Microsoft in Hot Water… Again (EU and Perhaps US)

Tech Regulation? Graham Cracker Partners with Pocahontas

AI News

FOSS Google Maps Alternative? Yes, Please!

SBF Nonsense

RIP Kevin Mitnick

Mastodon is for Free Speech

WE 1 – Euro Commission Investigating MS

Slack complained in 2020 about the fact that Microsoft has decided to bundle Teams with both Office 365 and Microsoft 365. The Commission finally has gotten around to investigating the claim of anti-competitive practices. Wouldn’t be the first time, and won’t be the last time Microsoft has run afoul of regulators in regard to software monopoly behavior. Shoot, I remember the Netscape suit from 25 years ago because Microsoft had been bundling Intermittent Exploder (Internet Explorer, IE) with Windows from 95 SP 2 up into 98, and making it harder for people to adopt the honestly better Netscape Navigator browser. Microsoft narrowly avoided being “trust busted” and split into separate companies in the early 2000s. Here we are again. I’m going to hazard a guess that MS will get slapped by the EC. If they don’t, I’ll be surprised. As always, though, the idealist in me hates that we need to have bloated over-powered governments and agencies in order to keep the big boys in line. There’s so much greed and frankly immoral and unethical practices in the business world because most execs and management types are stuck in a poverty loop in their heads which makes them feel like they need to do anything and everything to get ahead because there is never enough. The reality is that there is enough and more than enough for all of these companies to have pieces of the growth pie. They don’t need to have this scarcity mindset which causes them to do shady shit.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-may-regret-bundling-teams-with-365-subscriptions 

WE 2 – Microsoft Back in the Crosshairs Here at Home

Senator Wyden, of Oregon, is pushing for Microsoft to be held accountable for what he calls “negligent cybersecurity” due to how two major state-sponsored hacks have been leveraged against Microsoft and its users: SolarWinds (Russia, 2020) and now the Outlook hack which slammed the US Federal government (China, 2023). Sen Wyden wants Microsoft to be forced to change their policies to be more proactive in protecting its customers, perhaps to even change their EULA, which he wisely realizes will take a whole-government effort to make happen. He wrote a letter to the DOJ, FTC, and CISA to apply pressure to Microsoft. We will see what happens here. I can see this going one of three ways, from least likely to most likely:

1. A) Microsoft kowtows to Wyden and changes their EULA without fines or anything
2. B) The Gov’t agencies refuse to do anything
3. C) Microsoft winds up getting fined heavily, fights it, wasting more money, and we get to laugh at them.

As always, we will keep up on this and report as there is more to say about it.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/us-senator-its-time-to-investigate-microsoft-for-negligent-cybersecurity 

WE 3 – Senators Graham and Warren Team Up

Wonder twin powers, activate! LMAO. Graham Cracker and Pocahontas agree on something? Oh wait, that’s right, the South Carolinan senator is a RINO extraordinaire. Why wouldn’t he partner with someone like Elizabeth Warren? They are both interested in adding more power to the federal government. It’s like looking at two identical cars with slightly different paint jobs. Anyway, enough denigrating these people, let’s talk about the legislation that the a co-sponsoring. It is called the Digital Consumer Protection Commission Act, and would create something akin to the CMA or the Euro Commission here in the US, but specifically focused on regulating tech, and Big Tech in particular. This regulator will be able to sue companies — or even force them to stop operating — in response to various potential harms to customers, rivals and the general public, including anticompetitive practices, violations of consumer privacy and the spread of harmful online content. Doesn’t that sound just peachy, guys? Another government agency dedicated to invading your privacy and trying to control your thinking through another official layer of forced censorship from the feds.

I just feel so warm & fuzzy inside when the government wants to usurp even more of our constitutionally guaranteed rights by overstepping its constitutional limitations. Oh boy! On the other hand, the primary ostensible reasons for this regulator are to handle privacy and competition issues for these tech giants. Sounds like a mess to me. Since when does the US government care a lick about our privacy? They do handle competition, in the form of anti-trust cases on the part of the DOJ for the last 150 years or so, since Standard Oil and the railroad robber barons were punished by the DOJ at the end of the Gilded Age. However, privacy has hardly been touched in terms of meaningful efforts from the federal level. Individual states, such as California, have passed significant legislation in the last handful of years, but even those have been hard to enforce in the best of times. I don’t have a better solution off of the top of my head, but I know that more centralized power which is a-constitutional is never a good long-term solution for these problems. We need to lobby our senators to express our distaste for this constitutionally ignorant piece of legislation. Tell them to vote against this nonsense.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/27/tech/big-tech-regulation-new-federal-agency/index.html 

