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  • UL NO. 410: The Immigration/Identity Security Risk, Super Soldier Pentagon Talk, Okta&Me Updates, Teachable Agents

UL NO. 410: The Immigration/Identity Security Risk, Super Soldier Pentagon Talk, Okta&Me Updates, Teachable Agents

Meta bans AI-generated Political Ads, Google's new RETVec Anti-spam tool, a casual convo on Super Soldiers, and more…

Author

Daniel Miessler
December 04, 2023

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.

Greetings!

I’m settling into December and have been hacking on stuff like a fiend!

  • Improving the explanation of what you get when you sign up as a UL Member, and the UL Member portal for where you get it. A buddy basically said it wasn’t super clear what all came with it—like I didn’t hype it up enough and show all the benefits—which I agreed with after I looked at it, and I was already working on improving the portal. It’s better now!

  • Making progress on our main AI product, now with a completely new stack.

  • Building that project I teased about a few weeks back. It’s my first Go executable project, so it’s taking a bit. Super excited about it though!

  • I wrote a sick new AI tool that takes any video and provides a full set of transcripts and topics like this one for Mark Manson’s Convo With David Perell.

A sample from my new Chapters tool

If you know any YouTube creators who need auto-generated, high-quality chapter timestamps, please let me know. This normally takes hours of tedious work for a human, and it’s pretty hard to do well. REACH OUT IF YOU KNOW SOMEONE

  • Started a new RPGLit book, which is very RPTLit.

And I’m hyped to be seeing two friends this week that I’ve not seen in many months! I hope you’re into something good as well, but also trying to power down a bit for the holidays.

Let’s jump in!

MY WORK

Immigration and National/Racial Identity is Becoming the Top Global Security Issue
Starting off with a light topic, this new essay is about when culture wars create identity wars, and we get predictable results in the form of authoritarianism and atrocity. READ IT

SECURITY

Okta just revealed that the recent hack compromised data on all its support customers, meaning the ones who had contacted support and had been using that service. MORE | MORE 

The 23andMe breach also just expanded. They’re now saying it was “a significant number of files”, and it was genetic data as well. MORE

💡This is why I’m so skeptical whenever I hear, “But no ______ data was affected.” I’m always waiting for the other bodies to drop. I feel like we won’t know the actual impact for a number of months, so I consider all the initial updates to be preliminary. Same with LastPass, and countless others.

Meta and Google are calling out China for thousands of fake accounts spreading content across multiple platforms. Meta's report detailed the removal of 4,789 accounts posing as Americans, which later shifted to impersonating Indian profiles to spread disinformation about the Dalai Lama. MORE | META’S REPORT

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Meta's has outright banned AI-generated political ads. For all countries. Everywhere. The decision affects ads related to politics, elections, housing, employment, credit, social issues, health, pharmaceuticals, and financial services. MORE

Google's RETVec is Gmail's new tool to fight spam and malicious emails, using a multilingual text vectorizer that catches tricks like homoglyphs and typos. The integration of RETVec has boosted Gmail's spam detection by 38% and cut false positives by nearly 20%, while also slashing computational costs significantly. MORE | THE PROJECT

The USS Carney and commercial vessels were attacked with missiles by Houthi rebels in the Red Sea. Balsy. They downed 3 drones as part of the attacks. MORE

Vulnerabilities:

  • 🚨Chrome Zero-Day Patched — Google just released an emergency update for Chrome's fifth exploited zero-day this year. | CRITICAL | CVE-2023-6345 | MORE

  • 🚨Zyxel NAS Vulnerabilities — Zyxel's NAS devices have critical flaws allowing unauthenticated command execution. | CRITICAL | CVE-2023-4474 | CVSS Score: 9.8 MORE

Incidents:

  • ⚠️ North Texas Water Hit — North Texas Municipal Water District's systems, including phones, were disrupted by a cyberattack. | SEVERITY: HIGH | RESPONSE: The district has not yet disclosed any specific response measures. MORE

  • ⚠️ Dollar Tree Data Compromise — ZeroedIn's breach hit about 2 million people, including Dollar Tree and Family Dollar employees. | SEVERITY: HIGH | RESPONSE: ZeroedIn notified affected customers and may face a class action lawsuit. MORE

📖 Okta Threat Hunting Guide — Part 2 of the Okta Threat Hunting series is out, offering advanced techniques for log auditing. | by /u/Or1rez MORE

📺TALK: Prompt Injection Exploits, CONFERENCE: Ekoparty VIDEO

🧱PROJECT: RETVec: Gmail's New Shield MORE

There was a wild panel of military leaders called BLACK SWAN: DAWN OF THE SUPER SOLIDER (their caps). And the topic was basically all the different ways we are working to make people into super soldiers. Surreal since they’re so casual about the conversation, and I just showed my girl all the Bourne movies, which included the modified soldiers one. VIDEO | (Members) Check the #extractwisdom channel | GET ACCESS to the EXTWIS of the VIDEO

TECHNOLOGY

Sam Altman's back as OpenAI's CEO, and things seem to be settling down. Not sure what they’ll even do for Season 5 of the Sam Altman show. Microsoft also snagged a board observer seat. MORE | MORE | MORE

