Collaborate Disseminate
The only links are from The Daily Mail and The Mirror, but a marital affair was discovered because the cheater was recorded using his smart toothbrush at home when he was supposed to be at work.
Continue reading Surveillance Via Smart Toothbrush
Russia is proposing a rule that all foreigners in Moscow install a tracking app on their phones.
Using a mobile application that all foreigners will have to install on their smartphones, the Russian state will receive the following information:
- Residence location
- Fingerprint
- Face photograph
- Real-time geo-location monitoring
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this. Qatar did it in 2022 around the World Cup:
“After accepting the terms of these apps, moderators will have complete control of users’ devices,” he continued. “All personal content, the ability to edit it, share it, extract it as well as data from other apps on your device is in their hands. Moderators will even have the power to unlock users’ devices remotely.” …
Continue reading Location Tracking App for Foreigners in Moscow
One one my biggest worries about VPNs is the amount of trust users need to place in them, and how opaque most of them are about who owns them and what sorts of data they retain.
A new study found that many commercials VPNS are (often surreptitiously) owned by Chinese companies.
It would be hard for U.S. users to avoid the Chinese VPNs. The ownership of many appeared deliberately opaque, with several concealing their structure behind layers of offshore shell companies. TTP was able to determine the Chinese ownership of the 20 VPN apps being offered to Apple’s U.S. users by piecing together corporate documents from around the world. None of those apps clearly disclosed their Chinese ownership…
Interesting story:
USS Stein was underway when her anti-submarine sonar gear suddenly stopped working. On returning to port and putting the ship in a drydock, engineers observed many deep scratches in the sonar dome’s rubber “NOFOUL” … Continue reading Friday Squid Blogging: US Naval Ship Attacked by Squid in 1978
This article gives a good rundown of the security risks of Windows Recall, and the repurposed copyright protection took that Signal used to block the AI feature from scraping Signal data.
Continue reading Signal Blocks Windows Recall
Technology and innovation have transformed every part of society, including our electoral experiences. Campaigns are spending and doing more than at any other time in history. Ever-growing war chests fuel billions of voter contacts every cycle. Campaigns now have better ways of scaling outreach methods and offer volunteers and donors more efficient ways to contribute time and money. Campaign staff have adapted to vast changes in media and social media landscapes, and use data analytics to forecast voter turnout and behavior.
Yet despite these unprecedented investments in mobilizing voters, overall trust in electoral health, democratic institutions, voter satisfaction, and electoral engagement has significantly declined. What might we be missing?…
I already knew about the declining response rate for polls and surveys. The percentage of AI bots that respond to surveys is also increasing.
Solutions are hard:
1. Make surveys less boring.
We need to move past bland, grid-filled surveys and start designing experiences people actually want to complete. That means mobile-first layouts, shorter runtimes, and maybe even a dash of storytelling. TikTok or dating app style surveys wouldn’t be a bad idea or is that just me being too much Gen Z?2. Bot detection.
There’s a growing toolkit of ways to spot AI-generated responses—using things like response entropy, writing style patterns or even metadata like keystroke timing. Platforms should start integrating these detection tools more widely. Ideally, you introduce an element that only humans can do, e.g., you have to pick up your price somewhere in-person. Btw, note that these bots can easily be designed to find ways around the most common detection tactics such as Captcha’s, timed responses and postcode and IP recognition. Believe me, way less code than you suspect is needed to do this…
A DoorDash driver stole over $2.5 million over several months:
The driver, Sayee Chaitainya Reddy Devagiri, placed expensive orders from a fraudulent customer account in the DoorDash app. Then, using DoorDash employee credentials, he manually assigned the orders to driver accounts he and the others involved had created. Devagiri would then mark the undelivered orders as complete and prompt DoorDash’s system to pay the driver accounts. Then he’d switch those same orders back to “in process” and do it all over again. Doing this “took less than five minutes, and was repeated hundreds of times for many of the orders,” writes the US Attorney’s Office…
In response to a FOIA request, the NSA released “Fifty Years of Mathematical Cryptanalysis (1937-1987),” by Glenn F. Stahly, with a lot of redactions.
Weirdly, this is the second time the NSA has declassified the document. John Young got a … Continue reading The NSA’s “Fifty Years of Mathematical Cryptanalysis (1937–1987)”
From Hackaday.com, this is a neural network simulation of a pet squid.
Autonomous Behavior:
- The squid moves autonomously, making decisions based on his current state (hunger, sleepiness, etc.).
- Implements a vision cone for food detection, simulating realistic foraging behavior.
- Neural network can make decisions and form associations.
- Weights are analysed, tweaked and trained by Hebbian learning algorithm.
- Experiences from short-term and long-term memory can influence decision-making.
- Squid can create new neurons in response to his environment (Neurogenesis) …
Continue reading Friday Squid Blogging: Pet Squid Simulation