There's a joke about certain princes here but I just feel bad for the people getting scammed since I know firsthand how realistic these things can seem
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
Edit: Recalled -> Recall
If anything I think that paper serves best as a reminder that just because an idea is clever and logical, that doesn't necessarily mean it's true.[1]
[1] As another example, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Gandhi
One of them said, and I'll never forget, "Thank you for being reasonable".
There's less need to identify the most gullible when AI drops the incremental cost of responding closer to zero.
"Thinking like an attacker is a skill rightly valued among defenders."
and
"Attacking as a business must identify targets, and this is easy only if we believe that attackers have solved a problem that has vexed multiple communities for decades."
Bollocks!
Are we talking about the same thing?
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This thought-provoker is 100% human-derived.
#They'reMadeOutOfWeights
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I didn't even realize how serious I was being, back in late 2022, when I was telling my Boomer friends (twice my age, but still closer than most "family") "make sure if you're grand-daugther calls 'begging for her life,' you need to ask the kidnappers something only she would know – and then *you can never ask that same question again (for verification, at least; ask whatever you want).
We are here.
Ah with a decade or two time horizon it shouldn’t matter how hard it crashes if Zitron & Doctorow are proven right… rightttt!
I cracked. Had never seen that used before, yet so obvious now in retrospect. Pure poetry.
But if investors hadn't been taking profits on the incline, then I have little sympathy for them skiing down the decline.
(This is a harsh opinion, but people getting into investing should be doing it actively, not passively, ie. do some research, make a plan. Also, for those who are invested passively, long term, via ETFs, then they're still up 55% as @Nition says, so they're all good)
That said, OpenAI isn't public, so you can't directly short it easily. I guess you could short Microsoft but I don't know if that gives you enough exposure to truly be worth it, even if you do genuinely believe what OOP claims.
Not guaranteed, but the norm.
I've never tried to buy PUTs on a big IPO but I wouldn't be surprised that there's a premium on them, if options trading is even available.
AI definitely makes the scams more believable, a Nigerian Prince can now easily forge documents.
But at the same time AI is a double edged sword, it can be used for both offence and defense.
I think they are about the same.
Both work about as well as autocorrect
You don't exactly want convincing evidence; you want a good story.
Let's ask Vint Cerf whether the web was meant to run logic, or just be a document format. I bet no matter what he answers, the world would be like the GIF pronunciation "I don't care if the original creator said it's pronounced like giraffe, I'm gonna say it like gift because I KnOw BeTtEr"
Internet 3 when (because I know that academia does already have an "Internet 2", although I bet due to Internet 1 security issues, Internet 2 is already compromised too)
But those are completely unrelated topics. You don't need a hint of JavaScript to do online banking.
And you don't need online banking to send someone your credit card details or banking information. Any kind of communication can turn into a scam. You can steal money over the phone or by mail.
That’s a really extreme take that lacks any nuance.
Might as well blame the OS as well for allowing any custom code to be executed.
> This planet has, or had, a problem, which was this. Most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small, green pieces of paper, which is odd, because on the whole, it wasn't the small, green pieces of paper which were unhappy. And so the problem remained, and lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans.
Tim invented the web: HTML, HTTP, URLs.
Vint did a lot of things, but most of it had to do with lower-level internet infrastructure, not the web per se.
Here is a story which describes one such letter from 1913: https://web.archive.org/web/20020815055745/http://www.samizd...
Is there any way to help the elderly navigate this shift?
"Ignore anyone asking you for money unless you know them and they do it in-person."
It sounds extremely obvious and infinitely practical.
How often are you (or your parents) legitimately asked for money via email / internet? I mean, my answer is: never. My parents' answer is: never. My parents-in-law answer is: never.
"You're my daughter? Then tell me the name of your twelth pet centipede."
Usually, the scammer will think of a scenario that give the victim very limited time to stop and think, or put them in the state that fear takes over their mind
Ethics, morals and whatever people call only exists if economy is stable. If you let this sort of opportunistic environment exist there will be people to work in it
What is a "stable" economy? The US has the world's largest GDP, the highest nominal GDP per capita of any nation with a population over 10 million, the highest amount of investable and liquid private assets of any country in the world, more than a third of the world's millionaires, etc.
And yet I think you'd have a hard time convincing most people that the US is a bastion of ethics and morals.
It is true that we see correlation between richer countries and lower level of crimes - across all layers of society.
Rich countries have created a definition that makes it a poor country thing, conveniently ignoring the type of corruption that is institutionalized (and in some cases even legalized) in many rich countries.
I think it can be true that we have in effect far more corruption in the west than what is readily recognized at the same time that it’s true that we have less corruption than most other countries.
Do you even read what you write? If you institutionalize corruption to reduce competition between different corrupt factions, you end up with a not endemically corrupt society?
Here's what it actually means: if you institutionalize corruption, you end up with an endemically corrupt society that is incapable of even recognizing corruption for what it is.
> ...at the same time that it’s true that we have less corruption than most other countries.
No, the corruption is just more sophisticated so that we can pretend it isn't corruption. Just look at campaign finance. In many ways, it's even more insidious than companies handing over paper bags full of bribe money to politicians and government officials.
