Weekend Edition 19: Crypto, AI, FAA, and Social Media Roundup

Weekend Edition 19 – Crypto, AI, the FAA, and More
Crypto News, AI News, Latest On FAA Problems, and a Social Media Roundup.

WE 19-1: FTX, SBF, and Crypto Fallout
Well, SBF can’t keep his trap shut. In a substack post, on Thursday, he is still claiming that he is innocent of all wrongdoing. However, his other former coworkers each pled guilty to related charges for FTX and Alameda Research. How do you see that? What do you guys think? Seems like they are taking the fall for young Sammy, here. We will see what happens when he actually goes to trial in October. He stirred the pot by redirecting (or attempting to redirect) our attention over to the alleged actions taken by the head of Binance over the last 6 months before he (SBF) stepped down from FTX and Alameda. These allegations amount to committing corporate espionage to bring FTX and Alameda down. We will see if any of that is proven out.
Another interesting tidbit in the saga happened on Wednesday when the FTX lawyers claimed that they “found” 5 of the missing 8 billion dollars, so no big deal, right, guys? Hmm, that seems awfully convenient. The CEO in charge of the bankruptcy proceedings seems even more shocked as time goes on, at just how disorganized and out of control FTX and its related companies were. The lawyers claim that the rest of the missing money isn’t really missing, but tied up in crypto that would tank the market even more if they sold them. The charitable side of me finds these excuses plausibe, but the cynic, which is far louder right now, can’t take anything these clowns say at face value... I am torn...
Sources:
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/12/sam-bankman-fried-denies-stealing-user-crypto-funds-in-new-substack-post.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/11/ftx-has-recovered-5-billion-worth-of-liquid-assets-lawyers-say-bankman-fried-crypto.html

WE 19-2: AI News – ChatGPT and VALL-E
ChatGPT is EVERYWHERE, right now. What is it? It is an AI chatbot which can do a good number of things, even write scripts for things (probably not programming scripts, but human language stuff). It has no current access to the internet, so it can’t do research on current things, but was trained back in late 2021, so it can have a very intelligent conversation with you about old news. Ok, so what’s the big deal with that? It has quickly become quite ubiquitous around the internet, and you almost can’t tell if you’re talking to a human being or one of these chatbots anymore. Does that kinda freak you out? It should. As cool as it is on a purely technical level, this makes me very nervous in practice. Don’t get me wrong, I am intrigued by it, but I don’t think that I would ever seek out a conversation with one of these, personally.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/chatgpt-is-going-to-be-everywhere-in-2023/
What about VALL-E? Well, I believe I have talked about DALL-E in the past, which is one of the best-known AI art generators, which have their own raft of moral and ethical issues, over how we deal with the concept of intellectual property and copyrights. VOLL-E is an AI voice generator. That should immediately raise GIANT red flags all over the place, if you’re paying attention. An accurate voice generator which you cannot tell was not a real person’s voice... This is not simply doctoring or tweaking audio clips to make someone say something they didn’t say, that has been a reality with recorded voice for at least a couple of decades, and is bad enough. This is worse. This can take a 3 second voiceprint recording and generate your voice to read written text to you, with accurate inflection and emotion, based on context. A bad actor could take a very short snippet of your voice, feed it into VALL-E, then make you read anything, and most people wouldn’t be able to tell it wasn’t you. This is why allowing Google, Apple, Microsoft, or Amazon to have your voice, through voice-controlled “smart” devices (Google Assistant/Home, Siri/ Apple Home, Cortana, Alexa, etc) is such a horrible idea. These corporations already have a very cozy relationship with Big Brother as it is, if they are truly separate at all, but all it takes is a data leak or a successful hack attack to “liberate” that data from their respective clouds, and there you are, not only what you actually said in the recordings they take from listening ALL the time (allegedly so that they don’t miss an activation beat, and “oh, we don’t record everything you say and do in your home”.... Bullshit.) but what malicious actors could make you say, think of the voice prompts with your credit cards or other sensitive accounts that are similar, and how easy it would be to plug that AI text-to-speech engine into a VOIP call to gain easy access to your accounts. This is bad news, y’all. Bad news indeed. I don’t want to leave this on a downer note, but as cool as the concept is in theory, it is (from where I sit) far too easy to abuse this technology.
https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/01/10/after-chatgpt-and-dalle-meet-vall-e-the-text-to-speech-ai-that-mimics-anyones-voice

