👉 Read this issue as a webpage to avoid the email cutoff
issue 👈
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.
Good morning!
Well, this weekend was quite a year.
I binged Seasons 1, 2, and 3 of Sam Altman this weekend.
Microsoft is streaming Season 4 starting this morning,
starting with most everyone quitting if the board doesn’t
resign.
🔎 Here’s
my analysis of the situation.
Functionally, Ilya left and started a new company with people who want
to approach AGI very slowly and carefully—exciting nobody.
🔥I just got done doing some magic with Whisper (an IlyaAI project) and
my own RPGSession AI.
I’m now taking our live weekly RPG sessions and turning them into full
summaries and even “Previously On Crown and Mayhem…” audio teasers! LISTEN TO IT
Our “Previously On…” teaser read in a deepfake of my voice from 11Lab!
I’m reading probably the most interesting piece of fiction I’ve read
in…maybe forever.
It’s Kafka on the Shore, by Murakami. The way this book is building characters, story, and
suspense is insane.
Can’t wait to see what Sam and team does next, whether he’s at Microsoft,
back at OpenAI, or out on his own.
I hope you have a less exciting week than Sam’s weekend. Let’s get into it.
MY WORK
Insane amount of output this week!
🔥🚨Sam Altman Wants AGI as Fast as Possible, and He Has Powerful
Opponents
My analysis and theory of how Sam Altman was removed from OpenAI by
the forces for XRisk and EA.
MORE
🛡️SEC vs. SolarWinds is CyberSecurity’s ENRON Moment
My essay
analyzing the SEC case against SolarWinds, and how it’ll affect
cybersecurity going forward.
MORE
⚔️ My AI Summarization of a D&D Session + Previously On Trailer + My
Deefaked Voice
This is was SUPER fun to make, and we’re going to do it for all our
sessions going forward. Nothing beats tabletop RPG with friends!
LISTEN TO IT
SECURITY
👋 I continue to work on making the news sections as concise yet rich as possible, which is the unique approach for the UL newsletter. As such, I’ll
putting only the especially interesting, surprising, or notable stories
in the main SECURITY section, because most Vulnerabilities and Incidents
are so commonplace that they’re becoming noise. I will still have them
down below in their own sections so you get the coverage!
🤯This is nuts. A ransomware group has added a new technique to their
arsenal:
threatening to report a company to the SEC if they don’t pay.
Actually in this case they just straight up reported them. But now this is a
move other groups can use. Compromise, start the clock, and tell the victim
you won’t report them if they pay.
MORE
TikTok is under massive scrutiny because
Bin Laden’s “Letter to America”
went viral on the platform despite its extremely anti-American and
antisemitic language. Similar to the pro-Palestinian bias on TikTok,
TikTok’s leadership is saying they’re not influencing anything. “Young
people are just pro-Palestine”. That could very well be true, but I hate the
fact that they (see the CCP) have the ability to influence what millions of
America’s kids are seeing and thinking.
MORE
The FBI is intensifying its scrutiny on Hamas-related activities in the US
following the group’s unexpected strike on Israel. In a recent testimony,
FBI Director Christopher A. Wray highlighted the increased threat level to
the US after last month’s attack by Hamas on southern Israel.
MORE
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AlphaLock, a new Russian hacking group, is going Silicon Valley with live
performances, a slick UI, offering hacker training, and monetizing through
an affiliate program. They’ve built a two-part business model: first, they
train hackers via online courses, and second, they plan to profit from these
trained hackers through an affiliate program on the dark web. Sorry to say,
but I’m impressed.
MORE
Israel is reportedly using NSO’s Pegasus spyware to track Hamas-related
kidnappings and murders. I’m torn on this. It legitimizes this kind of
software, but if there ever were a legitimate use, I suppose this is it.
MORE
Google just dropped new Titan security keys. They’re available with USB-C
and USB-A connections, they’re FIDO2 compatible, can store over 250
passkeys, and also include NFC for easy mobile device pairing.
MORE
Vulnerabilities:
🚨Patch Tuesday Alert — Microsoft’s latest update fixes 60+
vulnerabilities, including three exploited zero-days. | CRITICAL |
CVE-2023-36025, CVE-2023-36033, CVE-2023-36036
MORE
🪳Fortinet Vulnerability Alert — Fortinet has issued updates for
critical vulnerabilities in FortiClient and FortiGate. | HIGH |
CVE-2023-38545, CVE-2023-38546 | CVSS Score: Not provided
MORE
🪳WordPress Plugin Flaw — Over 600,000 WordPress sites are at
risk due to a WP Fastest Cache plugin vulnerability. | HIGH |
CVE-2023-6063 | CVSS Score: 8.6
MORE
🪳SAP Business One Flaw — SAP’s latest patch fixes a critical
vulnerability in Business One. | CRITICAL | CVE-2023-31403 | CVSS Score:
9.6
MORE
🪳SSH Key Exposure — Researchers found a new way to snatch SSH
keys due to computational errors. | CRITICAL | No CVSS Score provided
MORE
⚠️ MeridianLink SEC Complaint — AlphV reported MeridianLink to
the SEC for not disclosing a recent breach. | SEVERITY: MEDIUM |
RESPONSE: MeridianLink claims minimal business interruption and no
unauthorized access found.
