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A few of you may remember that my final report for the SRI portion of the NSF ACCURATE team project wrote extensively about how the non-technical issues were beginning to weigh heavily in the overall trustworthiness of the overall election process, character assassination, malicious lies, misinformation, intentional disinformation, death threats to election officials and voters, support from the Supreme Court, dumbing down public education, book burning, claiming slavery was a job-opportunities program, and many other factors unrelated that were almost totally unrelated to the computer technology were all pieces of the puzzle.
The NYTimes had a serious of articles on Sunday and Monday trying to assess blame. For example, President Biden failed to make the positive case for his administration, and he deferred too long before exiting the candidacy. The Democrats violated their own belief in an open convention. Kamala Harris did not adequately defend herself and attack back until it was too late. The voters' concerns were underestimated by pollsters and the Democratic Party. The real issues were never debated or even addressed. Many Democrats apparently stayed home. And that's just a few points discussed post-election from some of the media.
Summary: The technology seemed to get an accurate sense of the voters; the anomalies in the election generally lay elsewhere.
Trump supporters spent years fomenting concern about election integrity. On Tuesday, they set it all aside.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/06/technology/trump-election-denial.html
The only survivor of the October 24 fire was a woman in her 20s who was able to get to safety after a quick thinking passer-by smashed a window of the burning Model Y car to free her […]
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/terrified-friends-burned-death-tesla-34087725
Angelenos can hail a robotaxi with the Waymo One app starting Tuesday. There are about 100 taxis in the Los Angeles fleet – but they don't drive freeways.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-11-12/robotaxis-open-for-business-in-los-angeles
Is it a toaster? Is it a pill on wheels? No, it's Zoox's funny-looking robotaxi, the latest fully autonomous vehicle to hit the streets of California.
Zoox's self-driving vehicles began rolling out in San Francisco's SoMa neighborhood this week, and are expected to compete with robotaxis designed by Waymo, which started offering rides to the public in San Francisco and Los Angeles earlier this year.
But not quite yet. For now, Zoox's driverless trips around SoMa will be for testing and research purposes only.
It appears that an upgrade has been marked as a security update, and is pushing some versions of Windows Server 2022 to Server 2025.
If you're running Server 2022 21h2, you may want to manually flag KB5044284 as skipped until Microsoft clarifies the issue.
The Korea Times, 9 Nov 2024
North Korea staged GPS jamming attacks for the second consecutive day Saturday, affecting several ships in the Yellow Sea and dozens of civilian aircraft, according to South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). After being alerted, the International Civil Aviation Organization adopted a decision raising serious concerns over the GPS jamming, naming North Korea explicitly for the first time.
Apple added an inactivity timer that reboots iPhones to a more secure state when they haven't been unlocked in a while.
After scouring a lake in Wisconsin, authorities now say Ryan Borgwardt staged his drowning to abandon his wife and three children.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/11/11/kayaker-drowned-faked-death-wisconsin/
Angelenos can hail a robotaxi with the Waymo One app starting Tuesday. There are about 100 taxis in the Los Angeles fleet – but they don't drive freeways.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-11-12/robotaxis-open-for-business-in-los-angeles
Pluto holding a girl in his paws while trekking through a flooded Disney World. Godzilla crying while cradling a giant bug in a flooded city street. A small girl in a lifejacket seated on a boat next to a green alien baby.
Absurd and comical rescue images that appear to have been made with artificial intelligence have sprung up on social media this week as Hurricane Milton hit Florida, a reaction to the earlier proliferation of more realistic fake images related to Hurricane Helene.
Many of the memes are clearly fake – some contain fictional characters, others look like illustrations, most have captions that imply the posts are a joke. But as technology has advanced, fake images generated by AI have continued to proliferate on the Internet, at times making it easier for false information to spread online. Public officials even cautioned Floridians this week to beware of AI-generated images that falsely depict conditions on the ground. […]
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/fake-images-hurricane-survivors-bizarre-meme-rcna174874
https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/30/ai_code_helpers_invent_packages/
Signs of risk in usage of “AI” for application development:
0: Legality of LLM/GPT training sources is still unresolved.
Risk the first, that you're using an AI for application development. If you're using TDD or any other code testing framework, you can mitigate this risk by only allowing the AI to create/edit/suggest method/function level code. LLMs and GPTs have shown great promise in assisting with refactoring or suggesting approaches for method level code. The testing framework should help ensure the code does what the AI “thinks” it does and help the org create stable code quickly.
