UL NO. 446: AI Ecosystem Components, MS 0-Days, Iranian Campaign Hacks…

SECURITY | AI | MEANING
:: Unsupervised Learning is a stream of original ideas, story analysis,
tooling, and mental models designed to
help humans lead successful and meaningful lives in a world full of
AI.

TOC

• NOTES

• MY WORK

• SECURITY

• AI / TECH

• HUMANS

• IDEAS

• DISCOVERY

• RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

• APHORISM OF THE WEEK

NOTES

Hey!

Few things here to start out:

• All better from being sick. Was quite minor. Would not even have known I
  was sick if not for testing.

• We migrated Fabric to Go! It’s now easier to install, upgrade, and it’s
  way faster.
  INSTALL/MIGRATE

• Joe Rogan had Peter Thiel on the podcast, and it was a brilliant
  conversation. One of the best podcasts of that type in months.
  MORE

• I bought one of those mini-libraries to put in my neighborhood. Love the
  idea of sharing books with the local community!

Ok, let’s go…

Continue reading online to avoid the email cutoff…

MY WORK

My new essay on the 4 components (not just the model weights!) that will
decide who wins out of OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, or Google.

The 4 Components of Top AI Model Ecosystems

The four things I think will determine who wins the AI Model Wars

danielmiessler.com/p/ai-model-ecosystem-4-components

A short essay on what I see as the root of a lot of “LLMs can’t reason”
arguments.

The Link Between Free Will and LLM Denial

Denying the specialness of LLMs seems tied to over-believing in the
specialness of humans.

danielmiessler.com/p/free-will-llms

SECURITY

Microsoft just released patches for 90 security flaws, including 10
zero-days, with six of those being actively exploited. Notable
vulnerabilities include CVE-2024-38189 (RCE in Microsoft Project),
CVE-2024-38178 (memory corruption in Windows Scripting Engine), and
CVE-2024-38213 (SmartScreen bypass).
MORE

Russian cyberspies from the FSB, along with a new group called
COLDWASTREL, have been running a massive phishing campaign dubbed “River
of Phish” targeting US and European entities since 2022. The campaign aims
to steal credentials and 2FA tokens from high-risk individuals, NGOs,
media outlets, and government officials. MORE

The Pentagon is planning to flood the Taiwan Strait with thousands of
drones in the event of a Chinese invasion. US Indo-Pacific Command chief
Admiral Samuel Paparo described the strategy as creating an “unmanned
hellscape” to delay Chinese forces and buy time for US and allied
reinforcements. Weird that we just tell people our strategies like this,
though. MORE

Sponsor

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Dropzone.ai is the the only company I’ve seen that has truly nailed the agent-driven approach to investigations. Or really Agents used in a cyber workflow.

What they do is take alerts that come from tools like PAN, and they
start autonomously investigating them, just like a human analyst.
This is where this is all going, and they’re the best I’ve seen. So much
so that I’m now an advisor for them!!

By the way, if you’re interested in where this is all headed, check out
this article
on how Gartner just canceled SOAR. It’s a clear signal that companies like
Dropzone are where things are going.

dropzone.ai/request-a-demo

Request a Demo

   

Jeff Sims has published a timeline of his research on offensive AI
agents, detailing the development of three distinct types of offensive AI
systems. MORE

SolarWinds has patched a critical deserialization vulnerability
(CVE-2024-28986, CVSS 9.8) in its Web Help Desk software that could allow
remote code execution. The flaw affects all versions up to 12.8.3 and has
been fixed in hotfix 12.8.3 HF 1. MORE

Iranian banks have been hit by a massive cyber attack, reportedly one of
the largest in the country’s history. Seems likely tied to Israel/Iran
tensions. MORE

Trump shared a fake image of Harris speaking at a Communist event. This one
looks fairly fake, but 1) lots of people will still believe it’s real, and
2) current tech can already make more believable ones. We’re actually at the
point I talked about here:

