UL NO. 402: Israeli Footage & Analysis, WSFTP + MOVEIT, AI Explainability, Andreessen vs. Perell on Writing, and more…

Unsupervised Learning is a Security, AI, and Meaning-focused podcast
that looks at how best to thrive as humans in a post-AI world. It combines
original ideas, analysis, and mental models to bring not just the news, but
why it matters and how to respond.

Hello,

I had a different intro planned but what’s happening in Israel is all I
can think about right now. The news and the footage coming out is
unimaginable, and my thoughts are with everyone who’s currently
suffering.

❣️ 

MY WORK

ExtWis 2.0b: Marc Andreessen vs. David Perell
I’m working on v2.0 of extwis, the Wisdom Extractor for
text, and this is a member post of one such extraction for an
extraordinary conversation between Marc Andreessen and
David Perell about writing, creativity, and AI. Seriously great conversation
here.
MORE
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SECURITY NEWS

Israeli Attack
Israel is currently dealing with the largest attack on its territory
in 50 years, following a surprise early-morning assault by Palestinian
militants from Gaza. The attack has resulted in hundreds of deaths so far,
with militants infiltrating at least 22 Israeli towns and army bases nearly
simultaneously, kidnapping Israeli civilians and soldiers, and firing
thousands of rockets toward cities as far away as Jerusalem.

– The scale of the latest Palestinian attack shocked Israelis, many of whom
were observing the Jewish Sabbath. Diplomats and analysts were also caught
off guard.

– The ease with which Palestinian fighters entered Israel prompted
recriminations and anger among Israelis, with questions about the quality of
Israeli intelligence gathering.

– The Israeli government said Saturday evening that it was cutting off its
electricity supply for Gaza, which gets two-thirds of its power from Israel.

– The assault coincided with Israel’s escalating efforts to seal a landmark
peace deal with Saudi Arabia, and many are saying this is a way of
disrupting that relationship.

– The Biden administration
warned Israel’s enemies
not to try to take advantage of the current state of chaos.
NYTIMES

– The US has also sent
an aircraft carrier and significant amounts of munitions and other
military support
to aid Israel.

– Israel has now ordered
a ‘complete seige’
of Gaza as a result.

Heartbreaking reporting from the ground in Israel:

• A family deals with the loss of a child and sister while still being
  held hostage.
  MORE

• Hamas paraglides into a peace rave while people dance. Hostages are then
  taken in later videos.
  MORE

• People being kidnapped from the rave.
  MORE

• More visuals from the New York Times
  MORE

It’s unbelievable, and I’m very worried about what will develop in the next
few days as this unfolds. Especially as Israel responds and if/when
Hezbollah/Iran gets more involved.

🇮🇱 🇮🇱 🇮🇱 

—

Genetic Data Breach
23andMe has confirmed a data breach where user data is being sold on
hacker forums due to a credential-stuffing attack. The breach seems to have
a racial aspect as they first leaked data on Ashkenazi Jews, and then on
Chinese people.

The leaked data includes full names, usernames, profile photos, sex, date of
birth, genetic ancestry results, and geographical location.

I signed up for one of these services many years ago knowing
for absolute certain that this day would come. For me the risk
calculation is very simple: the value of the data to me is much higher than
the danger I feel from someone having the data.
BLEEPINGCOMPUTER
|
THERECORD
|
WIRED

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MGM’s Fallout 
MGM Resorts got hit by a ransomware attack last month, costing
them a crushing $100 million and leading to customer data theft. The
threat actor responsible was an affiliate of the BlackCat/ALPHV ransomware
gang known as Scattered Spider, who breached MGM’s network using social
engineering, stole sensitive data, and encrypted over a hundred ESXi
hypervisors.
MORE
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MORE

Phantom Hacker Scams 
The FBI is warning about a rise in ‘phantom hacker’ scams
targeting seniors. This is where the attacker calls claiming to be tech
support, saying they’ve been hacked, and then proceeds to hack and/or scam
them.
MORE

Vulnerabilities:

• WSFTP Mass Exploitation Alert 
  Security researchers are warning about widespread
  exploitation of multiple vulnerabilities in WS_FTP Server, including one
  with a maximum CVSS severity score of 10.
  MORE

• Exim Patches Zero-Days 
  Exim has patched three of the six zero-days disclosed last
  week, one of which allowed unauthenticated attackers to gain remote code
  execution.
  MORE

• Qualcomm’s Quick Patch 
  Qualcomm has patched over two dozen vulnerabilities,
  including three zero-days reported by Google’s cybersecurity units.
  MORE

