Weekend Edition 51: privacy, on the rocks
Weekend Edition 51: Privacy, on the Rocks
US Officials Fake Social Media Accounts
AI Nonsense
Android TV Malware
New FCC Commissioner
CCP Bans Apple for Federal Employees
UK Encryption Woes
WE 1 – Feds Have Fake Social Media Accounts
This one is gonna be hard for me to not be sarcastic about, but then, I suppose that I am a conspiracy theorist… It has been shown recently, through research done by the Brennan Center (named for Obama’s C_A head, by the way), that the DHS, CBP, and ICE all use fake social media accounts to surveil possible illegal aliens who slipped past their nets at the border. This article really only explicitly names those agencies, but the theory is that it is far more widely practiced among other federal-level agencies. This was more or less confirmed in the Twitter and Facebook Files, which were at least partially released earlier this year. The reality there, though, was that these agencies did not need fake accounts in order to keep track of people. They had wide open back doors installed at the hearts of these organizations, which they frequently used. I digress, though. This piece is about the DHS, CBP, and ICE and their abuses of these popular social media sites. These measures are unconstitutional. We have the right to free speech in this country, as well as the right to freely assemble (digitally or physically), as well as the right to privacy. Now the criminals who are either looking to scam the system or who are actively doing so have no such rights. There is also a gray area for the social media companies who have policies which expressly prohibit such tactics, so it is an issue that they have allowed it to keep going. What do you guys think?
WE 2 – Greasy Nuisance Signs EO to Investigate AI’s Impact on CA
Gavin Newsome (aka Greasy Nuisance or Gov. Greaseball) is apparently jumping onto the fearporn bandwagon about the impact of AI. This idiot wouldn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground if someone didn’t show him the difference. So he is having State-level departments study it and draft a report for him over the next 60 days about the economic impact of the use of AI in CA, as well as how the government could potentially use it in the state. Lord have mercy, just what we need, a bunch of Sacramento mindless jerks studying and implementing AI in governmental settings. That’s what is likely to come next, instead of recorded messages in bureaucratic office phone systems, they’ll roll out some GPT-based generative AI solution to talk to to screw we the people over even more than the insane crap regulations that we have to wade through in order to get anything worthwhile done, here. Apparently he (Gov. Greaseball) felt the need to insinuate that generative AI could cause environmental and energy grid disasters which could lead to “mass casualty events”. Proof that this moron has been watching CNN and Fox News (lmao) too damn much. We need a governor who can think for himself, here in CA. That might rankle too many within the Sacramento machine, but it is what We the People need, just as much as We the People need to learn to unhook ourselves from the brain drain of the Media. Let’s all learn to think for ourselves, here, and not be mind controlled zombies anymore. Maybe he;s wondering how these sorts of things could be triggered via AI tools so that he could make it look like it was AI’s fault when he follows the Cabal’s orders re: depopulation. He may need some huge gesture for them to agree to installing him as Depends’ successor in the White House. He sure is Central Casting enough, if you catch my drift. He has also made moves in relation to the Presidency, many think that he has all but thrown his hat into the ring already. That would be a disaster for this nation. Even more than the current puppet-admin. He has put the icing on the destructive cake here in CA. We’ve tried to kick him to the curb a few times now, but as in the USSR, it isn’t the votes that count, but who counts the votes that counts. He and the machine which installed him here are the ones who always count those votes, so nothing changes. He’s a mindless empty suit who will do whatever people more powerful than he is tell him to.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/california-joins-the-ai-regulation-frenzy
WE 3 – Microsoft Vows to Shield Users of Copilot from Litigation
Wow. Just wow. Now, this is just on offer for paying customers, not any old Joe Schmoe who uses BingAI to create something which infringes on someone’s copyrights. Specifically for paying customers of Office 365 who use Copilot, as well as enterprise users of BingAI. They claim that if those users are challenged on copyright grounds, Microsoft will assume any legal liability they incur through their use of Copilot AI. Wow. Big talk from Redmond, y’all. I wonder when they’ll be put to the test first. Will they have to eat their words? Not like they don’t have the funds to handle this, being one of the largest companies on the planet, and besides, here’s another angle: if they handle all of the legal challenges for these customers, they get that much more data to train GPT on, so that their guardrails will be better and the results of people’s prompts will be less likely to trigger litigation in the future. Oh, another caveat: those users have to have been using the MS-designed guardrails in order to qualify for this indemnification. If you circumvented those things, you are screwed, so no DANGPT shenanigans. If you don’t know, there have been groups who have created various work-arounds to the guardrails for ChatGPT, and Microsoft has added its own filters to the situation, which can apparently be turned off, otherwise this issue would be moot, as I see it.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-vows-to-shield-users-of-copilot-ai-from-copyright-lawsuits
