AI tools to craft well written scripts as well as “deepfake” tools to allow convincing audio and visual impersonation are supercharging the scammers’ capabilities and making it more and more difficult for even sophisticated people to exit these scams once they are entrapped. The best way to avoid these schemes is to recognize and stop the initial approach - if you have senior citizens in your life, here are 2 simple messages you need to share with them:
ANYONE CALLING/MESSAGING TO OFFER YOU ANYTHING OUT OF THE BLUE IS MOST LIKELY A SCAMMER - STOP ALL CONTACT IMMEDIATELY AND BLOCK THEM.
UNSOLICITED CALLS/MESSAGES “FROM YOUR BANK” ARE VERY LIKELY TO BE FRAUD. HANG UP AND CALL THE CUSTOMER SUPPORT NUMBER ON YOUR STATEMENTS OR BANK CARD TO CONFIRM THESE TYPES OF MESSAGES.
Appointment with fraud - Spammers and scammers have taken to using iCalendar invitation emails to send fraudulent messages using Apple’s trusted infrastructure. I personally have received multiple fake invoices and “notifications of Bitcoin wallet activity” this week via this route. Having these messages show in the iCalendar app could give them added “legitimacy,” especially for less sophisticated users.
Scammers are victimizing small businesses by posting or threatening to post fake negative reviews - and, of course, Big Tech’s response is, to say the least, uninspiring. The targeted businesses are those highly dependent on review based referrals (of course) and the scammers are located in places like Bangladesh and Pakistan, out of the reach of law enforcement. Add to that the fact that the amounts of money involved are small (hundreds of dollars per incident) and the fact that federal law enforcement seems to be preoccupied with Making America Great Again (by terrorizing hard working immigrants and perceived enemies of the criminal Trump regime) these days, and it does not seem likely that the feds are going to do anything about this.
Blinding the scammers - Well, not actually blinding them, as much as I would endorse such a punishment… Santander Bank just added a clever new feature to its online banking app to help protect its customers from fraud. If the app detects screen sharing software running on the device, it blurs the banking app screen to prevent fraudsters from seeing account information and making transactions. Apparently, this is a thing in the mobile banking world - getting users to download remote assistance software which assists the scammers in stealing client funds. More financial institutions need to do things like this…
Tech Stuff
It seems like corporate CEOs are not the only leaders drinking the “AI is the answer to all of our problems” KoolAid - Albania has become the first nation to appoint an AI bot as its Minister for Public Procurement in an effort to tackle the nation’s admittedly abysmal track record on corruption. Now, I am hoping that this is more of a PR stunt than actual policy for the sake of the Albanian taxpayer, but it is an (unfortunately excellent) example of the levels of hype and stupidity surrounding AI.
Some scientists claim to have found a way to “fingerprint” images to determine what specific cameras took them based on very subtle optical blurring inside of said images. So glad this advancement happened at a time when our unaccountable secret police have decided that photographing them while disappearing people off the street is an “act of violence.”
And finally, an interesting look at the future of medicine where people rely on AI chatbots - this story is from China, but given the way things are going with public health here in the US, I think this could be an early indicator of what health care is going to be like for everyone but the super wealthy.
Fun Stuff
When I was a kid, I loved to watch Wile E. Coyote (Suuuuuper Genius) continually blow himself up, run into painted tunnels, and run off of cliffs in the vain pursuit of the Roadrunner. Little did I know that thousands of miles away, behind the Iron Curtain, my commie kid counterparts also had their version of this eternal, pointless pursuit - in Nu Pogodi! (Just You Wait!), Vulk, a cigarette smoking, hooligan wolf is always out to get Zayetz (Rabbit) but doesn’t ever quite accomplish his nefarious goal. Apparently for Russians and Communist Bloc folks of a certain age, this classic cartoon has the same place in their hearts as Tom & Jerry and Roadrunner does for us. And the art, music and storylines are really fun. And I thought commie kids only had cartoons about tractor factories…
What would it be like to live in a city with no standardized street addresses? We take “123 Main Street” for granted and probably could not conceive of what life would be like without these place markers. For the people of Costa Rica, life without street addresses is normal and this short documentary calls into question one of those little pieces of modern infrastructure that we take for granted.
Someone, I beg of you, please, please set this service up in Northern NJ.