Snippings

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The link his friend sent was for a website seemingly run by Penn Park Capital Management, a company registered in Surrey. Describing itself as one of Europe’s leading fund managers, the group behind the site was quick to get back in touch. The person who rang, calling himself Charlie Barker, spoke with a British accent, and was well-versed in finance.
Naidoo invested $10,000 (£7,300), and later sold off his existing shares in Tesla to take full advantage of the SpaceX opportunity. Once all the funds were transferred, they ghosted him. “Looking around online, that’s when I saw the comments,” Naidoo said. “It was all a total scam.”

From: Elon Musk’s space unicorn has a scam problem | The Observer.

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A major data breach in Pakistan has reportedly exposed the personal information of thousands of individuals, including federal ministers and senior government officials.
The Express News reports the compromised data is being sold online and includes the addresses of mobile SIM owners, call logs, copies of national identity cards and international travel records.
The leak spans multiple tiers of government, affecting figures from the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) to cabinet-level officials.
Authorities such as the PTA and the National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (NCCIA) have offered little public response, even after claiming that offending websites had been taken down, as enforcement efforts attract criticism.
Dozens of online platforms are selling sensitive data cheaply, according to the report (via The Express Tribune). This includes mobile location data for 500 Pakistani rupees ($1.76), detailed call records for PKR 2,000 ($7), and travel histories for PKR 5,000 ($17.55). Intelligence sources warn that such data could be weaponized by malicious actors to target individuals with minimal effort or cost.

From: Pakistan suffers data breach with copies of national ID, sensitive data on sale | Biometric Update.

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While the platform, like most, has restrictions on certain content, such as violence and nudity, for users under 18, these safeguards have in the past been easy for young users to circumvent by entering an older birthdate on their account.

But now, the company is rolling out an artificial intelligence-powered tool to estimate a user’s age based on their activity on the platform “and then use that signal, regardless of the birthday in the account, to deliver our age-appropriate product experiences and protection,” said James Beser, director of product management at YouTube Youth, in blog post last month.

From: YouTube to Estimate Users’ Ages Using AI | TIME.

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OpenAI will restrict how ChatGPT responds to a user it suspects is under 18, unless that user passes the company’s age estimation technology or provides ID, after legal action from the family of a 16-year-old who killed himself in April after months of conversations with the chatbot.

OpenAI was prioritising “safety ahead of privacy and freedom for teens”, chief executive Sam Altman said in a blog post on Tuesday, stating “minors need significant protection”.

The company said that the way ChatGPT responds to a 15-year-old should look different to the way it responds to an adult.

Impact of chatbots on mental health is warning over future of AI, expert says
Read more
Altman said OpenAI plans to build an age-prediction system to estimate age based on how people use ChatGPT, and if there is doubt, the system will default to the under-18 experience. He said some users “in some cases or countries” may also be asked to provide ID to verify their age.

“We know this is a privacy compromise for adults but believe it is a worthy tradeoff.”

From: ChatGPT developing age-verification system to identify under-18 users after teen death | ChatGPT | The Guardian.

 

Actually, Sam is wrong about this. There is no privacy comprimise necessary. We have tried and tested tolls at our disposal to ensure that people can demonstrate what they are (a person, over 18, an American citizen or whatever) without having to disclose who they are. It is cryptographically trivial to present a verifiable credential attesting to adulthood without making the slighest compromise on privacy and, frankly, we should be doing this as soon as possible.

Microsoft have just released their “Crescent” cryptographic library, which uses a a sophisticated form of cryptographic proof called a zero-knowledge SNARK (Zero-Knowledge Succinct Noninteractive Argument of Knowledge), to add unlinkability to widely used identity formats, protecting privacy. These include JSON Web Tokens (the authentication standard behind many app logins) and mobile driver’s licenses. Usefully, it works without requiring the organizations that issue these credentials to update their systems.

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The past two weeks have been dreadful for Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), and the crisis at the car maker shows no sign of coming to an end.
A cyber attack, which first came to light on 1 September, forced the manufacturer to shut down its computer systems and close production lines worldwide.

From: Jaguar Land Rover: Some suppliers ‘face bankruptcy’ due to hack crisis.

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“Creating counterfeit digital people risks destroying our civilisation. Democracy depends on the informed (not misinformed) consent of the governed.”

From: How chatbots are changing the internet.

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The futurist and bestselling author Yuval Noah Harari has argued that AI is better described as “alien intelligence”, a new, and different, form of intelligence we can neither control nor fully understand. The entire knowledge base of humanity may one day be taken over by this alien intelligence and manipulated in ways that could degrade our human understanding of the world.

From: How chatbots are changing the internet.

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AI Outcomes report shows mixed results for how fifty major banks are using GenAI and Agentic AI to generate value and shows that “innovation theater” is rampant.

The report’s findings show that banks are full of use cases but trying to use GenAI in a way that won’t “break the bank.”

This means 85% of the use cases focus on internal use of GenAI rather than setting it loose on the more risky task of working with clients.

From: (7) Innovation Theater is Alive and Well in Banking AI Deployment.

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“A new boss is someone that we don’t question. We don’t want to be seen rocking the boat”, explains Elisabeth Carter, criminologist at Kingston University and host of BBC Radio 4’s Scam Secrets podcast.

From: Spear phishing: the ‘boss scam’ that targets new starters.

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According to the FCA report, 12.5 million consumers need support in saving for retirement, and 38% of the working-age population are under-saving for the future. Last year, 59% of adults did not use financial advice on investments, savings, pension, and retirement plans and only 9% received regulated financial advice.

From: FCA’s targeted support proposal sparks debate on advice boundaries and consumer access.

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