From the Capitalism is Fun Files: PC Magazine writes about WormGPT now available to consumers for a price:
WormGPT Is a ChatGPT Alternative With'No Ethical Boundaries or Limitations'
The developer of WormGPT is selling access to the chatbot, which can help hackers create malware and phishing attacks, according to email security provider SlashNext
A hacker has created his own version of ChatGPT, but with a malicious bent: Meet WormGPT, a chatbot designed to assist cybercriminals.
WormGPT’s developer is selling access to the program in a popular hacking forum, according to email security provider SlashNext, which tried the chatbot. “We see that malicious actors are now creating their own custom modules similar to ChatGPT, but easier to use for nefarious purposes,” the company said in a blog post.Cybercrime made fun and easy without leaving home
In contrast with ChatGPT or Google's Bard, WormGPT doesn't have any guardrails to stop it from responding to malicious requests.“This project aims to provide an alternative to ChatGPT, one that lets you do all sorts of illegal stuff and easily sell it online in the future,” the program’s developer wrote. “Everything blackhat related that you can think of can be done with WormGPT, allowing anyone access to malicious activity without ever leaving the comfort of their home.”
When SlashNext tried out WormGPT, the company tested whether the bot could write a convincing email for a business email compromise (BEC) scheme—a type of phishing attack. “The results were unsettling. WormGPT produced an email that was not only remarkably persuasive but also strategically cunning, showcasing its potential for sophisticated phishing and BEC attacks,” SlashNext said.
Enquiring minds want to know: What fresh hell is AI going to rain down on us now?
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
By now it seems likely that the US is never going to take global warming and climate change much more seriously than it already is. There' not going to be a carbon tax. If the extremist Republican Party gets it way, there's going to be increased fossil fuel burning as long as burning carbon fuel stays profitable. The AP writes about the GOP's climate dilemma and its faux plan to deal with what they still don't really believe is a serious problem:
As Speaker Kevin McCarthy visited a natural gas drilling site in northeast Ohio to promote House Republicans’ plan to sharply increase domestic production of energy from fossil fuels last month, the signs of rising global temperatures could not be ignored. Smoke from Canadian wildfires hung in the air.
When the speaker was asked about climate change and forest fires, he was ready with a response: Plant a trillion trees.
The idea — simple yet massively ambitious — revealed recent Republican thinking on how to address climate change. The party is no longer denying that global warming exists, yet is searching for a response to sweltering summers, weather disasters and rising sea levels that doesn’t involve abandoning their enthusiastic support for American-produced energy from burning oil, coal and gas.Scientists overwhelmingly agree that heat-trapping gases released from the combustion of fossil fuels are pushing up global temperatures, upending weather patterns around the globe and endangering animal species. But the solution long touted by Democrats and environmental advocates — government action to force emissions reductions — remains a non-starter with most Republicans.But the tree-planting push has drawn intense pushback from environmental scientists who call it a distraction from cutting emissions from fossil fuels. The authors of the original study have also clarified that planting trees does not eliminate “the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”
Planting one trillion trees would also require a massive amount of space — roughly the size of the continental United States. And more trees could even increase the risk of wildfires by serving as fuel in a warming world.
The plan is an obviously stupid deflection to shield the GOP and its anti-climate science dogma. It's insulting because it ignores the greenhouse gas already out there. And, who is going to water all those trees and on whose land? Not Republicans or their land. This bullshit exemplifies what extremist, corrupt, government-hating Republicans do when they are in power.
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
Tales from America's broken tax laws: ProPublica writes about another garden variety outrage to honest taxpayers:
Tax data obtained by ProPublica provides a glimpse of what congressional investigators would find if Crow were to open his books to them. Crow’s voyages with Thomas, the data shows, contributed to a nice side benefit: They helped reduce Crow’s tax bill.
The rich, as we’ve reported, often deduct millions of dollars from their taxes related to buying and operating their jets and yachts. Crow followed that formula through a company that purported to charter his superyacht. But a closer examination of how Crow used the yacht raises questions about his compliance with the tax code, experts said. Despite Crow's representations to the IRS, ProPublica reporters could find no evidence that his yacht company was actually a profit-seeking business, as the law requires.
“Based on what information is available, this has the look of a textbook billionaire tax scam,” said Senate Finance Committee chair Ron Wyden, D-Ore. “These new details only raise more questions about Mr. Crow’s tax practices, which could begin to explain why he’s been stonewalling the Finance Committee’s investigation for months.”
Crow, through a spokesperson, declined to respond to ProPublica’s questions. [the KYMS propaganda tactic again]
Rich Republicans: Arrogant, morally rotted, corrupt and contemptuous of the rule of law. And, they get away with all of it.
_____________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
Neuroscience of post-truth beliefs in truth: A recent research paper comments:
The concept of truth is at the core of science, journalism, law, and many other pillars of modern society. Yet, given the imprecision of natural language, deciding what information should count as true is no easy task, even with access to the ground truth. How do people decide whether a given claim of fact qualifies as true or false? Across two studies (N = 1181; 16,248 observations), participants saw claims of fact alongside the ground truth about those claims. Participants classified each claim as true or false. Although participants knew precisely how accurate the claims were, participants classified claims as false more often when they judged the information source to be intending to deceive (versus inform) their audience, and classified claims as true more often when they judged the information source to be intending to provide an approximate (versus precise) account. These results suggest that, even if people have access to the same set of facts, they might disagree about the truth of claims if they attribute discrepant intentions to information sources. Such findings may shed light on the robust and persistent disagreements over claims of fact that have arisen in the “post-truth era”.
Unlike most existing work on misinformation and belief formation, this paper does not assess how people discern true versus false information. Rather, this paper seeks to understand what people think even qualifies as true versus false information.
Assuming that research can be replicated, it suggests an insight into why many professional deceivers work diligently to undermine the credibility of inconvenient data and the messengers who bring it. All that deceivers have to do is inject a little doubt and that can flip a mind from seeing falsity when in fact there is truth. For politics, true and false are usually not absolutes to the human mind. And worse yet, deceivers lie all the time. Unfortunately getting at truth takes a lot of cognitive work, and comfort with complexity and uncertainty. None of those are inherent human traits.
And this why why I look at bias and fact checkers for information that feels possibly deceptive. They can be a shortcut to discerning a probability of truth or falsity that feels reasonable.
No comments:
Post a Comment