Weekend Edition 42: No More Collusion?
Judge Rules that Feds Need to Back off of Social Media
Twitter to Sue Meta?
French Police Now Officially and Openly Spy on Citizens
Navy Hacks Teams
Cloud Huge Target Still
Chatbots Old News?
OpenAI Gets Sued
AI Ready to Take Your Job?
OpenAI Is Dedicated to Handling the Emergence of “Superintelligent AI”
Weekend Edition, Tech News, Technology, Podcast, Censorship, Twitter, Meta, MS Teams Hacked, AI
#weekendedition #technews #technology #podcast #twitter #meta #threads #msteams #AI
WE 1 – Judge Doughty Smacks Feds Down For Ignoring First Amendment
In his ruling on the case brought by the AGs of Missouri and Louisiana against the Federal Gov’t, the judge stated that, based on the evidence presented by the plaintiffs, the government likely colluded with big tech firms to censor Americans’ social media posting, specifically around the convid plan/scamdemic (not that we didn’t know this, but now a federal judge has said it in a ruling). I can’t wrap my head around the blatant abuse of the constitution from both wings of the establishment bird that is congress. I could get into “conspiracy theories” here, but I don’t want to waste the time when they have essentially been shown true at most turns. Suffice it to say that the social media giants weren’t purely selectively applying their arbitrary “community standards” through the manufactured crisis of the last 3 years or so. Elon kinda showed us that in the “Twitter Files”, but anyone who actually cared and paid attention had that sense early on. After all, the Narrative needed armor and strong protection from the powers that be, because otherwise it would have fallen apart far too quickly to be useful in their Hegelian dialectic (manufactured problem, ginned up fear, provided -almost magical- solution). People were scared to death, and these establishment mafia types just soaked it in, because it equaled unprecedented power over we the people. But I digress… Judge Doughty publicly confirmed what most of us suspected and ordered the Feds to stop contacting social media companies to censor we the people. That is huge, you can guarantee that these jokers will appeal somehow via some crazy loophole, and try to change the venue so that they’ll be dealing with a judge who is more friendly to the notion of shredding the most important of the Bill of Rights, aka more “progressive” in their legal theory. I hope the Judge was thorough enough in his 155 page ruling that any potential loopholes are non-extant. Of course the WH weighed in, saying that “while social media companies should make ‘independent choices’ about the information they present, they ‘have a critical responsibility to ‘take account of the effects their platforms have on the American people’’”. I think that they, and the DOJ, are reeling from this ruling, and We The People should savor this victory and enjoy the potential of a little more freedom of speech as we seek to remedy the larger problems in our country.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66106067
WE 2 – More Noise from the Dirty Blue Bird
Twatter is now claiming that Meta stole industry secrets by snapping up former Twatter engineers after they were fired last Fall/Winter, and that Threads is too close to Twitter to not be a literal copyright infringement issue. They have now threatened to sue a handful of times over the perceived similarities between the extant Twatter app and the new Threads app from Meta. This sounds like more marketing noise, because I think that Elon, like Trump, understands that any PR is good PR. He is keeping both platforms from and center in the public eye, and drawing more attention to both from the normies who would use either. I have no personal interest in either, as if I wanted to micro-blog, I would just jump on Mastodon. If you think about it, that is how I use Truth, Telegram, and Gab anyway, I don’t need another platform to worry about, particularly not one which has already been shown to be censorious and is connected with an outfit like Meta, whose whole raison’d’etre is to gather data about its users for advertising and 5-Eyes spy agencies. No thanks, I conscientiously object to that battlefield. Not worth it. I know, I was somewhat glowing in my discussion of Threads a few weeks ago, but I can’t in good conscience jump onto any platform owned by Meta. I won’t do it. My data is too valuable, my privacy matters too much to me. What do you guys think?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66129215
WE 3 – Well, So Much for the ‘Liberty’ Part of the Slogan from the French Revolution…
