Rens

Senior Information Security & AI Officer (CISO-office) @NS_online

[Rens @mosymuis]

#AI is trickling into our organizations, whether we like it, or even know it, or not. How to manage all these novel #cybersecurity risks? Watch my full talk on securing #GenAI for the enterprise at the AI Tech Summit: https://t.co/9BP5U8KodM

[Reilly Chase @rchase]

I still think about this a lot

[Reethu @ritu_twts]

bro Microsoft ran out of reasons to use their own browser

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

There's a wild economics phenomenon behind the decline of every venue in these charts. Almost nobody knows its name.

Start with what it isn't. It isn't an American problem. Britain, the country that invented the pub, has lost 16,150 of them since 2000. Over a third, gone. Same slope, different continent, no car culture to blame.

The actual culprit was discovered by accident in 1966. An economist named William Baumol was hired to answer a boring question: why were symphony orchestras always broke? Sold-out halls, rich patrons, government grants, and the books never balanced. Any city. Any decade.

Then he noticed the thing hiding in plain sight. A Beethoven string quartet took four musicians and 40 minutes to perform in 1826. In 1966, it took four musicians and 40 minutes. Productivity gain across 140 years: zero. But those musicians live in the modern economy, where the factory worker's output grew 20x. Pay them like it's 1826 and they leave to work in the factory. So their wages rise while their output stands still, and costs climb forever.

Baumol called it cost disease. Every bar, bowling alley, and movie theater in these charts has a terminal case. A bartender pours the same drinks per hour as in 1980. A theater fills the same seats per screen. Flat output, compounding rent, labor, and insurance.

Your couch caught the opposite condition. Quality-adjusted TV prices fell 97% since 2000, per BLS. Streaming ships infinite content for $15 a month. One more night in costs approximately nothing.

Tickets up 42%. TVs down 97%. Americans and Brits both read those price tags every Friday for 25 years. The charts show the verdict.

And here's Baumol's grimmest finding: cost disease has no cure. Nothing makes a bar 10x better at being a bar, because the inefficiency IS the product. Humans, in a room, taking their time.

The couch just keeps getting cheaper.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Taiwan solved tax evasion in 1951 with a trick so cheap it should embarrass every tax authority on the planet.

The problem was an all-cash economy full of small shops. A merchant pockets the cash, skips the receipt, and the sale never existed. Auditors can't catch what was never recorded, and hiring enough of them to watch every noodle stand costs more than the missing tax.

So finance chief Ren Xianqun flipped the incentive. Print a lottery number on every receipt. Draw winners every two months on live TV. Top prize today: NT$10 million, about $310K.

Suddenly the customer and the shopkeeper want opposite things. The merchant wants the sale off the books. The customer wants the ticket. And there are millions more customers than merchants. Every transaction now carries a built-in witness demanding the paper trail.

Year one, reported tax revenue jumped 75%, from NT$29 million to NT$51 million. Seventy-five years later, roughly 70% of Taiwanese still play. Convenience stores redeem the smallest NT$200 prizes at the register, so even a coffee receipt feels like a scratch card.

The elegant part is what the audit force costs. The prize pool runs about NT$7 billion a year, roughly $20 million. In exchange, the government gets 23 million unpaid auditors working every checkout line in the country, forever. No inspector general on earth delivers that coverage at that price.

Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Slovakia all copied it. The most effective compliance tool ever built looks like a game, and that's exactly why it works.

[Hank Green @hankgreen]

Beating out "12" for the Google search "4x3" is possibly the greatest achievement of my life.

[Fabrizio Rinaldi @linuz90]

My girlfriend couldn’t cancel a hotel reservation today.

No cancel button. They weren’t replying on WhatsApp.

Since I really didn’t want to call the hotel, I told her to try and just use Codex.

2 minutes later, she came back to me saying that Codex quickly realized there was a basically hidden cancel button on the reservation page (nasty dark pattern), and it just went ahead and canceled for her.

It’s a little thing, but there’s so much daily stuff now I’m doing with Codex.

Paired with Computer Use and the Chrome integration, it’s really great at a huge range of tasks, so I’m starting to default to it.

(this is probably true for Claude as well)

[Ryan Els @RyanEls4]

The difference between Server and Serverless architecture 🤔

[Sarrah Bellus @sarrah_bellus]

Donald Trump will go down in history as the only US President to be outwitted by a single-celled organism.

[Asher Perlman @asherperlman]

Happy Father’s Day

[‏ً @omgsidewalks]

NEVER let your printer know you’ve waited until the last minute and you’re in a hurry, because it can sense fear.

[Dr Chris Burden 🐺 @WulfrunianChris]

Under 16s messaging each other on Excel post the social media ban.

