Tell me something only the real you would know

from here and here

Well this is disturbing. You increasingly can't trust phone calls from loved ones in financial distress because scammers are mimicking their voices with AI. Imagine having to authenticate your child or grandchild on the worst day of their life.

Beware the knights of Scamalot

from here and here

The Queen is dead and that's just the kind of thing criminals love to latch on to in order to trick people into clicking on things. Don't fall for it. If you really want details, do a search and get them from reputable news sources that hopefully won't be serving any malware.

We're never going to have trustworthy computing at this rate

from here and here

Not that I trust Microsoft's vision of "trustworthy computing", but people have been sounding the alarm about office macro malware literally since the macro feature was invented. To have macros finally disabled after all these years and then almost immediately re-enabled again is a huge disappointment.

Crypto Winter's silver lining

from here and here

With cryptocurrency prices plummeting it's no longer economical to use video cards for mining, so the prices for the cards are dropping too because of the decline in demand. That's good news for gamers, and video card makers no longer need to deal with the market for their products being subverted by some decentralized finance nonsense.

One of these days

from here and here

The thing about being a doom-sayer is, if you leave your predictions open-ended enough then you're never really wrong and you only need to be right once.

As predictable as the seasons

from here

I've seen enough bitcoin 'give-aways' to know where this is going. These days most bitcoin give-aways are scams. Even if this one is legit, there are going to be so many fraudulent variations that people won't know which is the real one.

It may be that life imitates art, but business should know better than to imitate fraud. Free money usually falls under the heading of too good to be true, but this is going to lend an air of credibility to the concept and people are going to get burned as a result.

This isn't even it's final form

from here

It's bad enough when individual neighbors have surveillance gear pointed every which way, it's so much worse when they're all linked together without anyone's consent.

Only America gets to have backdoors

from here

I may be dating myself here, but back in the day Oracle tried to market their software as "unbreakable". I don't think I need to tell you how that worked out for them. Now they're going to be looking for problems in someone else's code - good luck with that. Hopefully it works out better this time.

Of course the aim is to prevent Chinese backdoors, and this was all prompted by a government that keeps trying to add backdoors to things (they're obsessed with the back door, it seems). It all seems very self-serving, to be honest.

Like the Adobe Acrobat of content management systems

from here

When I look at blogging platforms, somehow it seems that the one everyone uses is the one that's always getting exploited. It makes you wonder why people continue to use it when stuff like this keeps happening.

I think I'd prefer a Nigerian prince

from here

If you had to choose between dealing with royalty or some pedophile's lackey, which would you choose?

What's the worst thing they could change the license plate to?

from here

It's one thing to stick a computer into an appliance (maybe the computer can make the appliance function better?), but sticking a computer into something that used to just be a hunk of metal with a code painted on it? Digital license plates feel like the Internet of Things (which is already questionable as it is) jumping the shark.

It's always coming

found on Make A Meme

Even when it gets here there's another one coming. It never ends.

Who'll be the dumb zucks this time?

from here

So Mr. "They Trust Me - Dumb Fucks" wants you to give him your cash in exchange for cryptographic funny money you can use to make financial transactions over WhatsApp.

That's a big NOPE from me.

I thought mono only made people sick

from here

Now I realize Mono isn't the malware here. It's a legitimate platform that enables a certain degree cross platform functionality. You know what also allowed things to be cross platform? Java - and look how that turned out. Java is notorious for being a vector of attack.

Even without the never-ending stream of vulnerabilities that came with Java, the simple act of allowing executables from a highly targeted platform (Windows) run on one whose defensive ecosystem isn't nearly as well developed is just asking for trouble. Especially now that the cat is out of the bag.

Don't call me, maybe

from here

So apparently there's a bug in Facetime that lets people calling you hear what's going on on your end before you even answer the call. Ooops! Apparently Apple has already temporarily disabled Group Facetime in order to stop people from exploiting this vulnerability while they prepare a fix, but the script kiddies are still going to try it because word of the vulnerability will almost certainly spread farther and faster than word of Apple neutering it.

Crooks will be giving thanks all the way to the bank

found on Make A Meme

Some will even say the blockchain can fix it

from here

The security industry has it's share of ambulance chasers, and the ambulance of the day is supply chain risks, thanks to a report by Bloomberg News. Are there real risks associated with supply chains? Sure, but actual incidents of compromise by supply chain attacks are pretty rare, even if you assume what Bloomberg reported is true (and we don't know that yet).

TL;DR for GDPR

from here

I've already received a number of these and I'm expecting more real soon now.

You know the rules and so do I

from here

And the rule is, if you find a security vulnerability that allows you to Rick Roll people in a new and unusual way, you do it.

At first I was like "I hope I'm not giving anybody ideas" but then I watched the video embedded in this Wired story and discovered that the original researcher has already done this, so if miscreants start playing this prank it's that guy's fault (because he knows the rules too).

The problem with #DeleteFacebook

from here

I don't think I'm giving anyone any new ideas here. Squatting on established names/pseudonyms/etc. is a thing that's been going on for many years, but a movement to abandon Facebook is going to open up a lot of opportunities for fraud all at once.

I get that people are fed up with Facebook, but it's not the size of their user database that makes them money, it's users who are actually actively using the service. If you want to deny them the ability to use your data, there isn't much you can do about the data you've already given them but you can certainly stop giving them anything new by simply not using the service anymore or if you like by disabling (rather than deleting) your account.