SECURITY | AI | MEANING :: Unsupervised Learning is my continuous stream of original ideas, analysis, tooling, and mental models designed to help humans thrive in a world full of AI.
Hey there!
Wow, so much going on. And only a few weeks until Hacker Camp in Vegas.
Friend of UL, Ray Alner, is looking for a new position as a Systems Engineer. He has experience in DevOps, Cyber, leadership, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Also, on a personal note, Ray is one of UL’s smartest and kindest members, and someone should absolutely snatch him up before they miss out. REACH OUT TO RAY DIRECTLY
I’ve brought back the SECURITY, TECH, and HUMANS sections. I love the idea of just one section, but I found myself wanting to sort them to make it easier to read. Which means you were probably feeling that way too. Sorry. Fixed it.
I added new levels to the AGI definitions (4 and 5) within the RAID AI Definitions Resource. MORE
I feel like Apple Notes is my actual operating system, and macOS is just the window manager.
Ok, let’s get to it…
👉This is the big one! I’ve been thinking about and writing this one for months. There’s a high chance that this will be the most impactful project I ever create. READ THE ANNOUNCEMENT
Would really love for you check it out. And even better—get involved.
—
My new piece on Dynamic Content Summaries and how I think they’re going to be the way we view content in the future. MORE
Exploring the idea of Personal vs. Business brands, and which is better for different types of creator. MORE
Kaspersky Shuts Down U.S. Operations — Kaspersky is shutting down its business in the U.S. starting July 20, following sanctions and bans from the U.S. government. | MORE
AT&T says nearly all cellular customers and some landline users have had their data stolen, but now there’s an interesting twist being reported by Kim Zetter at Wired. Evidently AT&T paid a member of the hacking team nearly $300,000 to delete the only copy of all the data. | MORE
Russia is using AI-enhanced software called "Meliorator" to create fake online personas for disinformation campaigns. This tool helps manage these personas and spread false information through social media. | MORE
💡One of the things I’m most worried about from AI is the disinformation bots. Both the sheer number of them, but also their sophistication.
The better AI gets (and especially agent frameworks) the more it’s going to be like our enemies’ intelligence agencies now have millions of employees.
What used to be tens or hundreds of people creating campaigns—slowly, with lots of mistakes—will instead be millions of bots. And they’ll be making far fewer mistakes and adapting very quickly to new narratives and memes.
I think the internet is going to have to switch from a blocklist to an allowlist mentality. It’s just going to be too much to filter.
A new Exim vulnerability with a CVSS score of 9.1 allows attackers to bypass attachment extension blocking and deliver executables. Over 1.5M email servers are affected. | CVSS 9.1 | MORE
Google is now offering passkeys for high-risk users who join its Advanced Protection Program, replacing the previous requirement for a physical security key. | MORE
🤖 Excited about AI innovation? We are too.
As we gear up for Winter 2024/Spring 2025, we're opening our sponsorship window to companies innovating in Artificial Intelligence.
🚀 Join us in reaching over 94,000 of the sharpest minds in security and tech. Don't miss your chance to showcase your AI project or business to our specialized readership.
Connect now before this season’s sponsorship calendar fills up!
📧 Email us at [email protected] to discuss how we can spotlight your AI innovations in upcoming newsletters!
A new Exim vulnerability with a CVSS score of 9.1 allows attackers to bypass attachment extension blocking and deliver executables. Over 1.5M email servers are affected. | CVSS 9.1 | MORE
Foreign influence campaign analysis from US Intelligence:
Russia is backing Trump (I’m guessing because he’ll pull us out of Ukraine).
Iran is acting as a "chaos agent," in its influence campaigns, focusing on exploiting U.S. political and social tensions rather than backing a specific candidate.
China is mostly staying out of U.S. elections, seeing little benefit in influencing the outcome. They're more focused on data collection for future influence operations.
Sponsor
PODCAST: Bestselling author Dmitri Alperovitch’s Vision for Cyber Defense
GitLab has a critical flaw (CVE-2024-6385) in its CI/CD pipelines that lets attackers run pipelines as any user. Upgrade now. | CVSS 9.6 | MORE
Sponsor
ProjectDiscovery Cloud Platform Asset Discovery
For Organizations: Uncover your external attack surface and cloud assets with automatic asset enrichment and daily monitoring.
OpenAI’s AGI Levels — OpenAI has published their 5-tier ladder for AI progress. I’m honestly not a fan, other than Level 5. | MORE
💡I don’t see how they’re going from chatbots to human level reasoners, and then to agents, and then to innovators that can aid in invention. First, Level 2 and Level 4 are way too close, and both are already possible.
Then you have this really interesting jump at Level 5, to something that can do the work of an organization.
The problem is they’re mixing criteria. 1 is I don’t know what. Reasoners is about thinking quality. Agents is just an attribute: “can take action”. Innovators is just a descriptive output, i.e., “aids invention”.
Huh? Chatbots can aid invention. And that’s Level 1.
Then you have Level 5, which is actually about scale more than thinking quality.
The scale isn’t super useful, IMHO. I am not even perfectly happy with my own attempt, but at least it compares apples to apples.
AI Startups Raising $100M+ in 2024 — Here's the full list of 28 US AI startups that have raised $100M or more in 2024. | MORE
Anthropic has added new features to Claude that help automate prompt engineering. | MORE
💡I’m seeing a lot of my friends in AI switching to Claude over ChatGPT right now. Or more specifically, preferring Claude Aritifacts over ChatGPT, and Sonnet 3.5 over GPT-4o.
