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Here’s a fascinating tax hack from Belgium (listen to the details here, episode #484 of “No Such Thing as a Fish,” at 28:00).
Basically, it’s about a music festival on the border between Belgium and Holland. The stage was in Holland, but the crowd was in Belgium. When the copyright collector came around, they argued that they didn’t have to pay any tax because the audience was in a different country. Supposedly it worked.
I have mixed feelings about this class-action lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming that it “scraped 300 billion words from the internet” without either registering as a data broker or obtaining consent. On the one hand, I want this to be a protected fair use of public data. On the other hand, I want us all to be compensated for our uniquely human ability to generate language.
There’s an interesting wrinkle on this. A recent paper showed that using AI generated text to train another AI invariably “causes irreversible defects.” From a summary:
The tails of the original content distribution disappear. Within a few generations, text becomes garbage, as Gaussian distributions converge and may even become delta functions. We call this effect model collapse.
Just as we’ve strewn the oceans with plastic trash and filled the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, so we’re about to fill the Internet with blah. This will make it harder to train newer models by scraping the web, giving an advantage to firms which already did that, or which control access to human interfaces at scale. Indeed, we already see AI startups hammering the Internet Archive for training data.
This is the same idea that Ted Chiang wrote about: that ChatGPT is a “blurry JPEG of all the text on the Web.” But the paper includes the math that proves the claim.
What this means is that text from before last year—text that is known human-generated—will become increasingly valuable.
Amusing parody of password rules.
For example, at a certain level, your password must include today’s Wordle answer. And then there’s rule #27: “At least 50% of your password must be in the Wingdings font.”
EDITED TO ADD (7/13): Here are all the rules.
Police are already using self-driving car footage as video evidence:
While security cameras are commonplace in American cities, self-driving cars represent a new level of access for law enforcement and a new method for encroachment on privacy, advocates say. Crisscrossing the city on their routes, self-driving cars capture a wider swath of footage. And it’s easier for law enforcement to turn to one company with a large repository of videos and a dedicated response team than to reach out to all the businesses in a neighborhood with security systems.
“We’ve known for a long time that they are essentially surveillance cameras on wheels,” said Chris Gilliard, a fellow at the Social Science Research Council. “We’re supposed to be able to go about our business in our day-to-day lives without being surveilled unless we are suspected of a crime, and each little bit of this technology strips away that ability.”
[…]
While self-driving services like Waymo and Cruise have yet to achieve the same level of market penetration as Ring, the wide range of video they capture while completing their routes presents other opportunities. In addition to the San Francisco homicide, Bloomberg’s review of court documents shows police have sought footage from Waymo and Cruise to help solve hit-and-runs, burglaries, aggravated assaults, a fatal collision and an attempted kidnapping.
In all cases reviewed by Bloomberg, court records show that police collected footage from Cruise and Waymo shortly after obtaining a warrant. In several cases, Bloomberg could not determine whether the recordings had been used in the resulting prosecutions; in a few of the cases, law enforcement and attorneys said the footage had not played a part, or was only a formality. However, video evidence has become a lynchpin of criminal cases, meaning it’s likely only a matter of time.
Doryteuthis opalescens is known as the market squid, and was critical in the recent squid RNA research.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Read my blog posting guidelines here.
The Washington Post is reporting that the US is spying on the UN Secretary General.
The reports on Guterres appear to contain the secretary general’s personal conversations with aides regarding diplomatic encounters. They indicate that the United States relied on spying powers granted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to gather the intercepts.
Lots of details about different conversations in the article, which are based on classified documents leaked on Discord by Jack Teixeira.
There will probably a lot of faux outrage at this, but spying on foreign leaders is a perfectly legitimate use of the NSA’s capabilities and authorities. (If the NSA didn’t spy on the UN Secretary General, we should fire it and replace it with a more competent NSA.) It’s the bulk surveillance of whole populations that should outrage us.
We have learned this lesson again:
As part of the FTC v. Microsoft hearing, Sony supplied a document from PlayStation chief Jim Ryan that includes redacted details on the margins Sony shares with publishers, its Call of Duty revenues, and even the cost of developing some of its games.
It looks like someone redacted the documents with a black Sharpie but when you scan them in, it’s easy to see some of the redactions. Oops.
I don’t particularly care about the redacted information, but it’s there in the article.
The stalkerware company LetMeSpy has been hacked:
TechCrunch reviewed the leaked data, which included years of victims’ call logs and text messages dating back to 2013.
The database we reviewed contained current records on at least 13,000 compromised devices, though some of the devices shared little to no data with LetMeSpy. (LetMeSpy claims to delete data after two months of account inactivity.)
[…]
The database also contained over 13,400 location data points for several thousand victims. Most of the location data points are centered over population hotspots, suggesting the majority of victims are located in the United States, India and Western Africa.
The data also contained the spyware’s master database, including information about 26,000 customers who used the spyware for free and the email addresses of customers who bought paying subscriptions.
The leaked data contains no identifying information, which means people whose data was leaked can’t be notified. (This is actually much more complicated than it might seem, because alerting the victims often means alerting the stalker—which can put the victims into unsafe situations.)
Don’t do it:
Recently, the manager of the Harvard Med School morgue was accused of stealing and selling human body parts. Cedric Lodge and his wife Denise were among a half-dozen people arrested for some pretty grotesque crimes. This part is also at least a little bit funny though:
Over a three-year period, Taylor appeared to pay Denise Lodge more than $37,000 for human remains. One payment, for $1,000 included the memo “head number 7.” Another, for $200, read “braiiiiiins.”
It’s so easy to think that you won’t get caught.
In this detailed article about academic plagiarism are some interesting details about how to do data forensics on Excel files. It really needs the graphics to understand, so see the description at the link.
(And, yes, an author of a paper on dishonesty is being accused of dishonesty. There’s more evidence.)
EDITED TO ADD (7/13): Guardian article.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.