UL NO. 416: Tracking AI Agent Activity, 400 SF Cameras, AI Sleeper Agents…

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

TOC

• INTRO

• MY WORK

• TECHNOLOGY

• HUMANS

• IDEAS & ANALYSIS

• NOTES

• DISCOVERY

• RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

• APHORISM OF THE WEEK

INTRO

How are you?

Tons of stuff going on this week as plans for the year start to solidify.

• A number of paid talks are starting to fill in, with the earliest in
  February and the latest so far in October. Absolutely love the
  combination of getting the ideas out there,
  getting to travel domestically and internationally, and getting
  paid for it!

• I put out the bundle of loot for attendees of my AUGMENTED AI
  course on Friday.

• I uploaded a ton to my still unannounced project, and activity on it is
  already going strong. Cannot wait to fully launch this thing!

🔥I have a buddy looking for a Security SE position. Remote,
US-based. He’s a total and absolute gem.
He’s one of my mentors and the best SE I’ve ever seen in any field.
He not only learns any product instantly, but he
deeply understands the tech, the customer problem, and sales, so he
is insanely gifted at connecting what the customer needs to the product or
service in question.
Send me a quick note
if you or someone you know is looking for a superstar SE.
He will get snatched up quickly.
EMAIL HIM DIRECTLY

Ok, let’s go…

MY WORK

A Conversation with Jason Kikta from Automox

In this sponsored episode of Unsupervised Learning, we talked to Jason
Kikta. Jason is the CISO and Senior VP of Product at Automox, and our
conversation covered: – Endpoint Management – IT and Security Overlap –
Patching Strategies – Cloud-Based Solutions – Configuration Drift – Policy
Articulation – Automation and AI – IT Operations Challenges – Future Product
Features – and other topics.

omny.fm/shows/unsupervised-learning/a-conversation-with-jason-kikta-from-automox

Dark Visitors is a project that tracks AI agents doing various
shenanigans on the internet and offering the ability to block them via
robots.txt. HT to @securibee | by Dark Visitors | MORE

Super cool research on AI Sleeper Agents. Basically, agents that act cool
normally but wait for a particular stimuli or moment to become vulnerable or
take some other action.
MORE
|
THE PAPER

From the paper (click for PDF)

💡You know how open source was supposed to provide “many eyes” and keep us
safe? Well, benign AI agents will actually make that a reality. Auditing
code. Crawling content for malware traps. Sending strange input to systems
to try to trigger sleeper behavior, etc. The solution to malicious AI is, unfortunately, going to be benign AI
tasked with finding it.

OpenAI is now partnering with the Pentagon for some projects, reversing its
stance on military use of its AI. They are working on ‘a number of projects
including cybersecurity capabilities’ (Bloomberg), but they’re maintaining
their ‘no-weapons development’ policy.
MORE
|
MORE

Sponsor

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 go.automox.com/itops-report-2024

Download the report now

   

Scammers are now using AI to fake the voices of relatives in emergency
scams, tricking people into acting fast without adequate time to scrutinize.
The FBI has logged over 195 complaints about these “grandparent scams,” with
victims losing nearly $1.9 million from January to September 2023.
Tell your loved ones about these! MORE

China has been getting Nvidia chips despite a US ban that was meant to stop
that from happening. They’ve been going through smaller suppliers,
circumventing restrictions imposed in 2022 and 2023.
MORE

San Francisco is going heavy on surveillance, evidently. They just installed
400 license plate readers across the city as part of the Flock Safety camera
system. The police chief says it will help track down criminals, citing that
70% of crimes involve vehicles. I’m honestly for this kind of thing, despite
the fact that it’ll have downsides. I just want there to be proper use and
oversight.
MORE

Advisories

🚨Ivanti Directive Issued — U.S. federal agencies have been ordered to patch
a critical Ivanti software vulnerability. | CRITICAL |
MORE

⚠️ Cybercriminals are exploiting TeamViewer to launch ransomware attacks by
leveraging leaked LockBit builder tools. Huntress Labs’ analysis of
compromised endpoints revealed that attackers gained access through
TeamViewer, attempting to deploy ransomware via a DOS batch file.
MORE

Incidents

⚠️ UK Councils Cyberattack — Three UK councils are grappling with a cyber
incident that’s knocked public systems offline. | SEVERITY: HIGH | RESPONSE:
Systems isolated, no customer data breach found yet.
MORE

🚨 Chinese Espionage Campaign — Chinese hackers have been exploiting a
VMware vulnerability for two years undetected. | CRITICAL | CVE-2023-34048
MORE