WE 4 – Google Sets Tone for Political Ads
Google has decided that any political ads using AI generated content must acknowledge that it was AI generated. This seems reasonable. They are about to roll out guidelines for content which will require prominently placed notices to the effect of “this image does not depict real events” or “this video content was synthetically generated” in or near the posted content. How many times, already, have we been taken in by something that appears real, but is not? Wait, every day on the news… Uh oh. But in terms of online, though, sometimes memes are difficult to tell from reality. For instance, how many people thought that the image released last week, alleging to be Trump’s mugshot was real? I did for a bit. That was essentially a clever meme, since mugshots always have height markers and such in the background. Trump has made a killing off of those images. I do not say this to disparage the cleverness of that move, or to insinuate that Trump should or should not have been arrested. That issue, I leave for another time. His team is absolute fire, in terms of marketing. They turn all of these things that would destroy any other candidate into cannon fodder for the campaign. But I digress. Deepfakes are a problem for people who lack discernment, this has been proven time and time again. The technology exists to make anybody say just about anything, fairly easily. Forcing campaigns to acknowledge when they are using generative AI to create out-of-character or unreal types of scenarios for their candidate or the opposition is a good thing, in my book, since these tools, in the hands of ethically challenged political hacks could really create ugly situations. Google has also banned demonstrably false statements in campaign ads. Who decides what is true, though? Google? Or actual, real facts?
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66739858
WE 5 – Low-end Android TV Devices Are Vulnerable to Hacking
You may or may not remember the Mirai firmware bug which could allow an attacker to hijack your device to form a botnet and carry our Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS) against servers of their choice. What is a DDoS attack? It is a method by which bad actors often do shut down the servers for a targeted website by creating a network of “bots” which spam nonsense packets at the server in question until it gets overwhelmed and has to shut down. There’s a new descendant of that exploit called Android.Pandora.2, which is making the rounds as a malicious firmware update. What is the purpose of an attack like this? The point is to cripple a website and perhaps hold its function for ransom. How can you avoid this if you have one of these older Android TV-equipped devices? Make sure that you regularly update your OS and firmware, and that you only install apps from trusted sources, not just random places.
https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/mirai-botnet-infects-android-tv-boxes-to-run-ddos-attacks
WE 6 – We Finally Have a Full Slate of FCC Commissioners
Whether this is a good thing or not remains to be seen. There is a real possibility that this new commissioner will renew the pursuit of Net Neutrality. That would be disastrous. Net Neutrality opens the door to greater censorship, not greater freedom. The FCC has only had 4 commissioners, 2 from each wing of the corrupt bird that is congress, for the duration of Depends’ administration to date. That has changed now. Leftists are cheering because their team now has a majority in this key commission which sets so much policy in this critical space. I am so tired of politics, y’all. It’s a dirty game which only seems to get dirtier the deeper you look into it. Special interests need to be given the boot so that people who are genuinely interested in serving We the People can rise up and change things. PAC’s need to be dismantled and banned. Big money cannot be allowed to corrupt the process any longer. Whether you want to call it Deep State, the military-industrial complex, or the cabal, or whatever other moniker you want to assign, it needs to be denied access to the halls of power. The revolving door between big business and big government needs to be shut down permanently. Sorry for the excursus here, but you probably agree with my sentiments if you’re bothering to read this blog anyway, so there you go. Let me know in the comments if you have any other related thoughts or prognostications.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/senate-confirms-new-fcc-commissioner-ending-2-plus-years-of-deadlock
WE 7 – No More iPhones for CCP Officials
Lol. Now the CCP strikes back for the US’s bans on TikTok and Huawei, among others. They are turning our logic against us, and doing a tit-for-tat move. Well, iPhones are made by a well-known US company (albeit one with huge ties with the CCP, since most manufacturing seems to occur at Chinese little more than slave factories), therefore, since Apple is based in the US, they must have back doors into the devices in question which will feed data to the US intel community, after all. Apparently, this is just an official statement of an unwritten rule which has been in place since before CONvid was released. This cracks me up, honestly. This could also be a proactive clap back to US allies banning hardware from Chinese-based companies, as well as the pending giant turd called the RESTRICT act. Remember that steaming pile from a while back?