CLEAR Security Breaches 
CLEAR, the service that lets you pay to skip airport security
lines, is under lawmaker scrutiny after employees escorted passengers
through TSA checkpoints without ID checks or CLEAR enrollment. Anecdotally,
I’m seeing a lot more people skip the CLEAR line these days and just go
through TSA/PreChek. Not sure how much longer they’ll survive if they don’t
clean this up.
MORE 

AI Impersonates Celebrities 
We’ve been talking about convincing and impactful deepfakes for
a couple of years now, and they’re finally here. Tom Hanks and Gayle King
have warned their fans about AI-generated scams featuring fake versions of
themselves.
MORE

Sony Hit Again
Sony has been hit twice in four months, with the latest breach
affecting around 6,800 individuals. The breach was due to an unauthorized
party exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in the MOVEit Transfer platform,
leading to the compromise of sensitive information of 6,791 people in the
U.S.
MORE

Backdoored Androids in Schools 
Tens of thousands of Android devices with backdoored firmware
have been shipped to end-users, including US schools. Cybersecurity vendor
Human Security discovered this as part of a global cybercriminal operation
called BadBox, infecting the firmware of over 70,000 Android devices with
the Triada malware.
MORE

TECHNOLOGY NEWS

Rewind = Permanent AI Capture
Rewind, an AI life recording app for Mac and iPhone, is launching a
wearable called the Rewind Pendant
that continuously captures and transcribes your real-world conversations.
The Pendant encrypts and stores all data locally on your phone, making it
a personalized AI powered by everything you’ve seen, said, or heard. I’m
simultaneously intrigued, ordering one, and preemptively horrified by the
privacy issues this type of tech is about to unleash. MORE
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A VERY SIMILAR DEVICE CALLED THE TAB
|
A DEMO OF THE TAB

AI Explainability Breakthrough
OpenAI just made an extraordinary jump in their ability to explain
the function of individual neurons in language models like GPT-4. They found
that iterating on explanations, using larger models, and changing the
architecture of the explained model can all increase explanation scores.

They’re also open-sourcing their datasets and tools for
GPT-4-written explanations of all 307,200 neurons in GPT-2, hoping the
research community will develop new techniques for generating higher-scoring
explanations.

This is huge for the use of AI in day-to-day
critical systems, as humans will be more likely to trust an AI if they can
see how it arrived at its decisions.
MORE
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SIMILAR ANTHROPIC RESEARCH

CAPTCHA Replacement 
Cloudflare has now widely deployed its CAPTCHA alternative,
Turnstile, aiming to address the fact that everyone hates CAPTCHAS and
they’re getting much easier for AI to crack. Turnstile relies on passive,
background data analysis rather than visual puzzles. Between this and
Passkeys I’m pretty happy with user-focused security advancements this year.
MORE

Copilot’s Impact 
Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, believes that their new AI,
Copilot, will revolutionize personal computing, comparing its significance
to the rise of the PC, the Web, mobile, and cloud computing.
MORE

Confabulation vs. Hallucination
Similar to humans, Large Language Models (LLMs) don’t ‘hallucinate’
information, they ‘confabulate’, which is inventing plausible-sounding
justifications with no basis in fact when forced to answer a query they
don’t know. Some researchers think recognizing LLMs as confabulating rather
than hallucinating will improve understanding and performance.
MORE 

Podcasts Suffering
The podcast industry is still reeling from layoffs and cancellations,
with the ad market’s uncertainty hitting hard.
MORE

HUMAN NEWS

Jobs Boost 
The US economy added a surprising 336,000 jobs in September,
and the unemployment rate has remained below 4% for 20 consecutive months.
Wall Street had predicted a mere 173,000 jobs to be added, expecting the
unemployment rate to drop to 3.7%. I’m starting to think the recession did
happen, but that it’s a permanent one for those on bottom while those on top
keep on thriving. More extreme on both ends.
MORE

Cashless Ban Activated 
D.C. just put a stop to cashless businesses, making it
mandatory for all businesses to accept cash. The goal is economic
inclusivity, as not everyone has access to digital payment options, but it
also makes those businesses more attractive to thieves.
MORE 

China’s Brain Drain 
China’s top tech talents are leaving the country, but they’re
not going to the US as you might expect. They’re largely going to countries
like Canada, Australia, and Japan instead.
MORE 

COVID, Politics, and Vaccines 
Nate Silver provides regression analysis support for his
previous blog post showing that states with higher Biden victory margins and
vaccination rates have lower COVID-19 death rates since vaccines became
widely available. Basically, more Republicans died of COVID than Democrats
because they didn’t vaccinate.
MORE 