Vulnerabilities

🪳 GitHub Key Rotation — GitHub just rotated critical keys due to a
high-severity vulnerability that exposed credentials. | HIGH | CVE-2024-0200
| CVSS Score: 7.2
MORE

🪳 Critical Vulnerabilities Patched — VMware and Atlassian have released
patches for newly disclosed critical vulnerabilities. | CRITICAL |
CVE-2023-22527, CVE-2023-34063 | CVSS Scores: 10, 9.9
MORE

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TECHNOLOGY

A recent study by Boston Consulting Group shows that consultants using
ChatGPT-4 significantly outperformed their AI-less peers in various tasks.
The experiment involved 758 consultants and found that those using AI
completed 12.2% more tasks, did so 25.1% faster, and produced 40% higher
quality results.
MORE

💡These are beginner numbers because this is all just starting. I think the
big change in hiring in tech—and companies in general—starting in the next
2-5 years will be
letting go of the bottom 75% of performers (or just not rehiring them
after attrition), and competing for the top 25%.

And within that group, the competition will be fierce for the top 1-10%
who are gods with AI. Why? Because when they’re augmented by even just
Copilot or ChatGPT they’ll be superhuman. But as agent frameworks start to
take over, they won’t be a Human + AI pair. They’ll be a Human + AI Team pair. And that AI team might be hundreds
or thousands of people behind a single person.

In other words, the competition for jobs, starting in the next few years
will be against a top 10% performer who’s backed by a farm of AI Agents,
which gives them the output of 10-1000X that of a non-augmented, normal
employee. It’s no competition. And this is who companies will still be
hiring. Everyone else, moving along the scale of competence over time, will be
increasingly unemployable.

Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI. Super cool project that
surveyed thousands of published authors on what they thought was coming in
AI, and when. I think they were far too conservative, which I think is due
to their academic bias. In other words,
they seem too safe and sane to creatively imagine how fast this stuff
could actually move. Which is also why so many academics were blindsided by November 2022.
Still, I think the paper set up the questions pretty well, and it’s still
interesting to see that many opinions in one place.
MORE

From the paper (click for PDF)

💡The hardcore academic “ML” types are the people I’ve seen be the most
wrong about AI and where it’s going. At least in my opinion; jury’s still
out of course. The problem is the disconnect between the culture of academia and the
insanity that is GenAI. Academics are high in rigor and caution, which is awesome for some
things, but it’s a hindrance if you’re trying to think big and crazy. And
big and crazy is what’s needed to play in the current game.

My recommendation is to think carefully about where you are, and where the people you follow
are, on the scale of Creativity←→Rigor.

Don’t listen much to people who are like “AGI is 10+ years away, if
ever.” Or, “What we have isn’t even real AI.” Or, “You can’t trust AI
because it literally just makes stuff up.” People saying such things in an
absolute sort of way are likely to either be low in OCEAN Openness and/or
an academic.

Don’t bring math to a poetry contest, and don’t bring pessimism to an art
contest.

Mark Zuckerberg has pivoted again. He was all about metaverse, and then he
kind of went the AR way with Lex on his podcast,
and now he’s all in on open-sourced AGI. He’s doing a massive
acquisition of Nvidia’s H100 GPUs, expecting to own over 340,000 by year’s
end. 2024 is going to be ridiculous.
MORE

ᴅᴀɴɪᴇʟ ᴍɪᴇssʟᴇʀ ☕️
@DanielMiessler

I agree whoever said we shouldn’t call a model open source if they only
release weights.

It’s not fully open unless you have the data and methodology as well.

Still, very cool.

VentureBeat @VentureBeat

Meta is all in on open source AGI, says Zuckerberg
venturebeat.com/ai/meta-is-all…

 

6:58 PM • Jan 18, 2024

  

8 Likes  
1 Retweet  

0 Replies

Google’s Circle to Search simplifies finding info on your phone by
letting you circle an item on-screen to instantly search for it. Can’t wait
for Apple and everyone else to copy this. Super cool.
MORE

Shining black light in public places (FAR-UV) could help prevent the spread
of airborne diseases, potentially reducing the likelihood and impact of
pandemics. Studies show that far-UV light can kill 99.9% of coronaviruses
and other pathogens in the air, offering a passive defense against a wide
range of respiratory viruses.
MORE

Wenquai
slashed their AI costs dramatically by optimizing Mixtral with GPT-4. They
managed to reduce their daily AI expenses from a steep $100 to less than a
dollar.
MORE