[大变活人 @seanwei001]

将数千根吸管打包在一起，基本上就创造了一个低科技的像素屏幕。

每根吸管作为一个独立的光路，完全模仿了数据通道的工作方式。

[satender @satenderlambaa]

Google Maps priority pass to divert other drivers

[Dark Web Informer @DarkWebInformer]

🚨 Instagram had an exploit that allowed you to use Meta AI to reset passwords to accounts with no MFA on them. The exploit was patched a short time ago.

[Boring_Business @BoringBiz_]

CEOs walking into work after realizing that the AI tokens are going to cost more than the employees they fired

[Son Luong @sluongng]

Codex just found a “workaround” of not having sudo on my pc…

[André @oracles]

Today Instagram had this massive exploit where hackers were just stealing rare handles left and right. Hundreds of accounts gone.

People losing handles they’ve owned since 2010, some worth hundreds of thousands.

I own a few rare ones so I was actually stressed watching this happen in real time, which I haven’t been in years.

Obama White House account got hit.

These aren’t some random new accounts, these are verified, locked down accounts and they still got compromised.

The thing is the exploit is so simple it’s almost funny. Attacker goes to Forgot Password, says their account is hacked, turns on a VPN to match the target’s location (which now you can find on the about section of the page).

Instagram’s AI support flow asks them to verify with a selfie.

They grab a photo from the target’s profile, run it through an AI video generator to make an animation of the person’s face moving around, upload that to Meta’s AI as proof.

And Meta’s AI just accepts it because it can’t tell the difference between a real selfie and an AI-generated video of someone’s face
.
Once verified they change the email to theirs. Password reset link goes to their email. They own it now. 2FA gets bypassed somehow in the process but honestly I don’t know exactly how, just that it did.

Point is even locked down accounts went down.

Then you try to recover your account and you’re talking to a chatbot that has zero ability to help.

You can’t escalate to a human. You’re just stuck. Your asset is gone and there’s no one to call.

The whole thing just highlighted how stupid it is to automate account security without any human in the loop.

One AI fooling another AI while there’s literally no person anywhere to catch it.

Meta took hours to even acknowledge it while accounts were getting stolen every minute.

Now thankfully it’s patched but I don’t think it will be the last one. Stay safe!

[gian @giansegato]

spent my 11-hour flight back from europe working on a very long report. started as a slack message but morphed into a several pages long doc. wifi was as shitty as it gets. after finally making it home i realized that the computer had forcefully restarted. opened slack: draft was gone :(

hail mary: claude pls save me, no clue how but pls try

it checked APFS snapshots, time machine, slack indexeddb, write-ahead logs, service worker / http caches, local storage, app logs, hibernation image... nothing. all gone

but then... it realized i have alfred installed. so it checked the clipboard snapshots alfred keeps in sqlite. sad news: alfred clipboard memory gets deleted after 24h. aggressive retention policy. however! when sqlite runs DELETE, nothing gets actually deleted. it only marks pages as reusable, but it doesn't override the physical bytes. so claude decided to do a raw-scan of the db, reverse eng alfred data format, figure out the portion containing the timestamp, stitched everything back together across overflow pages... and handed me the exact final version of my report, the last one i cmd+C'd

all this, in a single shot

... day 200 of "what if you had an elite hacker you can ask anything to"

[wendell sandico @wendellsandico]

people who upload pictures of restaurant menus to google maps are our modern day saints

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Mexico paid $20 million for eight minutes in this movie. Then those eight minutes forced them to invent an entire cultural tradition.

Before Spectre, Mexico City had no Day of the Dead parade. The holiday was celebrated at home, at cemeteries, with family altars. Quiet, intimate, centuries old. Sam Mendes fabricated a massive street parade for the opening sequence, shot it with 1,500 extras in skeleton costumes across the Zócalo, and audiences worldwide assumed they were watching a real annual event.

Mexico's government had negotiated hard for the placement. Leaked Sony hack emails showed officials offered up to $20 million in tax incentives for four minutes of positive portrayal. Sony was drowning in a $300 million budget. The deal included script changes: the Bond girl had to be a Mexican actress, the villain could not be Mexican, and the city's modern skyline had to appear on screen.

Then the movie opened in 182 countries and tourists started booking flights to Mexico City for the parade.

The parade that did not exist.

Tourism authorities panicked. Visitors were arriving expecting the spectacle they saw in the film and finding nothing. So in October 2016, the government spent $500,000, hired 650 volunteers, built dozens of floats and giant skeleton marionettes, and staged the first real Día de los Muertos parade in Mexico City's history. 250,000 people showed up. They openly called it a "Spectre-style parade" in press materials.

Ten years later, the parade draws millions. Anthropologists call it the "pizza effect," where a cultural element gets exported, transformed abroad, and reimported as authentic. Mexico's most famous public celebration of its most sacred holiday was invented by a British director shooting a $300 million spy movie.

That tracking shot is doing more for Mexico City's economy every November than the $20 million they paid for it.