New substack that's worth your time

Randal emails to point out that he's started a Substack.  It's pretty interesting.  Here's an example about trade unions:

For the longest time much of the media has fed us the idea that “union = overpaid/lazy/bad”. Now we should all have the following ingrained in our skulls by now, “the media lies”.

Proceeding from that “law” (it really should be a scientific law at this point) we can deduce that the media is lying about unions. The real question to ask ourselves is, “why?”

Like I said, pretty interesting.

 

CMP Update

Ever want to be an M1 Garand armorer?  The CMP might be able to help out:

Designed for those who wish to take their passion for the venerable M1 Garand to the next level, the Advanced Maintenance Class (AMC) held in Anniston, Alabama, offers students a unique opportunity to receive unparalleled training from our knowledgeable Custom Shop Staff and build their very own M1 Rifle.

RANDOM DRAWING ENTRY WINDOW AND PROCESS 

Due to limited spaces and high demand, CMP will hold a random drawing to select participants. Interested individuals may enter the Random Drawing between November 1, 2024 and December 31, 2024.

If this is your bag, baby, then get on over there.

 

Dad Joke CCCXLV

No matter how kind you are, German children are kinder.

Spasiba, tovarisch!

Wow:

Four members of the now-defunct REvil ransomware operation have been sentenced to several years in prison in Russia, marking one of the rare instances where cybercriminals from the country have been convicted of hacking and money laundering charges.

Russian news publication Kommersant reported that a court in St. Petersburg found Artem Zaets, Alexei Malozemov, Daniil Puzyrevsky, and Ruslan Khansvyarov guilty of illegal circulation of means of payment. Puzyrevsky and Khansvyarov have also been found guilty of using and distributing malware.

...

REvil, which was once one of the most prolific ransomware groups, was dismantled after Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) announced arrests against several members in an unprecedented takedown. 

They aren't just going to prison, they're going to a Russian prison.  More of this, please.

 

 

What's Donald Trump's carry piece?

Lawrence has the details.

Someone at Netflix is getting fired

So their live streaming of the Mike Tyson fight last night was an unmitigated disaster.  But come on - you'd think that Netflix IT would understand how to spin up capacity to meet demand.  Maybe their replacements will.

For those who like the Sweet Science (or who used to), this is a fascinating episode from Hard Core History about how boxing has changed over time, mostly for the worse.  Dan Carlin interviews Mike Silver, author of The Arc of Boxing which is a terrific read.  I'm in general agreement with both the podcast and the book, although have to admit that I quite enjoyed the Barrios/Ramos bout last night.  It had a very Friday Night Fights feel to it.

The good security news keeps rolling in

I don't remember a week of such good security news:

A 25-year-old man in Ontario, Canada has been arrested for allegedly stealing data from and extorting more than 160 companies that used the cloud data service Snowflake.

On October 30, Canadian authorities arrested Alexander Moucka, a.k.a. Connor Riley Moucka of Kitchener, Ontario, on a provisional arrest warrant from the United States. Bloomberg first reported Moucka’s alleged ties to the Snowflake hacks on Monday.

...

In a statement on Moucka’s arrest, Mandiant said UNC5537 aka Alexander ‘Connor’ Moucka has proven to be one of the most consequential threat actors of 2024.

 Too bad we can't send him to a Russian prison, nyet?

AI failures in healthcare

Oh my word:

On Saturday, an Associated Press investigation revealed that OpenAI's Whisper transcription tool creates fabricated text in medical and business settings despite warnings against such use. The AP interviewed more than 12 software engineers, developers, and researchers who found the model regularly invents text that speakers never said, a phenomenon often called a "confabulation" or "hallucination" in the AI field.

Upon its release in 2022, OpenAI claimed that Whisper approached "human level robustness" in audio transcription accuracy. However, a University of Michigan researcher told the AP that Whisper created false text in 80 percent of public meeting transcripts examined. Another developer, unnamed in the AP report, claimed to have found invented content in almost all of his 26,000 test transcriptions.

Of course, they use it because it's cheaper than paying a human transcriber.  So riddle me this, Healthcare Administrator: what do you call yet another AI that lies all the time?  A day that ends in "-day".

And people have started noticing:

While the vast majority of people over 50 look for health information on the internet, a new poll shows 74% would have very little or no trust in such information if it were generated by artificial intelligence.

Meanwhile, 20% of older adults have little or no confidence that they could spot misinformation about a health topic if they came across it.

That percentage was even higher among older adults who say their mental health, physical health or memory is fair or poor, and among those who report having a disability that limits their activities. In other words, those who might need trustworthy health information the most were more likely to say they had little or no confidence they could spot false information.

People are smart enough to catch a whiff of marketing Bravo Sierra.

From now on I will start asking all of my healthcare providers if they do transcription, and if so whether they use AI for the transcription.  If they do I will demand to review the transcript.  If they won't, I'll get a different provider.