The amounts are bigger, the number of people who get a piece of the action is great and it's all "legal" so the corruption is more durable. And, again, everyone gets to pretend that it's not corruption.
Both options are endemically corrupt but removing most kinds of corruption is an improvement.
- tamper with index fund rules so that the 401k's of the masses are bearing the risk of your risky investment
- bribe a border agent to let you through to see a friend
In relative terms?
So what you're saying is that Trump and his family grifting Americans for a couple billion dollars so far in his second term is better than, say, Hun Sen and his family grifting Cambodians for somewhere between $500 million and $4 billion over ~40 years because the US economy is so much bigger than Cambodia's?
It is all but impossible to calculate how much wealth has been "destroyed" and, more importantly, how much wealth has been transferred from the middle class to the upper class by way of institutionalized corruption that many people, you included, won't even acknowledge as a form of corruption.
Meanwhile, members of Congress are laughing all the way to the bank.
Viewing the world as haves and have nots and building giant Walls and moats and hyper-capitalism alone will never solve this..
I'm thankful for Cloudflare and I don't think I would have had the resources to deal with it any other way.
They said "Am I speaking to <my full name>?". I did not answer that and instead asked what company they were calling from, then they immediately hung up.
I guess people who ask that initial question are disqualified for their scam, they're looking for more gullible folks.
But I feel like I have to answer when my son is at school/camp.
If someone really wants to get a hold of you, they can knock on your door.
Privacy focused solutions prevent the leaks which enable many scammers, and yet governments respond by demanding more identifiers be added everywhere, which perpetuates the leaks. I've not gotten a single spam message on Signal with their phone number privacy settings and username usage. You can change your username whenever you want.
Google should add email aliasing and encourage it. They could detect and alert users if an email that comes to an alias is from a different sender than the first email to that alias.
As if people weren't scamming before AI, with the billions of dollars seized from the Chinese scam dungeons in Cambodia [0] where they had kidnapped people and tied them to computers (including a few deaths, and another wave of arrests just recently)
Scammers gonna scam. At least if they can use AI for it then maybe they'll kidnap fewer people
Chinese models are going to keep getting stronger. Maybe the Free World™ should increase their people's access to and education about AI too.
Better to strike at the root of the LLM-scam business model wherever we can.
Why would the scammer go thru your detector?
Phone? The network could spot sources exhibiting robocall patterns. AI could analyze live conversations and warn the recipient on certain patterns.
Instant messaging? There's spam and abuse screening built into most IMs already. AI could [locally/privately] analyze conversations.
Email? Ditto; analyze conversations, a bit deeper than basic junk mail filters already do.
Unless you ban mentioning other IM platform or communication channel, they will always try to get you on something less monitored
Page 24 is where the AI stuff starts being described in detail.
Our most vulnerable must be getting absolutely hammered by scams. Is anyone working on protecting e.g. elderly people from social engineering? I feel like banks should be proactively suggesting people have a second family member or fiduciary sign off on risky transactions like wiring money to new accounts or pulling out a ton of cash.
I was recently on the phone with a very articulate member of my banks fraud department, or at least I believed they were up until they asked for my two factor code to reset my account. They had visibility into some past legitimate wire transfers which they asked me about along with a fictitious fraudulent one that they “blocked“, and when I pushed back against giving them my two factor code, they had a whole script prepared about needing to freeze my account until I went to a branch with four forms of identification (or just give us the two factor code and avoid the hassle). An acquaintance wired their down payment to a scammer after the real estate firms email system was compromised and scammer inserted their own wire instructions.
Not to mention reports of mythos directly hacking into banking systems. Scary times.
Is what I see. Which makes sense I guess. Maybe just tell me how you got to the page?
The PDF is linked here, which you can get to this article from the front page:
https://www.interpol.int/News-and-Events/News/2026/INTERPOL-...
Large groups of people in a poor country steal from rich countries, and your explanation is a morally corrupt culture? not the obviously extremely poor prospects of it's citizens?
> They have none, or worse they can talk themselves into this "Robin Hood" psychosis, where stealing the pension from the elderly is just fine, because they are part of the upper crust of the world.
You're describing a cartoon character. Most of these people are trying to survive, not make some kind of twisted moral stand. Please try to recognise the privilege your place of birth affords you and how much of a global minority you are in. Incentives are everything here.
It's nearly as if there was a lesson here about some individuals in the human race?
What was that yet about psychos? That 1% of all humans, no matter the socio-economic class, no matter the parents, are just full-on psychopaths.
The question is: what do we do, as a society, about those who only want to harm others?
I don't think you can even dispute this. AI will be the one to cause the next financial crisis.
[0] https://www.cell.com/joule/abstract/S2542-4351(25)00142-4
So what's the implication here? It sounds like you want AI canceled or curtailed, and if you apply the same logic to the internet in the mid 90s, you would have correctly called out the dotcom bubble. Does that we mean we should have also canceled the internet?
You should also be careful about taking imagined positions to the extreme ..."Does that we mean we should have also canceled the internet?"
It does, otherwise what are you arguing for, that financial crises are bad?
>You should also be careful about taking imagined positions to the extreme ..."Does that we mean we should have also canceled the internet?"
Right, which is why I posed it as a question.
In retrospect, I think the world would be a much better place if we'd just turned it off in 1998.