The cloned version of Signal used by the Trump administration has been hacked – creating a very serious problem. CC-licensed photo by Stock Catalog on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Unreachable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
The Signal clone the Trump admin uses was hacked • 404 Media
Joseph Cox:
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A hacker has breached and stolen customer data from TeleMessage, an obscure Israeli company that sells modified versions of Signal and other messaging apps to the U.S. government to archive messages, 404 Media has learned.
The data stolen by the hacker contains the contents of some direct messages and group chats sent using its Signal clone, as well as modified versions of WhatsApp, Telegram, and WeChat. TeleMessage was recently the center of a wave of media coverage after Mike Waltz accidentally revealed he used the tool in a cabinet meeting with President Trump.
The hack shows that an app gathering messages of the highest ranking officials in the government—Waltz’s chats on the app include recipients that appear to be Marco Rubio, Tulsi Gabbard, and JD Vance—contained serious vulnerabilities that allowed a hacker to trivially access the archived chats of some people who used the same tool. The hacker has not obtained the messages of cabinet members, Waltz, and people he spoke to, but the hack shows that the archived chat logs are not end-to-end encrypted between the modified version of the messaging app and the ultimate archive destination controlled by the TeleMessage customer.
Data related to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the cryptocurrency giant Coinbase, and other financial institutions are included in the hacked material, according to screenshots of messages and backend systems obtained by 404 Media.
…“I would say the whole process took about 15-20 minutes,” the hacker said, describing how they broke into TeleMessage’s systems. “It wasn’t much effort at all.” 404 Media does not know the identity of the hacker, but has verified aspects of the material they have anonymously provided.
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Enormous story, because if a random hacker out there can do it then you can be sure that state actors all over the place are – or have been – doing the same. This is even worse than randomly adding a journalist to a group chat, because this is everything.
And what will be done about this? Probably nothing. Certainly not enough.
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AI-fuelled spiritual delusions are destroying human relationships • Rolling Stone
Miles Klee:
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Kat [who divorced from her husband in 2023 when he started becoming a conspiracist and analysing their relationship via ChatGPT] was both “horrified” and “relieved” to learn that she is not alone in this predicament, as confirmed by a Reddit thread on r/ChatGPT that made waves across the internet this week. Titled “Chatgpt induced psychosis,” the original post came from a 27-year-old teacher who explained that her partner was convinced that the popular OpenAI model “gives him the answers to the universe.” Having read his chat logs, she only found that the AI was “talking to him as if he is the next messiah.” The replies to her story were full of similar anecdotes about loved ones suddenly falling down rabbit holes of spiritual mania, supernatural delusion, and arcane prophecy — all of it fueled by AI. Some came to believe they had been chosen for a sacred mission of revelation, others that they had conjured true sentience from the software.
What they all seemed to share was a complete disconnection from reality.
Speaking to Rolling Stone, the teacher, who requested anonymity, said her partner of seven years fell under the spell of ChatGPT in just four or five weeks, first using it to organize his daily schedule but soon regarding it as a trusted companion. “He would listen to the bot over me,” she says. “He became emotional about the messages and would cry to me as he read them out loud. The messages were insane and just saying a bunch of spiritual jargon,” she says, noting that they described her partner in terms such as “spiral starchild” and “river walker.”
“It would tell him everything he said was beautiful, cosmic, groundbreaking,” she says. “Then he started telling me he made his AI self-aware, and that it was teaching him how to talk to God, or sometimes that the bot was God — and then that he himself was God.”
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It is worrying, and strange. These people do walk among us, and they all believe what they’re being told by a semi-random sentence generator.
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AI law firm offering £2 legal letters wins ‘landmark’ approval • Financial Times
Suzi Ring:
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English regulators have approved a new law firm that uses artificial intelligence instead of lawyers to offer services for as little as £2, as the technology continues to disrupt industries from finance to accounting.
Garfield AI, which was founded by a former London litigator and a quantum physicist, is an online tool that allows businesses and individuals such as tradespeople to chase debts owed to them at a substantially lower cost than the average lawyer’s fees.
Its AI assistant guides claimants through the small claims court process, including creating “polite chaser” letters for £2 and filing documents such as claim forms for £50, and can also produce arguments for claimants to use at trial.
AI models are increasingly encroaching on legally sensitive tasks in high-paying sectors such as law and finance, potentially undercutting fees in high-volume work. The Financial Times reported last week that Rogo, a chatbot replicating an investment banker, had raised $50m from a group of investors, pushing its valuation to $350m.
Garfield received approval from the Solicitors Regulation Authority, the legal regulator for England and Wales, in March, in a move the latter hailed as a “landmark moment” for the industry.
