Dose of Paranoia - 2025-03-15
It gets worse before it gets worse...
Important Stuff
5 years on, Covid is still with us, and it still really sucks - Amy had a bout of it a couple of weeks ago and it was miserable. Of course, the new management of the US has decided not to distribute the stockpile of test kits they are sitting on to the public, because, well, it would make sense to use them before they expire. However, there is a loophole - community organizations like houses of worship, libraries, social organizations and the like can request free bulk orders of test kits from what’s left of the Department of Health and Human Services for distribution. I just ordered a few hundred kits for my local ambulance squad to distribute and recommend that you get your town, library or other social organization to do the same before Elon notices that the government is still trying to help non billionaires in some small way.
Infosec/Scam Stuff
Alexa - rat me out to Jeff Bezos - Apparently, anything you say to your Alexa home assistant will be recorded and sent to Amazon starting at the end of March. To be honest, this surprised me as I already thought this was the case and Jeff Bezos and his minions were diligently listening to me ask her to turn on a light, tell me a cat joke or give me a weather report. Time to decide whether to exile Alexa.
This better be one GREAT spoon - This is truly a wild story - a 9 year (!!) Kickstarter odyssey around… a measuring spoon. And it is not clear just how much of this is scam related and how much is the result of a really perfectionist… spoon designer. This does show that you need to be careful and have a lot of skepticism and tolerance to order new things from Kickstarter campaigns. And be ready to wait 9 years for your spoon.
Anatomy of a romance scam - This guy clearly has too much time on his hands, but I have to admit that it was interesting to read his VERY detailed breakdown of his interactions with a would be romance scammer. Looking at this, I can see how people can be taken in by these dirtbags. This is big big business (see next item).
Top scams for 2024 - The FTC came out with its list of top scams seen by consumers in 2024 and it is a doozy. Reported losses (a fraction of real losses) were up by $2.5B to 12.5 BILLION DOLLARS. Interestingly, younger people were more likely to be the victims of scams than older adults, but it was the older adults who lost the most money. And unsurprisingly, social media, investment fraud and bank transfers figured in most of the losses.
Many people think cryptocurrencies are useless - tish tosh I say! Here is another example of the main use case for bitcoin and other crypto - Russian evasion of sanctions on its oil trade. Yes, when someone tells you crypto is useless bullshit, you can confidently argue the case - think of all of the war criminals, regular criminals and scammers who would have to work so much harder to do their business without it.
Tech Stuff
Even AI is getting fed up with AI - There is a story going around that a programmer trying to use an AI assistant to write code got told off by said AI, when the bot abruptly refused his request to continue and suggested that he write the requested code himself so that he actually understood how it works. The AI apparently told him “Generating code for others can lead to dependency and reduced learning opportunities.” Wow - maybe AI is approaching what we used to call human level intelligence…. (And yeah, that image above was made by ChatGPT)
Now this is tech forward parenting - I am glad that my parents did not have access to this particular service. But I would DEFINITELY use it on my kids if I had any. Reason number 4678 that it is good that I am childless.
Fun Stuff
It is easy to think that the challenges we face today are symptoms of “our modern world” - but most of the experiences we have today are echoes of the past. A couple of cases in point:
Yeah, the world seems to be more awash in scammers, conmen and fraudsters than ever, but you need to remember that these people (and their scams) have been with us ever since there was civilization. Here is a case in point - this story of an up and coming Armenian monk and teacher from the 1860s whose life took a radical turn to scammerhood, reinventing himself as a prince and selling knighthoods to people with more money than sense. As with any good story, there are shades of gray here, as our “prince” actually did achieve some good… but his scam also lives on today into the Internet age.
And it is not just scams - bureaucratic red tape, administrivia, and the mind numbing jobs that go with them seem to get worse and worse as well. But spare a thought for the original bureaucrats in ancient Mesopotamia - recent archaeological finds in Iraq unearthed hundreds of clay tablets recording “the spreadsheets of empire,” recording the day to day details of running the world’s first civilization. And those proto bureaucrats couldn’t even go home at the end of the day and fire up Netflix to relax.
If you are not watching the Eagle chicks growing up on YouTube, you are missing some of the best TV out there.
And finally, if there is anyone living on Saturn, they are laughing at Earth with its puny single moon. We need to get working on this, people.