💡Analysis continues for exactly what happened, but I am still working under the theory that it was (basically) Accels vs. Doomers. And the Verge has Altman saying Q* was a leak (screenshot). All this keeping in mind that Sam isn’t pure Accel, and not everyone who thinks he should slow down is a Doomer. Still, I think that was (and continues to be) the primary dynamic. VERGE SCREENSHOT

An anonymous poll showed Google’s productivity is suffering, with 71% of software engineers working six hours or less daily and/or juggling multiple jobs without hitting a 40-hour week. How did Microsoft become sexy and Google has become stodgy? I think the answer is Satya. MORE

💡The other thing hurting Google is that they’re building products using a “throw it at the wall and hope it becomes another GMail” strategy, rather than building a Life Ecosystem Platform like Apple.

The Black Cabs in London are coming to Uber. Big win for Uber here. MORE

HUMANS

Ireland is experiencing major riots around immigration. A stabbing by someone who seems to be originally from Algeria spawned the riots, and far-right groups in the country are calling for civil war. Conor McGregor is in the fray as well, making a number of anti-immigration statements and calling for immigration change. People are also hoping he runs for office. MORE

The U.S. economy showed a 5.2% annualized increase in GDP, surpassing both the initial estimate of 4.9% and economists' revised predictions. Wait until all this AI-powered creation starts kicking in. MORE

💡Predicting AI-based GDP changes is really difficult, and not just because it’s about the future (lol). The issue is that AI both giveth and taketh away. It’s going to make everyone more productive, but also remove jobs. Many companies will go under because they’re replaced by AI offerings, but there will be a ton of new startups too. So how does that all net out? Nobody knows. My guess is we end up with way more productivity, but if a massive portion of the population loses their jobs, who’s going to buy all the new stuff? Will it just be the top 20% making stuff and selling it to the top 20%?

Bitcoin just passed $40,000, which is the highest it has been since April last year. People are asking if crypto is back now, but I’ve yet to see solid use cases that aren’t Bitcoin (alternate money storage), or get-rich schemes. MORE

Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince is reportedly driving a secret initiative to spike global oil demand, undermining climate action efforts. MORE

🔥Ozempic's rise is reshaping spending habits and could actually boost the economy. GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic are leading to less spending on food but more on lifestyle and fitness. This is something to watch closely. MORE

Extraordinary housing costs are forcing divorced couples to remain living together because they can't afford separate homes. This reminds me of bad job markets where people aren’t leaving a company because they can’t. And then when the economy improves you have a whole bunch of people resign. How many people are in relationships they don’t want to be simply because they don’t have the option to leave? MORE

China is building nuclear reactors faster than anyone. Also, missiles, ships, and pretty much everything else as well. Including infrastructure. They’re just winning at preparing for the future. All we do here is fight while they prepare for a post-US-dominated world. MORE

NOTES

A bit of vulnerability here: I’ve been slacking on my workout/exercise routine. A good amount of table tennis, but not enough walking and not enough weights. This is partially on purpose (relaxing a bit for December) but not really. I’m still eating well and getting tons done, but my energy levels would be even higher if I were on-plan! Do better, me.

DISCOVERY

⚒️AutoGen’sTeachable Agents — Like Autogen, and also from Microsoft, but as you talk to a given Agent it learns your responses and stores them in context for future conversations! MORE

🔬 Meditron LLM Release — Meditron's new open-source LLMs are trained on a vast medical corpus and outperform other models in medical tasks. MORE

🚀 Reaction Replaces Fail2ban — A new tool called Reaction aims to offer a more efficient alternative to fail2ban for server protection. | by xvello | MORE

🖥️ Yabai — A macOS utility that turns your desktop into a tiling window manager for better space management. | by koekeishiya MORE

📈 Say This Not That Chart — A handy reference for anyone looking to polish their professional communication. It's about choosing the right words at work. MORE

🗒️ SMART Goals Template — Ditch those vague aspirations. This template guides you to set Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound goals. MORE

Digital car keys are finally catching on. MORE

AI and the Rise of Mediocrity MORE

This guy created documentation for everything in his house. MORE

The Great Deshittification MORE

D&D is definitely back. MORE

Adobe bought Figma, and people aren’t happy. MORE

Lego-fy Yourself MORE

Why Life Doesn’t Really Exist MORE

A negative review of our UL Book Club book of the month. MORE

RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

If January is the time we think about the upcoming year, let December be your time to reach out to old friends. Here’s a text you can use for people you haven’t talked to in a while, but that you wish you had.

Hey there, just saying Hi. We never chat and that’s on me for not reaching out. I love you, and I hope you’re well. And I vow to send more texts until we’re annoyed or excited enough to get on the phone. 😀 

Copy that and spend like 10 minutes going through your contact list and sending it to the few dozen people who you care about and have lost contact with.

Some portion of those people could really benefit from hearing you right now, and they’re just a text away.

APHORISM OF THE WEEK

❝

The only way to have a friend is to be one.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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. 🫶 

Yours,