AI Chatbot Added to Mushroom Foraging Facebook Group Immediately Gives Tips for Cooking Dangerous Mushroom

Djordje Vlaisavljevic

Nov 21, 2024 — 1 min read

I haven’t owned a cellphone since around 2017. For years I used an iPod Touch to send emails or encrypted text messages. When Apple discontinued that iPod in 2022, I moved to a WiFi-only iPad Mini, which requires me to either carry a small bag or a jacket with pockets that can fit the not-so-mini communications device.

This was an extreme way to live in the previous decade, and arguably it’s even more extreme in 2024. But every time I inch closer to finally buying a phone, some cybersecurity incident happens that reminds me why I made this radical choice: telecoms and data brokers selling location data to bounty hunters or other third parties; hackers (repeatedly) stealing peoples’ sensitive personal information from T-Mobile; stalkers tricking Verizon into handing over a target’s address by haphazardly posing as a cop; and AT&T storing the call and text metadata of “nearly all” of its customers inside a Snowflake instance that young, reckless hackers gained access to.

Against The Dark Forest

The complex of ideas I’m going to call the Dark Internet Forest emerges from mostly insidery tech thinking, but from multiple directions.

Anthropic makes an AI safety plan

Can responsible scaling policies bring the future into alignment?

Pokémon Go Data ‘Adding Amplitude to War Is Obviously an Issue,’ Niantic Exec Says

A Niantic executive said he could see governments and militaries buying Niantic geospatial AI trained on player data, but the company said it’s still early days.

The post-election social network realignment

Bluesky and Threads are on the rise. Can it last?

Read more

Against The Dark Forest

Anthropic makes an AI safety plan

Pokémon Go Data ‘Adding Amplitude to War Is Obviously an Issue,’ Niantic Exec Says

The post-election social network realignment