Zelle Is Using My Name and Voice without My Consent

Okay, so this is weird. Zelle has been using my name, and my voice, in audio podcast ads—without my permission. At least, I think it is without my permission. It’s possible that I gave some sort of blanket permission when speaking at an event. It’s not likely, but it is possible.

I wrote to Zelle about it. Or, at least, I wrote to a company called Early Warning that owns Zelle about it. They asked me where the ads appeared. This seems odd to me. Podcast distribution networks drop ads in podcasts depending on the listener—like personalized ads on webpages—so the actual podcast doesn’t matter. And shouldn’t they know their own ads? Annoyingly, it seems time to get attorneys involved.

What would help is to have a copy of the actual ad. (Or ads, I’m assuming there’s only one.) So, has anyone else heard me in a Zelle ad? Does anyone happen to have an audio recording? Please email me.

And I will update this post if I learn anything more. Or if there is some actual legal action. (And if this post ever disappears, you’ll know I was required to take it down for some reason.)

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Posted on January 19, 2024 at 3:05 PM • 0 Comments

Speaking to the CIA’s Creative Writing Group

This is a fascinating story.

Last spring, a friend of a friend visited my office and invited me to Langley to speak to Invisible Ink, the CIA’s creative writing group.

I asked Vivian (not her real name) what she wanted me to talk about.

She said that the topic of the talk was entirely up to me.

I asked what level the writers in the group were.

She said the group had writers of all levels.

I asked what the speaking fee was.

She said that as far as she knew, there was no speaking fee.

What I want to know is, why haven’t I been invited? There are nonfiction writers in that group.

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Posted on January 19, 2024 at 7:21 AM • 7 Comments

Canadian Citizen Gets Phone Back from Police

After 175 million failed password guesses, a judge rules that the Canadian police must return a suspect’s phone.

[Judge] Carter said the investigation can continue without the phones, and he noted that Ottawa police have made a formal request to obtain more data from Google.

“This strikes me as a potentially more fruitful avenue of investigation than using brute force to enter the phones,” he said.

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Posted on January 18, 2024 at 7:02 AM • 18 Comments

Code Written with AI Assistants Is Less Secure

Interesting research: “Do Users Write More Insecure Code with AI Assistants?“:

Abstract: We conduct the first large-scale user study examining how users interact with an AI Code assistant to solve a variety of security related tasks across different programming languages. Overall, we find that participants who had access to an AI assistant based on OpenAI’s codex-davinci-002 model wrote significantly less secure code than those without access. Additionally, participants with access to an AI assistant were more likely to believe they wrote secure code than those without access to the AI assistant. Furthermore, we find that participants who trusted the AI less and engaged more with the language and format of their prompts (e.g. re-phrasing, adjusting temperature) provided code with fewer security vulnerabilities. Finally, in order to better inform the design of future AI-based Code assistants, we provide an in-depth analysis of participants’ language and interaction behavior, as well as release our user interface as an instrument to conduct similar studies in the future.

At least, that’s true today, with today’s programmers using today’s AI assistants. We have no idea what will be true in a few months, let alone a few years.

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Posted on January 17, 2024 at 7:14 AM • 16 Comments

On IoT Devices and Software Liability

New law journal article:

Smart Device Manufacturer Liability and Redress for Third-Party Cyberattack Victims

Abstract: Smart devices are used to facilitate cyberattacks against both their users and third parties. While users are generally able to seek redress following a cyberattack via data protection legislation, there is no equivalent pathway available to third-party victims who suffer harm at the hands of a cyberattacker. Given how these cyberattacks are usually conducted by exploiting a publicly known and yet un-remediated bug in the smart device’s code, this lacuna is unreasonable. This paper scrutinises recent judgments from both the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom and the Supreme Court of the Republic of Ireland to ascertain whether these rulings pave the way for third-party victims to pursue negligence claims against the manufacturers of smart devices. From this analysis, a narrow pathway, which outlines how given a limited set of circumstances, a duty of care can be established between the third-party victim and the manufacturer of the smart device is proposed.

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Posted on January 12, 2024 at 7:03 AM • 36 Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.