MORE
🪳FortiSIEM Critical Bug — Fortinet has found a critical bug in
FortiSIEM that lets attackers run commands remotely. | CRITICAL |
CVE-2023-36553 | CVSS Score: 9.8
MORE
🪳VS Code Extension Flaws — Third-party VS Code extensions have
markdown vulnerabilities. | CRITICAL |
MORE
Incidents:
🚨Juniper RCE Exploit Chain — CISA alerts of active exploitation
of critical Juniper vulnerabilities. | CRITICAL | CVE-2023-36844,
CVE-2023-36845, CVE-2023-36846, CVE-2023-36847 |
MORE
🚨Zimbra Email Heist — Attackers exploited a Zimbra email server
0-day to steal data from various governments. | CRITICAL |
CVE-2023-37580
MORE
⚠️Denmark’s Energy Sector Hit Hard — Denmark’s energy firms just
faced their biggest coordinated cyberattack, with hackers exploiting
Zyxel firewall flaws to hit 22 companies. | HIGH | CVE-2020-28771,
CVE-2023-33009, CVE-2023-33010 |
MORE
|
MORE
⚠️Mr. Cooper Cyberattack — They know some customer data was lost
but they were able to get many systems back online. RESPONSE: They’re
still determining the scope of the intrusion and damage.
MORE
⚠️ Truepill Data Breach — Over 2.3 million customers’ personal
health information was exposed. | SEVERITY: HIGH | RESPONSE:
Notification letters sent, lawsuits pending.
MORE
⚠️ Toyota Ransomware Threat — Medusa ransomware gang hits Toyota
Financial Services, demands $8 million. | SEVERITY: HIGH | RESPONSE:
Systems taken offline, law enforcement engaged.
MORE
|
MORE
⚠️MySQL Under Siege — MySQL servers are being hijacked by the
‘Ddostf’ botnet for DDoS attacks. | HIGH
MORE
⚠️ Law Firm Ransomware — Allen & Overy hit by LockBit
ransomware, possibly exploiting CitrixBleed. | SEVERITY: MEDIUM |
RESPONSE: Affected a few storage servers, no major data loss reported.
MORE
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👉 Continue online to avoid the email cutoff issue 👈
TECHNOLOGY
OpenAI blew up on Friday. Like, in a way that nobody would have believed if
a fiction writer released it. Here’s
my analysis of what happened, and over 700 employees have
evidently signed their intent to leave
if the board doesn’t step down. My question, though, is what happens if they
do? Like what is that going to solve?
MORE
Elon wants to change X so that it highlights smaller accounts based on
algorithmic similarity match, rather than klout. This is extraordinarily
good news because
the biggest problem new writers and creators have is being discovered. I wrote about this a long time ago in
a fake Amazon product that discovered things based on matching your
preferences
and similarity to stuff you like.
MORE
|
THE DISCOVERABILITY CRISIS
|
AMAZON CURATE (FAKE)
This guy built an AI that takes screenshots from his camera and narrates the
image in the voice of David Attenborough. SO CREATIVE.
MORE
|
MORE
Google DeepMind’s AI just outperformed traditional weather forecasting for
the first time, predicting up to 10 days ahead with higher accuracy than
traditional techniques. The AI, called GraphCast, surpassed the European
Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts in 90% of the 1,380 metrics
evaluated, including temperature and wind.
MORE | MORE
Tesla is building old-style drive-in diners with tons of services available.
This is the thing I like about Sam and Elon; they’re trying things, making
things, doing things. I can’t stand Elon on Twitter most of the time, but
he’s a lot more human and kind in interviews, and I love that he’s
creating.
MORE
YouTube is going after AI-generated content by requiring labels on videos
that might mislead viewers into thinking they’re real. The new policy will
apply to videos that are either altered by AI or entirely synthetic,
especially if they cover sensitive topics like elections or health.
MORE
|
MORE
|
MY PIECE ON AI INFLUENCE LEVEL
Google’s paying 36% of its search revenue from Safari to Apple, according to
recent court testimony. No wonder Apple’s ok with not doing their own search
engine. Seems to be working out pretty well for them.
MORE
Amazon has cut hundreds of jobs in the Alexa department. Not sure what that
means exactly, but I can tell you it doesn’t say good things for the
adoption of voice interfaces on smart speakers. It looks like Benedict Evans
continues to be right in our debate about how quickly voice interfaces would
be adopted. I argued they only had to get “so good”, and then they’d take
off. Perhaps they just haven’t hit that point yet.
MORE
HUMANS
Sweden is planning a ‘massive expansion’ of nuclear energy to secure energy
independence and combat climate change. The move includes constructing new
reactors and extending the life of existing ones.
