Weekend Edition 42: No More Social Media Collusion?

WE 1 – Judicial Smackdown On Behalf of Free Speech Rights
· Judge Doughty of Missouri
· Case brought by AGs from Louisiana and Missouri
· Found that Feds have been leaning on Social Media giants to censor things
· Ruled that they need to stop
· WH and DOJ struggling to appeal decision
· We’ll see how long this lasts and/or if it changes anything appreciably
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66106067

WE 2 – Social Media Platform “they stole our homework”
· Twitter right pissy about Threads
· Accuses them of stealing trade secrets from them via hiring recently fired engineers from Twitter
· Meta says, “sure, like we’d do that”
· Our platform is better anyway
· You copied our homework
· AS IF
· More PR for Threads as Twitter tanks
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66129215

WE 3 – France Goes Full INGSOC
· Police reform bill
· French police are nationalized
· Think of it as if our only police organization was the FBI
· Police can now spy on any citizen who is SUSPECTED of a crime worthy of at least 5 years in jail
· All devices’ geolocation data is fair game, here, if you are a suspect
· MPs trying to amend it to exclude, them, doctors, lawyers, judges, and journos,andto limit the time frame in view
https://www.techradar.com/computing/cyber-security/france-grants-police-power-to-spy-on-citizens-through-phones

WE 4 – US Navy Hacks MS Teams
· Exploit in external messaging feature
· Navy Team Red developed Python based tool
· TeamsPhisher
· Can insert malicious code into linked files for users who also have a SharePoint license
· Can do it en mass
· Avoid by closing off your external messaging feature when not needed
· Practice good digital hygiene
https://www.techradar.com/pro/the-us-navy-has-hacked-microsoft-teams-to-send-malware

WE 5 – Safe in the Cloud?
· Think again
· Cloud is one the biggest, easiest targets for hackers
· Remember, cloud = your data on someone else’s hardware
· Encrypt your data
· Use locally controlled multi-factor authentication (MFA)
· These steps will greatly improve your data security
· Tech Freedom can help with this, if you need
· Best practice is to on-site most of your data
· Not cheap, but then you control your data
https://www.techradar.com/pro/cloud-remains-the-biggest-target-for-cyberattacks

WE 6 – Has the Shine Worn Off From ChatGPT?
· For the first time since going public, traffic went down in May
· Not only ChatGPT, but Bing and character.ai also took a hit
· Bard flatlined
· Is it all worth it?
· Does this mean anything?
· I hope it means that the general public is losing interest
· It’s a tool, and can provide a starting place for writing or research
https://www.pcmag.com/news/are-we-sick-of-ai-chatbots-already-chatgpt-site-sees-traffic-dip

WE 7 – Speaking of Privacy...
· OpenAI Sued
· Class action
· Seeks temporary shutdown of commercial side
· Seeks damages for copyright holders whose work has been infringed in some way
· Seeks damages for individuals whose social media posts got data-scraped to train the LLM
· Interesting
· Will stay on top of this one as it develops
https://www.pcmag.com/news/openai-sued-for-using-stolen-data-violating-your-privacy-with-chatgpt

WE 8 – Is Your Job in Danger from Generative AI?
· Hostinger survey
· Healthcare seems most threatened
· Personally doubt that would fly well, but what do I know?
· Automotive
· I could see this one being a “thing” as long as it has all the data necessary to understand an issue
· What do you guys think?
https://www.pcmag.com/news/ai-is-coming-for-our-jobs-but-which-ones

WE 9 – Open AI Dedicating 20% of Cloud Resources to Stopping ‘super-intelligent AI’
· Bahhahaha
· We don’t even have publicly available functional general AI right now
· Generative AI is not really intelligent
· Is this really a problem?
· Why focus us on this potentiality?
https://www.pcmag.com/news/openais-latest-goal-prevent-superintelligent-ai-from-killing-us-all

Outpouring Fellowship Podcast
https://rumble.com/c/c-2966394