The RESTRICT Act has been touted by leaders on both sides of the aisle as a good thing, which always makes me nervous, I don’t know about y’all, but when “leaders” on both sides of the aisle praise a piece of legislation, it usually means that We the People are about to get stiffed and the government is about to get a raft of new powers to use against We the People. Let me remind you about this bill: its full name is Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology Act. If that doesn’t send a chill up and down your spine, then perhaps a review of a few of the points it covers should. This bill would essentially ban VPNs in the US, because if one uses a VPN with an endpoint outside the US, one could access the products and services which the bill exists to block access to, due to their being created and managed by companies based in the countries which this bill is concerned with. The list of countries is populated with the usual suspects: China, Russia, North Korea, Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela. Companies which appear to be in the crosshairs, but remain unnamed, include Kaspersky (who makes anti-virus software), ByteDance (parent company of TikTok), and Huawei. It could also ban, or greatly complicate the growth of cryptocurrency. That is chilling. I used Kaspersky back in the day (before I made the move to Linux, full time, where AV solutions are less necessary on an individual computer basis, vs in a Windows environment). This bill is a massive overreach and further erodes our right to privacy as American citizens, which should be enshrined in the constitution. Thane again, the government of We the People, by We the People hasn’t lived to those standards for a very long time. If they were actually attending to the letter of the constitution, rather than dancing on its ashes every day, they wouldn’t try half of the harebrained nonsense that they have inflicted on the sleeping populace in the last 110 years, since the birth of the Fed.
https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/china-bans-iphones-for-government-officials
WE 8 – UK Government Claims That It Hasn’t Backed Down
Remember a while back when I talked about the nonsense bill that the UK was working on, under the guise of “protecting the children”? There were a few encrypted messaging apps which objected strongly to the verbiage in that legislative effort, which included Signal, Whatsapp, and iMessage. The reality is that if encryption is the raison’d’etre for an application, and that is undermined by a government’s need to snoop, then there is no longer a good reason for that app to serve users in that country, for that matter, if e2e (end to end) encryption is broken at the behest of one country, then it may as well not exist elsewhere, either. This not only effects messaging apps, though that is the prime focus by the UK, here, but utilities like VPNs, that without the facility of e2e encryption would cease to serve any real purpose, either. These legislators, similar to the ones behind the RESTRICT Act, here in the US, are absolutely clueless about the technology. They just see a barrier to their control of our thinking and speaking and want it gone. The concept that encrypted messages could be meaningfully scanned without breaking the encryption is laughable at best. This is like dropping a nuke where a laser-guided precision strike would suffice. My understanding of the tech involved is that encryption = scrambling of message contents in such a way that no one without the key could read or make sense of it. By its nature, if someone other than the party you are communicating with has that key, then you are no longer private nor secure, and you may as well be emailing or sending an sms text message. In privacy terms, those are two of the least private ways to communicate, and you may as well be publicly broadcasting your data via FM radio. Sounds like the UK is about to lose access to Whatsapp (big deal, not really private or secure, hello, it is owned by Meta), iMessage (private, except from Apple, if I’m not mistaken), or Signal Messenger (the most private of the three). This is just a dumb move. I hope that the UK government wakes from its power trip in time to not pass this turd into law.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66716502