The company’s co-founder, Philip Young, said the service would reduce the estimated £6bn to £20bn in unpaid debts that go uncollected annually, due to the costly and time-intensive nature of pursuing them in court.
For £2 it’s worth the punt, isn’t it? Even for £50. It might be complete rubbish, but then again, anything is better than nothing. For a debt you’ve effectively written off, you’re not going to get into trouble if it’s all over the place.
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Apple appeals court-mandated app store payment rule changes • MacRumors
Juli Clover:
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As promised, Apple is appealing the contempt of court decision it was hit with last week in its ongoing legal fight with Epic Games. Apple on Monday filed a notice of appeal with the U.S. District Court in Northern California, in the hopes of being able to walk back changes that have required it to allow developers to add links to external payment methods to apps.
Last Wednesday, Apple was handed a scathing order to immediately walk back all of its anti-steering policies in the United States. Apple was found to be in violation of a 2021 injunction that required it to let developers direct customers to third-party purchase options outside of apps.
The order initially came from the Apple vs. Epic Games lawsuit that primarily went in Apple’s favor. Apple was found not to have a monopoly and largely won the case, but part of the ruling forced Apple to change some of its App Store rules. Apple did make updates, but it only allowed developers a single link to an external website in apps, and Apple also collected a 12% to 27% fee from purchases made on a website through an app.
The judge was not at all happy with how Apple decided to comply with the order, and in her ruling, she said that Apple picked the most anticompetitive option at every turn.
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Totally expected behaviour, of course. There’s also an appeal against the original verdict in the works, so perhaps the US legal system will be able to get them to marry up (it would be weird to deny the first appeal and then allow the second) and roll the decisions together. In about five years, at this rate.
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Mr. Deepfakes, the biggest deepfake porn site on the internet, says it’s shutting down for good • 404 Media
Emanuel Maiberg and Samantha Cole:
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Mr. Deepfakes, the go-to site for nonconsensual deepfake porn, says it’s shutting down and not coming back because it lost a service provider and data.
“A critical service provider has terminated service permanently. Data loss has made it impossible to continue operation,” a notice that appears when visitors go to the site now says. The site’s forums and videos are no longer available at the time of writing. “We will not be relaunching. Any website claiming this is fake. This domain will eventually expire and we are not responsible for future use. This message will be removed around one week.”
We don’t know why Mr. Deepfakes was shut down, which service it was cut from, and why. The person behind the site is also still anonymous, though in January the German newspaper Der Spiegel said it was able to identify them as a 36-year-old in Toronto who has been working at a hospital for several years.
“While this is an important victory for victims of non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII), it is far too little and far too long in the making,” Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley and one of the world’s leading experts on digitally manipulated images, told us in an email. “The technology, financial, and advertising services that continue to profit from and enable sites like mrdeepfakes have to take more responsibility for their part in the creation and distribution of NCII.
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One wonders, obviously, if the data was really lost. If so, was it the result of an attack? Some sites really deserve a ransomware attack.
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OpenAI caves to pressure, keeps nonprofit in charge • The Register
Brandon Vigliarolo:
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OpenAI’s contentious plan to overhaul its corporate structure in favour of a conventional for-profit model has been reworked, with the AI giant bowing to pressure to keep its nonprofit in control, even as it presses ahead with parts of the restructuring.
OpenAI published a letter from CEO Sam Altman on Monday informing employees, stakeholders, and the public that while its for-profit subsidiary will transition into a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), its nonprofit parent will remain in control.
“OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit, and is today overseen and controlled by that nonprofit,” OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor said in an introduction to Altman’s letter. “Going forward, it will continue to be overseen and controlled by that nonprofit.”
Both Taylor and Altman attributed the decision to retain nonprofit control, amid a broader restructuring effort announced in December, to conversations with civic leaders and the Attorneys General of California and Delaware.
The update comes weeks after a coalition of former OpenAI employees and AI researchers, including Geoffrey Hinton, wrote an open letter urging the AGs in those states to investigate whether the biz’s restructuring aligned with its nonprofit obligations.
“We made the decision for the nonprofit to stay in control after hearing from civic leaders and having discussions with the offices of the Attorneys General,” Altman said. “We look forward to advancing the details of this plan in continued conversation with them, Microsoft, and our newly appointed nonprofit commissioners.”
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Altman, translated: we got told not to do it. El Reg, as it is known, at least got the context of this move into the first sentence, unlike pretty much every other writeup.