TikTok Therapy Trend 
The Shadow Work Journal, a self-published workbook by
24-year-old Keila Shaheen, is the latest wellness trend on TikTok. Shadow
Work involves behaving as your true self, including your rough edges.
MORE

Tipping the Scales 
Chicago has become the largest US city to independently mandate
a full minimum wage for tipped employees. After being in Europe for a bit I
really hope we can just charge more for things and get rid of tipping. When
you get a cab or a meal at a restaurant, you just tap and go. Tipping is
toxic AF for everyone involved, and as far as I can tell the only reason it
still exists is so that corporations can pay wait staff less money en masse.
MORE

IDEAS & ANALYSIS

Conflict
I served in the US Army in Sinai, Egypt as an MFO peace
observer, and have had the chance to visit Israel multiple times over the
years. I have many Israeli and Palestinian friends. Given that, I hold two
things in my mind simultaneously: 1) I know that extraordinary pressure on a
people will cause them to do extraordinary things, and 2) I don’t see that
justifying these attacks in any way.

This isn’t a contradiction to me because I see two distinct parties in
Palestine: 1) innocent and peaceful Palestinians with legitimate grievances
about their treatment, and 2) militants who don’t actually want peace at
all. I think a big part of our problem is conflating these two groups.

The people who carried out these attacks are anti-Jew and anti-Israel,
full-stop. They’re not pro anything, except maybe being a hero in their own
stories. Anyone planning these actions had to know the result would be more
suffering for the Palestinian people, not less. So it wasn’t for Palestine.
It was for themselves. And who they targeted, and what they did to the
victims, is clear evidence of that.

I also feel strange switching to discussing security and AI when this is
happening. But I have to remind myself that suffering like this is going on
all the time—and often to many more people—yet I don’t care because I don’t
hear about it. Awareness and attention are our apertures for caring,
evidently, and we have too little control over both.

Opposites
I just did a trip to Europe to do my
Killer Context AI talk about software, security, and how they’ll be
affected by AI. It was in Budapest, and it was my first time visiting. The
highlight of the trip was visiting the most popular Ruin Bar in the city,
Szimpla KERTMOZI. A Ruin Bar is basically a collection of bars inside the
destruction from bombing in WW2.

So imagine a giant brick
building, or a city block, and part of the buildings are destroyed from
bombs. So there are missing walls, roofs, etc. Then imagine people go into
there and create the most vibrant and extraordinary place to gather you can
think of. Iron bars and mesh scafolding creating new walls, floors, and
ceilings. Plants everywhere. CD vending machines. Mysterious pixel art. It
was like a greenhouse beer garden with an industrial and artistic soul. We
just kept saying wow.

Anyway, what it got me thinking of—with the context of the Israeli attacks
having already happened, and the bar being in the Jewish quarter of
Budapest—was the juxtaposition of bombs and gardens. Here you have one of
the most hateful and destructive things ever in a massive bomb dropped on a
city during a war, and then from that we build a breathtakingly beautiful
place to gather and enjoy humanity. It reminded me of the imagery of
concrete being laid to block out life, but a crack forms and a green sprout
and flower pops through.

Humans are capable of such extremes. I feel like we could be entering a
really dark period right now with what’s happening in Israel, but I am
trying real hard to imagine what flowers might break through afterwards.

NOTES

My buddy Luke wrote
a wonderful essay
looking at the cybersecurity industry’s failures after meeting a man who
lost his life savings to online scammers. He argues for a shift in focus
from technology to people, suggesting that cybersecurity should be a public
service and that personal identifiable information (PII) should be assumed
to be publicly accessible.
MORE

DISCOVERY

⚒️
CloudGrep
— A handy tool that functions like grep, but for cloud storage. It’s a
game-changer for searching through your cloud data. | by
/u/0x636f6f6c
|
GITHUB

⚒️ Python Magic
— Running LLMs has been simplified to a single line of Python code, no
Docker needed.
MORE 

The iPhone 15 camera evidently beats the latest Android option MORE

The Sabbath as a Remedy for Modern Stress
MORE

The Monstera Albo is a multi-thousand-dollar house plant.
MORE

Daniel Haussman’s insane photos of the Icelandic Highlands.
MORE

Moxie Marlinspike suggests doing the minimum work to prevent starvation and
then pursuing something not about money, outside of supporting structures,
and not simply a matter of “consuming experience”.
MORE

See if your domain has been typosquatted MORE

RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

Check in on your Israeli friends. It’s a small country and everyone serves
in the military, so this is very personal to all Israelis even if they moved
away a long time ago.

APHORISM OF THE WEEK

❝  

War does not determine who is right – only who is left.

  Bertrand Russell