WE 4 – AI News for the Week

4-1 – OpenAI Loses Head of Trust & Safety

I guess I missed this story last week… The maker of ChatGPT lost its Head of Trust & Safety lat week, not to death, but to attrition, as he decided that he needed to step down “in order to spend more time with his family”. Since the chatbot was released, he found his role expand rapidly to the point where it was taking over his life. This leaves the small company needing to shuffle personnel until it can find a good replacement for him. This is a crucial moment as OpenAI is undergoing allot of well-deserved scrutiny over their viral chatbot. Props to him for knowing when to bow out, though. On the other hand, the cynic in me is questioning the move… Is there something sketchy happening in that department which is about to be revealed? Is he resigning to get ahead of that tidal wave? Time will tell, as always.

 https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/21/tech/open-ai-trust-safety-head-exit/index.html 

4-2 – What is Google’s Secretive Genesis Project?

Genesis sounds like a generative AI tool meant to automatically aggregate existing stories into a single, styled piece. It has yet to be announced, but journalists have dug in and prodded people in the “know” and found bits and pieces about the project. Is this a good thing? Have the egg heads at Google managed to tame the specter of hallucination enough to make this thing actually make sense in a newsroom? Think of this as The Drudge Report on steroids, minus a human team doing the info gathering. These things cannot hope to replace the instincts and capabilities of real, human journalists. All they can do is look at things posted online and aggregate and collate them. Could this be helpful? Sometimes, perhaps, but as with the rest of these generative AI tools, it could easily be used to amplify bad information, not misinformation, necessarily, mind you, but just wrong information, repeated many times over. This sounds like a recipe for propaganda. Do we need more mockingbird propaganda? I’m gonna say no… In fact, I’m thinking, “Hell no”. This sounds like a bad idea, across the board, to me. What do you guys think?

https://www.cnet.com/tech/googles-genesis-ai-tool-could-write-the-news-it-should-be-stopped/ 

WE 5 – Google Maps to Have Another FOSS Competitor?

Looks like the engineers over at the Linux Foundation have spun off a new foundation: Overture Maps Foundation. It is populated with also-rans in the map space: Microsoft, TomTom, Meta, and Amazon. They are pooling their map data in a common, open source database meant to be the seedbed for new map apps. The license allows each contributor to take whatever they want, as long as they continue contributing to the project dataset. If they fork it and don’t feed new data back into Overture, they will have to manage their own data moving forward, and that is costly and time consuming. Google spends upwards of $1 billion per year, either on maintaining its data or purchasing other mapping companies. Is this project ready to be applied to a new app that is even competitive with OSMAND+? No, not yet, though they have sourced much of their data from that project, which has been under development for 18 years. I’ve used it and some of its off-shoots, and steer people in that general direction when they try to break away from big tech map apps as they degoogle their lives. It is certainly a project to keep tabs on, though, and I am excited by it.

https://gizmodo.com/google-maps-alternative-overture-maps-data-linux-1850675768 

WE 6 – SBF Nonsense

6-1 – Leaking Diaries from Caroline Ellison

Sounds like SBF is pretty desperate, here. He has leaked his former partner’s Google Docs journal entries, selectively, showing that she didn’t believe that she was equipped or suited to run Alameda Research, so therefore her conviction in her trial is fitting, and when she is believed to testify that they had agreed to defraud the customers of FTX, that her testimony should be disbelieved. Thus the DOJ alleges in their latest accusation. He shared these journal entries, selectively, with the NY Times, such to taint the jury to believe that Ellison’s testimony should be discounted. The fact that he shared these things with the press is flat wrong. Given, if she wanted these things to be private, she never should have written them using a Google product. I have to wonder how he got ahold of these files to begin with. Did she give him her password? Did he appropriate them as the administrator of the company account she used to write these things? Did he hack it in some way? This article doesn’t say how he came by these pieces of information… It seems to me that that is a crucial piece of information, here. Was it moral or even ethical to take the actions he did to share it with the Times? No. Then again, if even a handful of the allegations against him are true, this certainly shouldn’t be beyond him to do. What do you guys think?

https://gizmodo.com/doj-accuses-sbj-of-leaking-caroline-ellison-diary-ftx-1850663571 