WE 19-3: What Happened with the Flights on Wednesday?
The flight tracking system which the FAA uses is sorely out of date. One such system, which completely went down is called NOTAM (Notice To Air Missions). This system sends important safety-related messages to pilots who are about to take off. It crashed for hours on Wednesday, grounding flights for 3-4 hours, leading to thousands of cancellations, and delaying over 7,000 flights... Wow. That is quite something. Was it just aging, inadequately maintained infrastructure, or was it a cyber attack? As of the writing of this article, that was unclear, but seemed to indicate that it was the former, not the latter. Not as exciting, but still a crucial point. Do we have the skilled manpower to maintain and upgrade these aging systems? I don’t know, but there was a video I saw of a guy who claimed he was fired after pointing out issues in the codebase for SouthWest Aitlines (he was paid as an auditor for them, by the way, so his job was to comb through code for issues, then report them). He seemed to think that a) we don’t have the skills and b) corporations want rubber stampers, not honest workers in those sorts of key positions. That speaks volumes to me.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/11/tech/faa-computer-system-notam
Buttigeig has launched an investigation into all of the airline issues of late, so that’s comforting... I suppose... At least that diversity hire who is far more concerned with labelling NYC bridges and roadways as “racist” than actually doing his job to run the Dept of Transportation is actually doing his job for once. Let’s see what he finds... Oh my, he found ancient systems which cannot stand up under the strain of modern air travel, color me shocked. Wasn’t this part of what Trump was after YEARS ago, with his version of the Infrastructure bill? Seems like it to me, but the funding for the FAA likely wasn’t secured very well, thanks to excess pork that was carved into the bill that actually passed. True, those sorts of bills are not “sexy”, but they are crucial, and if funding had been secured, then perhaps the 20-30 year old bones of the systems at the FAA could’ve been overhauled and we might have avoided some of these issues. Who knows. I sure do feel better knowing that Biden’s diversity hires have it all well in hand...
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/12/tech/faa-notam-system-outage

WE 19.4: Social Media Briefs – a cluster of stories about Twitter, Meta, and TikTok.
Elon and Twitter:
Well, some very high profile J6-related accounts have been restored recently, including DJT, Ali Alexander, CodemonkeyZ, and LT Gen Michael Flynn (Ret). Those are some big names. Good for Elon that he restored DJT’s account which DJT has said that he won’t use again anyway, owing to his connection with Truth Social. Seems a token gesture to me. As you all know by now, I do not trust this South African “wunderkind”, I see his connections with very dark things, such as the destruction of the planet and lives through the rare earth mining that is necessary for the batteries which power his cars (which only last about 5 years, then you may as well buy a new car, so much for them being so “green”), to the whole SpaceX thing, to the transhumanist stuff that he is working on in the form of Neuralink. Too many strikes against him for me to trust him at all.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/10/tech/twitter-restores-election-deniers
Meta:
Meta has had an internal debate raging over the reinstatement of DJT. According to this article, they are preparing to announce their decision soon. This has been made into a huge, hairy issue because of their longtime umbilical relationship with the American Intelligence Community... After all, if you recall, Facebook started as a CIA program called LifeLog. The IC (intelligence community) seemed to have a vested interest in destroying Trump, as well as stifling wrongthink. When they came after the little people, no one cared much about censorship or freedom of speech, but when they shut down the account of a sitting president, that sends a very chilling message, doesn’t it? On the other hand, Meta is a private company which has its own rules and governance, which we all agreed to when we signed the EULA and TOS. Given, they have arbitrarily altered the agreement several times over the last handful of years, allowing them to nuke accounts at will, largely. I don’t need to rag on this, but I also, in part, at least, fail to see the big deal at this point. Facebook is largely dead or dying, now, and Trump’s presence alone will not change that. If their rules were set, public knowledge, and administered fairly. They have not been. Part of that is that they have been able to hide behind Section 230, but yeah... Enough on Meta.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/11/tech/facebook-decision-reinstate-trump
TikTok:
Wait, mental health suffers when people spend too much time on social media? Say it ain’t so! Depression and anxiety spike, particularly in teens, whose brains are developing at a very rapid pace? Who knew? Alright, alright, enough sarcasm for now. TikTok is being investigated for just these issues, that they advertise their platform as “safe” for teens, but then serve suicide-related content within moments of a new account being created. Not only that, but the way that their algorithm is set up, it keeps you locked in, scrolling from one video to the next as it learns based on your reactions to content which kinds you like, then feeds you those sorts of videos. It is like youtube had a lovechild with pinterest. Content for centuries, tailored to your interests. It just never stops, and you lose hours, then days, then months in that vortex of content. You lose sight of yourself, your life, your family and friends, just like any other kind of addict. Children should not be allowed on these platforms. It is too easy, as a parent to just go, “Oh well, my kids are fine, they aren’t in my hair or destroying anything...” That is the worst attitude to take. There is too much garbage out there. If you care about what your kids consume, stay engaged and enforce the boundaries that you set.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/11/tech/tiktok-teen-mental-health

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