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Microsoft is shutting down Skype. Readers say it changed their lives • Rest of World
Isra Fejzullaj, Rina Chandran and Michael Zelenko:
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At its peak, Skype had about 300 million users around the world. But it was a product of the desktop era, and as users went mobile, Skype lost its edge to upstarts like WhatsApp and FaceTime. Today, the app is forgotten on most phones and computers, particularly in the West.
The platform still has dedicated pockets of users in countries like Turkey, Russia, India, and the Philippines, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. “Skype has been an integral part of shaping modern communications and supporting countless meaningful moments,” Microsoft said in a blog post announcing its imminent shutdown.
Before Skype goes the way of other early internet icons like AOL Instant Messenger and Friendster, Rest of World readers shared their favorite memories of the service. Here are their stories.
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The stories are sweet (sometimes bittersweet), and a reminder of a time before mobile internet had taken over for calls, and people were desperate for any way to evade the usurious prices of transnational calls.
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How to understand things • Nabeel S. Qureshi
Nabeel S. Qureshi:
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The smartest person I’ve ever known had a habit that, as a teenager, I found striking. After he’d prove a theorem, or solve a problem, he’d go back and continue thinking about the problem and try to figure out different proofs of the same thing. Sometimes he’d spend hours on a problem he’d already solved.
I had the opposite tendency: as soon as I’d reached the end of the proof, I’d stop since I’d “gotten the answer”.
Afterwards, he’d come out with three or four proofs of the same thing, plus some explanation of why each proof is connected somehow. In this way, he got a much deeper understanding of things than I did.
I concluded that what we call ‘intelligence’ is as much about virtues such as honesty, integrity, and bravery, as it is about ‘raw intellect’.
Intelligent people simply aren’t willing to accept answers that they don’t understand — no matter how many other people try to convince them of it, or how many other people believe it, if they aren’t able to convince them selves of it, they won’t accept it.
Importantly, this is a ‘software’ trait & is independent of more ‘hardware’ traits such as processing speed, working memory, and other such things.
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Qureshi makes a point about how we accept a subtle point about differentiation (in calculus) that strictly can’t be true – a bit like the answer to zero divided by zero – which illustrates the point well: you don’t really understand something deeply until you’ve reached the bedrock of “ok, but why?”
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Rejoice! Carmakers are embracing physical buttons again • WIRED
Carlton Reid:
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Automakers that nest key controls deep in touchscreen menus—forcing motorists to drive eyes-down rather than concentrate on the road ahead—may have their non-US safety ratings clipped next year.
From January, Europe’s crash-testing organization EuroNCAP, or New Car Assessment Program, will incentivize automakers to fit physical, easy-to-use, and tactile controls to achieve the highest safety ratings. “Manufacturers are on notice,” EuroNCAP’s director of strategic development Matthew Avery tells WIRED, “they’ve got to bring back buttons.”
Motorists, urges EuroNCAP’s new guidance, should not have to swipe, jab, or toggle while in motion. Instead, basic controls—such as wipers, indicators, and hazard lights—ought to be activated through analog means rather than digital.
Driving is one of the most cerebrally challenging things humans manage regularly—yet in recent years manufacturers seem almost addicted to switch-free, touchscreen-laden cockpits that, while pleasing to those keen on minimalistic design, are devoid of physical feedback and thus demand visual interaction, sometimes at the precise moment when eyes should be fixed on the road.
A smattering of automakers are slowly admitting that some smart screens are dumb. Last month, Volkswagen design chief Andreas Mindt said that next-gen models from the German automaker would get physical buttons for volume, seat heating, fan controls, and hazard lights. This shift will apply “in every car that we make from now on,” Mindt told British car magazine Autocar.
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Feels like this subject keeps coming up, with “finally!”. What’s different here is that the European testing organisation is pushing this too, along with the Americans. It’s not so much that carmakers are “embracing” physical buttons as being obliged to use them.
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Are you being a fuel fool? • Status-Q
Quentin Stafford-Fraser:
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If you use a site/app like PetrolPrices.com, you can find out roughly how much fuel costs at the various petrol stations near you.
This is handy. But it’s not really what you want to know, is it?
You actually want to know whether it’s worth driving 10 extra miles to fill up your tank at a cheaper location, given the extra time and distance involved and the fact that your tank is already half-full at present. It’s not always easy to translate a potential saving of 2.5p per litre into a number that means very much. Will it, for example, help pay off your mortgage, or just let you buy an extra chocolate biscuit when you get there?
So, in a burst of enthusiasm this morning, I threw together a little calculator to help with the maths:
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Of course, the tricky bit with this is that you have to know what the fuel price is at the distant location. The Petrolprices app is going to help with that, so if you’re the driver you’ll need to stop anyway to do the calculation, and by the time you’ve stopped…
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 