Iranian hacker group APT42 has targeted both Trump and Biden campaigns,
according to Google’s Threat Analysis Group. The group, believed to be
working for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, targeted both campaigns, but
only Trump’s campaign appears to have had sensitive files leaked to the
press, which is quite curious.
MORE

Trump corroborated this by pointing the finger at Iran for hacking his
presidential campaign, praising the FBI’s investigation into the breach. He
mentioned that the FBI is handling it professionally and reiterated multiple
times that Iran was behind it, though he didn’t share specific details from
the agency.
MORE

Sponsor

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Discover Assets Today

   

China-linked cyber-spies have infected dozens of Russian government and IT
sector computers with backdoors and trojans since late July, according to
Kaspersky. The attacks, dubbed EastWind, are linked to APT27 and APT31,
using phishing emails and cloud services like GitHub, Dropbox, and Quora for
command-and-control.
MORE

Scammers are targeting young Chinese job seekers in a tough economy,
exploiting their desperation by offering fake job opportunities.
MORE
|
Comments

Continue reading online to avoid the email cutoff…

AI / TECH

xAI’s Grok chatbot now lets users create images from text prompts and
publish them to X, leading to chaotic results like Barack Obama doing
cocaine and Donald Trump in a Nazi uniform. Really curious if this is going
to get nerfed or not. Elon replied to one that had him pregnant standing
next to Trump, and he replied, “Live by the sword, die by the sword.”
MORE

Alex Wieckowski is on a mission to make you fall in love with reading
again—and he thinks AI can help. In this episode, Alex shares how he uses AI
tools like ChatGPT to recommend books, understand deeper themes in novels
like Hermann Hesse’s “Siddhartha,” and create actionable strategies from
business books like Alex Hormozi’s “$100M Offers.”
MORE

Comedians are increasingly using AI to help write jokes and brainstorm
ideas, with mixed results. I think this is similar to the Turing Test in
terms of the importance of AI progress. If AI can write a full set of comedy
and make humans laugh, that’s f*cking huge.
MORE

San Francisco is looking to ban software that critics claim is being used to
artificially inflate rents. The software in question allegedly helps
landlords coordinate rent increases.
MORE

You might be overusing Vim visual mode. This post argues that many Vim users
rely too heavily on visual mode (I think I’m one of them), which can often
be replaced with more efficient normal mode commands. Examples include using
gg"+yG instead of ggVG"+y to copy a whole file and
dk instead of Vkd to delete the current and
previous lines.
MORE

HUMANS

Some California residents will soon be able to add their driver’s licenses
and state IDs to Apple Wallet as part of a pilot program launching this
fall. The program will allow 1.5 million participants to use mobile IDs for
TSA screening at LAX and SFO.
MORE

China’s manufacturers are facing a financial crisis, with many going
bankrupt due to a combination of weak demand, rising costs, and increased
competition.
MORE

Scientists at Fermilab have detected the first neutrinos using a prototype
detector for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE).
MORE

Venture capitalists aren’t looking for nice founders; they want risk-takers.
Nate Silver highlights that 70% of the billionaires on the 2023 Forbes 400
list are self-made, often coming from modest backgrounds.
MORE

There’s a growing trend of Gen Z men becoming NEETs (Not in Employment,
Education, or Training), with one in five young men under 25 unemployed and
not actively looking for work.
MORE

“Slow is smooth, smooth is fast” is a mantra deeply ingrained in Navy SEAL
operations, emphasizing precision over haste. This principle helps SEALs
execute high-stakes missions with minimal errors, as seen in Operation
Neptune Spear.
MORE

No one wants kids anymore, and it’s not just you. This video dives into the
reasons behind the declining birth rates, touching on economic pressures,
changing societal values, and personal choices.
MORE

Imposter syndrome often stems from systemic biases, not just self-doubt.
Harvard Business Review highlights that many women experience this due to
real exclusionary practices.
MORE

This guy got fired and replaced by AI at Cosmos Magazine, and the management
didn’t tell anyone. They are using generative AI to write articles, possibly
trained on their own authors’ work.
MORE

I gave my kids a summer like mine in the 1980s – This parent decided to give
her 10 and 5-year-old daughters a taste of a 1980s summer holiday, where
boredom was common and self-entertainment was key.
MORE

IDEAS

Here are a few ideas I’ve had recently that I haven’t written essays for
yet.