Apple finally passed Samsung in global smartphone sales last year. Despite a
general market decline, Apple’s shipments rose by 3.7 percent, while
Samsung’s dropped significantly by over 13 percent, contributing to Apple’s
lead. This is my surprised face.
MORE

HUMANS

The FDA just cleared DermaSensor, the first AI device that can detect all
major skin cancers, aiming to improve early diagnosis. The device, which
uses elastic scattering spectroscopy to analyze skin lesions, showed a 96%
true positive rate for detecting skin cancers in a clinical trial.
MORE

The self-checkout trend is hitting a wall as stores like Walmart and Target
scale back or ditch the machines after facing increased theft and higher
labor costs. Dollar General’s CEO admitted they’ve over-relied on the tech,
and now plan to boost staff numbers at checkouts.
MORE

💡I find it fascinating how sometimes tech and various movements try to
jump too far ahead, too quickly, and then get pulled back. Sometimes only
for a second, and sometimes for a long time. Work from home.
Self-checkout. AI?

South Korea just rolled out a new visa for digital nomads, aiming to attract
remote workers and boost its economy. The visa allows foreign residents to
stay for up to two years, provided they earn over $65,860 annually and have
comprehensive health insurance.
MORE

Germany is doing something similar. They made it easier to get citizenship,
aiming to attract global talent to fill job shortages. The new law reduces
the residency requirement for naturalization from eight to five years and
opens dual citizenship to all, not just EU and Swiss nationals.
MORE

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IDEAS & ANALYSIS

Everyone Should be a Thinker
One of my core beliefs is that it’s
a stain on humanity that only certain people are considered to have thoughts
worth sharing. I know this is just because we’re a young species, and it
takes time to advance as creatures, and as a civilization. I get that. But
it’s weird how civilizational retardation like this is considered normal
while you’re living in it.

If you ask the average person what they think about the most important
things in the world, like how to self-govern, free will, moral
responsibility, the nature of reality, etc., they’ll blush and smile and
make some sort of self-deprecating gesture. “That’s for the smart people to
think about.” They think it’s for special people, like public intellectuals,
people who write books or go on TV. It’s a travesty.

Human civilization will reach some modicum of advancement when it’s expected
that every human on the planet is educated and empowered enough to not only
have their own thoughts, but to believe those thoughts to be worthy of
sharing. The fact that the percentage of people who believe that today is
likely some obscene fraction of 1% should embarrass us all.

NOTES

I’ll be camping for the Apple Vision Pro at the Burlingame store on February
1st. I normally camp in the summer, so February will be a different
experience for sure. If you’re insane like me, come say what’s up.

Loving this Classical album,
Pamart: PLANET GOLD, and I’m sadly not much of a Classical person.
MORE

DISCOVERY

🔥Moving from a Knowledge Economy to an Allocation Economy. MORE

You won’t be judged on how much you know, but instead on how well you can
allocate and manage the resources to get work done. 

  Dan Shipper

🛠️Galah: an LLM-powered web honeypot using the OpenAI API | by
Adel Karimi
|
MORE

🐞 Pfuzz — A Unix-style web fuzzer for finding security vulnerabilities. |
MORE

🛠️ LAST – Scans code for security issues using OpenAI from the command line.
| by
Latio Tech
|
MORE

🔍 aifs — An AI filesystem tool for easy local semantic search. | by KillianLucas | MORE

Culture Change at Google (The Employee Isn’t First Anymore)
MORE

Navigating American healthcare might not require insurance, as paying cash
can sometimes be cheaper and more flexible.
MORE

How People Left Twitter, and How It’s Going
MORE

Powerful DALLE-3 Art Prompts
MORE

Midjourney V6 Caricatures | by
Allen T
|
MORE

🛠️ TweetFeed’s return for the latest Indicators of Compromise shared by the
infosec community by
Daniel López
|
MORE

A Search for More ChatGPT/GOT-3.5/GPT-4 “Unspeakable” Glitch Tokens by
MORE

Top Hacker News Books of 2023
MORE

RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

Here’s a cool heuristic for gauging your own happiness.

Pay close attention to how the success of your friends makes you feel. Not intellectually, but viscerally. Immediately. Within 1 second of
seeing evidence that they’re crushing it.

If it makes you smile uncontrollably, fist pump, and want to text them and
hype them up, that means you’re healthy. Congrats.

If it stings, gives you a sinking feeling, or makes you angry…I recommend
you talk to a therapist. This will destroy not just your relationships, but
your life in general. It’s actual poison.

APHORISM OF THE WEEK

❝  

The language of friendship is not words, but meanings.

—

  Henry David Thoreau  

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…

Yours,