6-2 – SBF Now Facing Fewer Charges than Before

The list of charges is getting pared down due to one excuse or another… By the end of this, I doubt that this highly connected front man for the establishment will ever really serve time for his numerous crimes. Between connections and contributions, he is very protected from any real fallout from his wrongdoing. The two most recent dropped charges are related, allegedly, to the nature of the extradition permission received from the Bahamian authorities late last year. The first charge to be dropped was related to bribery, but the most recent one had to do with campaign finance regulations. I think these are convenient excuses, personally, if you couldn’t tell. If these charges were actually investigated, it could potentially take down some very powerful DC swamp creatures, and we can’t have that, now can we? Just like how Epstein and Maxwell trafficked children to no one, apparently. All of his former coworkers from FTX have already pled guilty to criminal charges, and are cooperating with investigators to make sure he gets nailed. We’ll see how many of these charges actually exist by the time he faces trial on October 2, 2023, as well as a second trial next March. Prosecutors filed another 5 charges on top of the 8 major ones for which he had originally been extradited last year. It is the latter 5 charges which seem to keep getting dropped out of deference to the Bahamian government. If all of the initial 8 charges stick, and he has the book thrown at him (I doubt that outcome very highly), he would face 100 years in white collar prison. His connections and well placed donations will shield him from from much of that, and he, if my gut serves correctly, will likely get what amounts to a slap on the wrist. I doubt that he will ever see prison, much less for 100 years. We will see in a handful of months, though.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/15/investing/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-charges/index.html 

WE 7 – Ever Heard of Kevin Mitnick?

He was one of the best known of the early hackers. He was known, in his early days, for planning and executing some daring attacks on major corporations, such as Pac Bell. His first hack attack was carried out when he was only 16, and he entered the DEC network and stole their OS. He wasn’t convicted for that for another 9 years. He served 12 months in prison for that, then toward the end of his 3 years of supervised release, he broke into the Pac Bell voicemail system, which triggered him going on the lam for 2.5 years. During that time, he attacked dozens of other organizations, always staying one step ahead of the FBI, that was, until February 1995. 

He was convicted and served 5 years in prison, to get let out early and to reinvent himself as a public speaker and white hat hacker. He was only 59 when he passed this week, after a 14 month battle with pancreatic cancer. He was so respected in the hacking community that there was a groundswell of support from other hackers, who tend to be very individualistic, culminating in a “Free Kevin” movement. He spent the last 20 years advising numerous Fortune 500 companies as well as government agencies through his firm, Mitnick Security Consulting, as well as his position on the board of KnowBe4. He spent the last 20 years developing and implementing penetration testing methods, tools, and helping companies and organizations to become less vulnerable to black hat attacks. He was known as one of the earliest users of social engineering tactics, such as phishing. I think he might have made up for his shenanigans early in life, what do you think?

https://gizmodo.com/kevin-mitnick-famous-hacker-dies-at-59-1850659160 

WE 8 – CSAM on Mastodon? (and everywhere else) Say It Ain’t So…

Ok, let’s cut through the BS in this article, the scare tactics to discourage people from moving over to a freer and decentralized platform for micro-blogging, shall we? This piece is a thinly veiled hit against one of the main competitors to Twitter/ X. I am not a huge fan of any micro-blogging apparatus, but when you write a piece like this, with a headline like this: Mastodon Has a Child Abuse Material Problem, Like Every Other Major Web Platform, then I will take issue with you. They start off the article gatekeeping hard for mainstream platforms, but then are forced to admit that even these centralized platforms have a big problem with this material that has no right existing. The piece starts with a half-hearted explanation of what mastodon and the fediverse are, through clenched teeth, as it were. They call it insecure, not user friendly, and cannot have the kind of “guardrails” which are needed to curb things like CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material… Speaking of bloodless terms, we are talking about child porn related images and videos).

Late last year, there was a survey done by security researchers, who at the time, found a bevy of security vulnerabilities, some stemming from the the architecture of the platform itself (being decentralized and “instance” based, where each instance is operated by anything from a single person to a small organization), and others such as the fact that while it is FOSS, the code base had not been scrutinized very carefully until the massive influx of people fleeing Twitter after Elon bought it and threatened to make it more free speech friendly. There are significant issues in the code base which had not been addressed as of now about 8 months ago, that is an eternity in the world of software. The nature of FOSS is that it will always have vulnerabilities, but generally those issues get fixed quickly after being discovered. So that issue is moot.

As far as it being less than ideal in terms of user-friendliness, I can vouch for that. The instancing system is confusing right now, even for me. Something needs to happen, sort of like with the main servers for Jitsi, where the primary instances get beefed up and easier to sign up for.

In terms of the “guardrails” issue, every platform has an infestation of sick people who use it. Yes, they will go where there are fewer controls, that is human nature, however, even where there are “guardrails”, there are big problems. We need to adopt 0 tolerance policies for those who create and distribute these sorts of materials. They get caught, they get swift justice. No child should ever be subject to the kind of actions which are often depicted in CSAM.

https://gizmodo.com/mastodon-fediverse-child-abuse-material-stanford-resear-1850670857