MORE
Young Americans are increasingly siding with Palestinians over Israelis. A
new survey shows a 7-point drop in overall sympathy for Israel since
October, with only 54% of U.S. voters now more sympathetic to Israelis
compared to 61% previously. Among voters aged 18-34, sympathy for Israelis
has significantly shifted, with 52% now expressing more sympathy for
Palestinians, and a significant 66% disapproving of Israel’s response to
recent Hamas attacks.
MORE
Exxon Mobil is jumping into lithium production in Arkansas, eyeing the
booming electric vehicle battery market. I think this is extraordinarily
smart. It’s not just electric vehicles, but batteries in general are about
to be massively needed. What better way to hedge against oil’s decline? 4D
chess, these people.
MORE
|
MORE
Hate speech targeting Jews and Muslims has surged online, linked to the
Israel-Gaza conflict. Researchers found a significant increase in
antisemitic and anti-Muslim comments on platforms like Facebook and
Instagram, fueled by recent tensions.
MORE
|
MORE
Homeschooling is surging in the U.S. Experts originally thought it was just
a pandemic blip, but the Washington Post reports that homeschooling,
covering over 60% of school-age kids, continued to grow through the 2022-23
year. In my mind it comes down to the loss of trust in institutions. People
simply aren’t trusting the schools to teach kids what the parents believe.
MORE
👉 Continue online to avoid the email cutoff issue 👈
NOTES
I’m about to show you simply the coolest Vim Setup video ever created. Like
by a factor of 35X. Unspeakably brilliant. I’m like
inspired after watching this. Watch the video to love Vim more. To improve
your dotfiles. To get into Vim. To want to be an artist. To want to move to
Japan. To be a better person. Just watch the video. Trust me.
MORE
DISCOVERY
🔥⚒️ privateGPT — A tool for interacting with documents using GPT models
privately, without data leaks, even offline. | by
imartinez MORE
⚒️ Open-Source Threat Intel Feeds — A GitHub repo offering structured,
free-to-use threat intelligence feeds for better security monitoring. | by
Bert-JanP MORE
⚒️ Awesome-GPTs — A comprehensive list of GPT models on OpenAI, including a
specialized model for navigating and recommending GPTs based on user
queries.
MORE
⚒️ HackerArt GPT — A GPT by my buddy Joseph Thacker (rez0) that makes you
super cool hacker profile pics and art. | by
Rez0
|
MORE
⚒️ Screenshot-to-code — Turn screenshots into HTML and Tailwind CSS with AI,
using GPT-4 Vision and DALL-E 3 for image generation. | by
Abi Raja MORE
⚒️ CVE Watcher — A tool for spotting CVEs before patches are released,
helping you stay one step ahead of vulnerabilities
MORE
⚒️ Ahref — A tool for monitoring SEO health, understanding backlinks, and
analyzing traffic-driving keywords.
MORE
⚒️ Hallucination Leaderboard – tracks how often language models make stuff
up when summarizing text. | by
Vectara MORE
⚒️ ASCII-Gen — Turn your images into ASCII art with this Rust-based
command-line tool.
MORE
⚒️ Free Burp Collaborator — Learn how to set up your own Burp Collaborator
for free using Cloudflare Workers. | by Gabriel Schneider
MORE
🔎 AI Decision Making— Using ChatGPT with mental models like First
Principles Thinking, Second Order Thinking, and Regret Minimization
Framework to make better decisions.
MORE
Meta brings us a step closer to AI-generated movies
MORE
🎵Google’s new AI music creation tooling
MORE
|
MORE
Levels of AGI
MORE
How to Stop Spam Calls on iPhone
MORE
How to Keep Your Bank From Closing All Your Accounts
MORE
✍️ More people should write MORE
We don’t do DST at this company
MORE
🔥My favorite new developer / creator
MORE
People think white AI-generated faces are more real than actual photos
MORE
|
MORE
GPT-4’s Abstract Reasoning Gap
MORE
More Americans believe crime in US is becoming ‘extremely’ serious
MORE
Teens don’t want Android
MORE
TikTok is becoming a very popular news source
MORE
Melatonin Overuse in Kids?
MORE
Pesticides are being linked to infertility
MORE
The Discoverability Dilemma
MORE
The gang crisis in Sweden
MORE
iPhone is getting RCS, finally…
MORE
Sony Unveils Its Full-frame Global Shutter Offering — The Alpha 9 III
MORE
Amazon Now Sells Cars
MORE
RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK
The best Vim setup guide I’ve ever seen, but more than that—it’s the best
setup guide PERIOD that I’ve ever seen. It’s just a brilliant way to present
content, full stop.
MORE
APHORISM OF THE WEEK
❝
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the
children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the
long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or
nothing.
Hellen Keller
Thank you for reading.
UL is a personal and strange combination of security, tech, AI, and lots of
deeply human content. And because it’s so diverse, it’s harder for it to go
as viral as something more niche.
So if you know someone weird like us, please share it with them. 🫶
Share UL with someone like us…
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