Risk number 2: If you let the AI write class level code, it breaks down frequently. As noted in the source the current models will gladly pull in libraries that don't exist. This creates its own unique risks for languages that can fetch packages. Sure that package didn't exist when the AI made it up, but after looking at import trends, I've now created the package and its malicious.
Don't let the AI make import statements or fetch dependencies.
What X needs is stronger blocking, not this.
X CEO Elon Musk announced earlier this week that he's pulling the teeth out of X's (formerly Twitter) blocking feature. Soon, users you've blocked will be able to view your posts again.
Nina Owji, a web developer, posted, “X is about to remove the current block button, meaning that if an account is public, their posts will be visible to the blocked users as well!”
Musk's reply: “High time this happened. The block function will block that account from engaging with, but not block seeing, public posts.”
If Musk insists on going through with the weakened block, even more users will flee X. In the US, daily active X users fell to 27 million in February 2024, down 18% from a year earlier and 23% since Musk took over in November 2022.
The people who are staying, by the way, don't like X much. I'm one of those. An August YouGov survey found that 42% of those who use X daily have a negative view of it.
An Ontario Canada student attending an online school had her paper rejected by a 3rd-party system used by the school to check papers for plagiarism or ChatGPT use. When her mother complained, the school responded that the system was “98% foolproof” and they would not reconsider:
Even if the 98% claim is true, that still leaves a lot of students in the lurch, especially if the school acts as if the cheat-detection is 100% perfect…
https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/cybersecurity-advisories/aa24-317a
When you download a piece of pirated software, you might also be getting a piece of infostealer malware, and entering a highly complex hacking ecosystem that's fueling some of the biggest breaches on the planet.
Technology and loneliness are interlinked, researchers have found, stoked by the ways we interact with social media, text messaging and binge-watching.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/10/technology/personaltech/technology-loneliness.html
While I am not an attorney, I often speak on the technical aspects of electronically stored information (ESI), I advise attendees to take care to produce the requested material. I also caution that it is important to understand what information was produced.
Today, Amgen stock suffered a decline when a Cantor Fitzgerald analyst reported that they had uncovered hidden, potentially adverse, data in the publicly-released spreadsheet from an early stage trial of a weight-loss drug.
The complete article, including video clip, can be found at:
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/11/12/amgen-stock-falls-on-weight-loss-drugs-bone-density-loss-data.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crr9q2jz7y0o
Over the past few months the BBC has been exploring a dark, hidden world – a world where the very worst, most horrifying, distressing, and in many cases, illegal online content ends up.
Beheadings, mass killings, child abuse, hate speech – all of it ends up in the inboxes of a global army of content moderators.
You don't often see or hear from them – but these are the people whose job it is to review and then, when necessary, delete content that either gets reported by other users, or is automatically flagged by tech tools.
The issue of online safety has become increasingly prominent, with tech firms under more pressure to swiftly remove harmful material.
And despite a lot of research and investment pouring into tech solutions to help, ultimately for now, it's still largely human moderators who have the final say.
Proposal, considered among the strictest of its kind, stirs controversy over how best to protect children online
What the articles (at least those that I've read) fail to mention is that you can't implement a reliable age-based restriction without demanding verifiable proof of age from every customer, which means sharing private information with government or other institutions about what you desire to access. You can guess which kinds of sites are most concerned about these proposals.
You write that “the legal problems created by AI-generated content depicting criminal offenses against children – but where no real children are involved nor hurt – are still not resolved.” Heck, the legal problems with any depictions that don't involve real children haven't been resolved, or at least not in a way compatible with US free speech protections (which I acknowledge are stronger than those in the UK).
This is an old, old practice. My first encounter with it was in the Seventies when Rolling Stone magazine decided to switch from black and white to color (I don't recall anyone asking for this) and then raising the newsstand price to cover the increased costs.
It wasn't that long ago (in fact it may have been as recently as April 1, 2024) that an April Fool's Day prank was circulating about an app that would translate dog barks. How little time it has taken for this joke to be rendered obsolete by reality. Today's pigs may be tomorrow's dogs.
Has anyone consulted Dr. Dolittle about his experience with interpreting pig speech?
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