But it’s a leapfrog game. Soon we’ll have Opus 3.5, Llama 3.0 300B, and eventually GPT-5 (or whatever they call it).
2025 is going to be nuts, for multiple reasons.
New Fiber Speeds — A new fiber optic network transmits data at speeds above 400 terabytes per second, breaking the current record by nearly 33%. And this is on existing fiber, not some special new stuff. | MORE
YouTube Music Tests AI Playlists — YouTube Music is testing a new feature that lets you use AI to generate a playlist by describing what you want to hear. Premium users in the US can use a chat UI to enter descriptions like "catchy pop choruses" or "upbeat pop anthems." | by Emma Roth | MORE
There's a surge in delivery startups like Hailify, which pivoted from managing Uber and Lyft gigs to delivering thousands of parcels from China-based companies like Shein and Temu to U.S. shoppers. They see an opportunity to take market share from FedEx, USPS, and UPS. | by Ann Gehan | MORE
Why Women Are Disappearing From Tech — The percentage of venture deals for companies with female founders has dropped from 6.5% to 5.7% this year. Companies with at least one female co-founder are also seeing less funding, down from 27% to 16.6%. | by Jessica E. Lessin | MORE
Houston Is on a Path to an All-Out Power Crisis — For the 2.2 million people in Houston who lost power after Hurricane Beryl, the situation is dire. The city's power infrastructure is so fragile that even moderate storms are causing massive outages. And people are getting very angry. | MORE
Tour de France Riders Are Inhaling Carbon Monoxide — Multiple Tour de France teams are using carbon monoxide inhalation to enhance altitude training. This controversial practice involves inhaling a deadly gas to boost performance, and while it's not banned by WADA, it raises serious ethical and health concerns. | MORE
130 Million U.S. Adults Have Low Literacy Skills — Over half of Americans aged 16 to 74 read below a sixth-grade level, impacting their daily lives and families. | by Dr. Iris Feinberg | MORE
Colorado Poultry Workers Test Positive for Bird Flu — Three poultry workers in Colorado have tested presumptive positive for bird flu after an outbreak at a commercial egg facility. This virus has already killed over 6 million birds and is now infecting dairy cattle across the state. | MORE
Just 4 in 10k Galaxies May Host Intelligent Aliens — A new study suggests that intelligent alien life might be incredibly rare because it requires a planet with plate tectonics, oceans, and continents. Only about 0.003% to 0.2% of exoplanets meet these criteria, making the odds of finding such civilizations extremely low. | by Robert Stern and Taras Gerya | MORE
VCs Are Buying Medical Practices
I’ve got an doctor friend who’s been telling me about how venture capital is moving into medical practices. They’re coming in and doing what you would expect, which is looking for ways to make more money. Except they’re largely doing it unethically, i.e., by having the places sell stuff patients don’t need, request tests that are unnecessary, etc.
I feel like this is another example of like big investors buying up single-family homes and then renting them. Or storage spaces.
It’s like—the people with the money collect all the things, and then they can do whatever they want with them. And the purpose never seems to be to make things better. It’s always to make more money.
What am I missing? And if I’ve got this right, what are we to do about it? Capitalism is the best system we have, so this should be legal I think. But how do we keep the super-rich from just buying everything and making life worse for everyone else?
—
Most Conspiracies Come From Not Realizing How Often Things Fail | MORE
Therapy, Rumination, and Untying Knots | MORE
ffuf on Lambda — ffuf running on AWS Lambda and streamed to a web browser. | by defparam | MORE
Bullfrog — A Github Action that secures your workflows by controlling outbound network connections. You can define allowed IPs and domains or use audit mode to see all connections without blocking them. | by BullfrogSec | MORE
Everything You See Is a Computational Process, If You Know How to Look — Lance Fortnow argues that computation is everywhere if you know how to see it. He compares everyday processes like mailing a letter to computational operations and even describes randomness as a complex computational process. | by Lance Fortnow | MORE
The "Shaan Puri Emotion Eliciter" prompt lets you input your writing and get specific suggestions to make it more emotionally engaging. It maintains the original intent of your writing while enhancing it using each of the seven emotions. | by Moritz Kremb | MORE
As an Employee, You Are Disposable — The recent tech layoffs have shown that employees are disposable in the eyes of executives. It doesn’t matter if a company is profitable or not; layoffs can still happen, and executives continue to earn huge sums of money amidst these cuts. | by Nelson | MORE
You Never Control the Arc of Your Career — This piece dives into how career paths are often shaped by forces beyond our control, using Bruce Springsteen as an example. | by Michael Eaton | MORE
Smoking vs. Lung Cancer Deaths. MORE
Learning Multiple Concepts from a Single Image — Unsupervised Concept Extraction (UCE) is a new task that extracts and recreates multiple concepts from a single image without any human annotations. | by Shaozhe Hao et al | MORE
Change Detection in Satellite Imagery — This study addresses semantic change detection using satellite image time series (SITS-SCD) by integrating both change detection and semantic segmentation. | by Elliot Vincent, Jean Ponce and Mathieu Aubry | MORE
89 Things I Know About Git Commits — A collection of insights about Git commits gathered over 12 years of experience in both small teams and large Open Source projects. | by Jamie Tanna | MORE
Check on your friends you haven’t heard from in a while.
Send them a text. It’s free, and they will appreciate being thought of.
❝
In the age of infinite leverage, judgment is the most important skill.
Naval
Hey there,
If you’re not already, I’d love for you to become a member. 🫶🏻
Thank you,
-Daniel