France is in the process of pushing legislation through their version of congress which is more or less an omnibus bill to reform their federal police force. Yes, France only has the one police force organization, sure, each municipality has its representatives from the national force, but it is one thing, kind of like if the FBI ran all law enforcement in our country, rather than needing to work with state, county, and city level police departments. That, in itself, is a terrifying enough thought (at least for me). However, the politicians are working to shove this gem through which will allow state-level surveillance of its own people. VPNs can’t protect the French people from this invasion of whatever amount of privacy they thought they had before. Groups on both sides of the political spectrum are vocally opposed to this, as it is. Even people in Macron’s own party are trying to get an amendment done to limit the timeframe and scope of the invasion, including protecting themselves, doctors, lawyers, journalists, and judges from its reach. I’m sorry, you want to give your police a more or less blank check to spy on your people, but you want to be excluded? No, sir, life should not work that way. You don’t get a free pass like our legislators did with Zero Care in 2011-12. If it is good for your people, it is good for you, too. How does one become a suspect in a crime? How is this not just a blatant grab for power and control? They will be able to grab geolocation data from all of the devices of any person suspected of a crime which would net at least a 5 year jail sentence. That is terrifying, but I have to wonder how that fits with the EU’s GDPR, which France is a part of. It seems like the –actual- French are at a loss with these foreign rioters shredding their country, and at least to some extent, this feels like a bit of a kneejerk reaction. Then again, France has had a history of riots before the current flood of un-assimilated refugees from Africa hit as well. I don’t know what to think about this. What do you guys think about the current riots and this portion of the reform bill? Do you think that if it makes it through without alteration that it could, in some form, be exported here?
WE 4 – Navy Hacks MS Teams… Ruh roh, raggy…
Ok, so what happened, here? Is Teams actually secure? Big questions… First things first, the US Navy’s Red Team used a known bug within Teams to develop a tool to inject an external file into a company’s business account for Teams. The tool was written in Python and is called TeamsPhisher. It can be used autonomously, once the message is written and payload is attached. In order for it to work, your account organization has to have the accept external messages feature enabled and be linked to a SharePoint instance. The tool will send the payload, bypass the warning message, and link the malicious file to your SharePoint account. MSFT has stated that they are aware of the issue and the tool, but are unconcerned, as to them, it doesn’t pose enough of a threat to them or their users. Wait a minute, I know why they are so cool about this, SharePoint scans all files (even allegedly encrypted ones) which are uploaded to SharePoint, so if an infected file were uploaded there, it would likely be neutralized or deleted before it had a chance to do anything nefarious. (I talked about that last week, if I recall). Needless to say, I think that as long as you have external access turned off, you’re pretty safe from TeamsPhisher. Also, if you receive unexpected messages from someone you don’t know, you should not open them anyway. Even unexpected messages from someone you do know should be confirmed to have actually come from that person, trust, but verify, people.
https://www.techradar.com/pro/the-us-navy-has-hacked-microsoft-teams-to-send-malware
WE 5 – Is Your Cloud Safe?
Well, is it? Do you encrypt all of your files before you transfer them? If not, your cloud is likely vulnerable to attack. You also need to bring in on-premises multi-factor authentication (MFA) to secure your access to your cloud and on-premises data. Anything stored anywhere other than on the physical device/terminal/machine you are using should be protected by MFA and encryption. Ideally, even the data on your physical device should be protected via encryption, that way it takes more than just your user password to access your data. If it is encrypted on your system, there is less likelihood that you’ll transfer it in plain text to begin with. Does this make it less convenient? Yes. Is the pain worth it? If security and privacy matter to you, if your data (whether personal or company/ client data)matters to you, then the answer should be a resounding, “Yes”. Then again, if you transfer encrypted files onto SharePoint, they may as well not be encrypted, as MSFT will scrape your password and or keys and scan the file as soon as you upload it anyway, just in case there is something hinky in it. If it sounds like I am going easy on them for this, I am not. I just mentioned it in the last story anyway. Ultimately, if you are using any cloud, you are storing data on a piece of hardware you do NOT own. That is the definition of “cloud computing”. I’m all about helping you to create your own solutions where feasible at all, away from the prying eyes of ad agencies, Big Tech, and intelligence communities around the world. Take responsibility. Quit outsourcing your thinking because it is easier and more convenient to do so. Can it be costly? Yes. I won’t pretend that it is a free solution, after all, in the words of Robert Heinlein, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” (TANSTAAFL). I have solutions on tap for you, though, and it is certainly doable.
https://www.techradar.com/pro/cloud-remains-the-biggest-target-for-cyberattacks
WE 6 – Are We “Over” Chatbots?