The Ultimate Privilege
I think the ultimate privilege might be
growing up in a stable household with two parents who give you a strong work
ethic.

It trips me out how simple this is, and how the best advice is often like
this. It’s the same with diet, exercise, relationships, and a million other
things. The best advice is concise, wise, and generally hard to do.
But it’s not a mystery.

I think the US—and the world—should lock in on this one thing:
stable two-parent households that imbue a strong work ethic—and focus
a lot of energy on getting to 100% on that metric.

—

ᴅᴀɴɪᴇʟ ᴍɪᴇssʟᴇʀ ⚙️
@DanielMiessler

The biggest market opening right now is for a product/platform that
validates the authenticity of content coming from a creator or
publisher.

All the providers of content are going to have to work with the
providers of computing platforms to produce a signing and UX standard.

 

10:14 PM • Aug 14, 2024

  

9 Likes  
3 Retweets  

2 Replies

ᴅᴀɴɪᴇʟ ᴍɪᴇssʟᴇʀ ⚙️
@DanielMiessler

I used to think there was a big difference between somebody being weak
and somebody being evil.

I now treat them mostly the same because the outcomes they manifest are
mostly the same.

The only difference is that with a weak person I can try to make them
strong.

 

5:17 PM • Aug 18, 2024

  

26 Likes  
3 Retweets  

4 Replies

DISCOVERY

🔥Fabric + Raycast — Will Chen shows how to integrate Fabric into Raycast!
Very cool. I’m adding this myself, forcing me to switch back to Raycast. In
fact, I think I might integrate it more deeply by hosting a set of these
scripts within Fabric, so you can just point Raycast to that directory!
MORE

Eric Schmidt of Google did a crazy honest interview at Stanford and it was
so spicy that Stanford took it down. Here’s the video and transcript.
VIDEO
|
TRANSCRIPT
|
FABRIC SUMMARY

The Ideal Founding Team — Ben Horowitz lays out the perfect founding team in
the clearest way I’ve ever seen.
MORE

Scrape-it-now — A new CLI tool designed for AI-driven web scraping that
ensures idempotency.
MORE

Grok 2 — xAI has released Grok 2, a frontier class model capable of
reasoning, coding, and mathematics. It also brings FLUX to X users in
collaboration with Black Forest Labs.
MORE

Prompt Caching With Claude — Anthropic has introduced prompt caching for its
Claude models, allowing developers to cache frequently used context. Coming
to Fabric soon!
MORE

Flux AI — By Black Forest Labs,
Flux.ai
is a new open-source AI image generation tool that runs on consumer-grade
laptops. It excels in rendering people and prompt adherence, outperforming
competitors like Midjourney in some aspects.
MORE

GraphicInfo – A new website lets you generate infographics to make your
articles more engaging.
MORE

“Agile Is for Losers” is a rant about the author’s decade-long frustrations
with the Agile methodology infiltrating digital agencies.
MORE

RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

Stop accepting it when your loved ones—especially the young ones—are not
AI-literate. Here’s the way to think about this…

Imagine that the competition level for getting top jobs, mates, whatever—was
at 100 in 2022. And the average person was at like an 80.

Well, AI is Augmentation technology. It adds 20-50 points to people
who get good at it. So now that person with an 85 learns AI and they’re a
125.

The new standard is now reset to 120.

So if you were a 90 before, or a 110, you’re now behind.

Don’t let your people get left behind. AI is the new reading. It’s the new
high school diploma. It’s the new degree.

Make sure the people you love have it.

(And just to show you how real this is, and get you motivated—here’s an
8-year-old doing some live coding)
MORE

APHORISM OF THE WEEK

❝  

Standing still in evolution is equivalent to moving backwards.

  Matt Ridley

Become a Member to Augment yourself