For the first time in the 8 months, since the public release of ChatGPT, there was a slight decline in traffic in the last month. Not merely for the chatGPT direct portal, but even for Bing Search and character.ai, a competitor for the biggest chatbot. Even Bard isn’t seeing growth from May-June. I am actually happy to see this, hopefully the trend continues as people realize that it isn’t as epically awesome as they initially thought. It isn’t. It “hallucinates” entire news stories and even manufactures people from nothing to support its assertions. If you are using it for anything significant, never simply trust its results. Verify them, cross check them… Fact-check them. I have always said that these tools CAN be a good starting point for projects, not that I suggest you use them, but as long as kept in perspective and not fed any sensitive or private information, they can be useful. Also, keep in mind that most of the major ones are directly linked with Big Tech (Microsoft [owns a huge chunk of OpenAI and hosts most of the compute for chatGPT in the Azure cloud] and Google [Bard]). Then there are also major privacy issues (on top of those facts) with these bots, which we will talk about in the next story.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/are-we-sick-of-ai-chatbots-already-chatgpt-site-sees-traffic-dip
WE 7 – OpenAI Gets Sued Over Mishandling Private User Data
Uh oh, is the jig up for Altman and company? Clarkson Law has just served a class action lawsuit to test the theory that the ways in which OpenAI gathers data through web scraping and other means constitute a breach of privacy law for the people and organizations who posted their thoughts and work on the web, because unless the content was explicitly free domain or copyright-free. However, if material is copyrighted, and is used to train these bots, this case seeks recompense for the creators of said content from the company. It also seek a temporary injunction against the company, that it would have to shut down the commercial side of ChatGPT until the case is decided. I think this is a good idea. Only information that is free domain should be free game for AI companies to scrape and train their AI bots with, not just every little thing. Intellectual property matters, at least last I checked, here in the US. This isn’t the CCP yet. I think that this is an interesting case to watch closely, moving forward. I will do so, whenever there is more news on it.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/openai-sued-for-using-stolen-data-violating-your-privacy-with-chatgpt
WE 8 – Is AI Coming for Your Job?
Some industries seem to be more in jeopardy than others, such as healthcare or even automotive. Personally, I could see an AI do well in automotive, as long as it has full diagnostic data available on the vehicles it is tasked with repairing, and has solid databases for determining what that data indicates in terms of problems. As for healthcare, similar, but I don’t trust it with my personal health or data. That is too much information to give to a faceless algorithm, thank you. Then again, I haven’t gone to a doctor’s appointment for myself in close to ten years, so they don’t have any recent data from me, anyway. Let’s say a collective hell no to AI healthcare. There are reports out there from various industries indicating that many business sectors are looking to save money on HR by employing these AI tools. I can understand that impulse, however, I don’t think that it will have long-term effects at this time. Maybe I’m wrong and horribly biased against the technological tools here, but this is my sense right now. It has made a splash, and many large and medium companies have jumped on the bandwagon with it, but I think that the interest is waning, and people want to talk to another flash and blood person, not some soulless AI chatbot.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/ai-is-coming-for-our-jobs-but-which-ones
WE 9 – OpenAI Aims to Stop “Superintelligent AI”
LMAO!!!! Sorry, I think this is a joke, guys, OpenAI is so much more concerned with future developments than they are with your privacy and intellectual property rights. They are devoting 20% of their considerable cloud compute resources to researching how to stymie a possible superintelligent (more intelligent than most humans) general AI that may emerge in 5-10 years. General AIs don’t fully exist yet, as far as we know. I doubt they will be for some time, to be honest. Maybe I need to plead some level of ignorance here, but I don’t see this happening that quickly. The LLMs out there now are anything but intelligent. They don’t understand what they’re spitting out. What OpenAI is signaling here is that they are afraid of general AI’s which at least at unavailable to the public at this point. Why are they magnifying this non-issue? I know that on one hand, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, but if what is there, now is as pathetic as it is, then why are we scared of something that is so far off? Could it be closer than we think? What do you think?
https://www.pcmag.com/news/openais-latest-goal-prevent-superintelligent-ai-from-killing-us-all