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  • UL NO. 464 | AI Phishing Matches Humans, Under Sea Cable Cutter Patents, and Siri is About to Not Suck

UL NO. 464 | AI Phishing Matches Humans, Under Sea Cable Cutter Patents, and Siri is About to Not Suck

also...Russia's actual playbook, CISA's new rating system, and everyone's doing robots now

Author

Daniel Miessler
January 14, 2025

Hey there!

  • I have found the best coffee recipe in existence. MORE

  • This guy is brilliant. Funniest geek humor I’ve seen in ages. MORE

  • Been grinding on my Predictions page. It’s coming along, but only like 20% complete. MORE

  • Thanks to DoomerOutrun for the Fabric callout here! MORE

Have a great week!

Daniel

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SECURITY

A new study shows AI-powered spear phishing is extremely effective, finding AI tools achieved a 54% click-through rate versus 12% for regular phishing emails, and matched human expert performance at 1/30th the cost. Big yikes on this one—just as good as humans for 1/30th the price. MORE | THE STUDY

💡I’d love to say that was a bad paper, but the methodology looked solid, it’s out of Harvard, and has Bruce Schneier as an author. Le sigh.

The US launched a new cybersecurity label program called the U.S. Cyber Trust Mark to help people know which smart home devices are secure. Companies have to get their products tested by NIST-approved labs to earn the certification, which covers everything from baby monitors to smart locks. MORE

🚧 Project Russia reveals Putin's detailed playbook for taking down Western democracies through spiritual warfare and economic collapse. The 2005-2010 book series, distributed to Russian officials and linked to the FSB, outlines a plan for establishing a Putin-led "supranational" state after engineering the fall of the US dollar and democratic systems. MORE

💡I’m going to write a Fabric pattern that captures all the goals and tactics of this strategy.

Then I’m going to start sending YouTube video transcripts through the pattern to find where people are speaking exactly to the book of this plan! See: Tucker Carlson.

Taiwan says a Chinese ship might have deliberately cut one of their undersea internet cables, which follows similar incidents in Europe recently. MORE

💡I wonder if one future could be internet without undersea cables. Bandwidth would be infinitely slower, but it’s harder to take out satellites. Basically all the major powers have their own internet and web. And they only really partner with friendlies.

Seems farfetched, but so did a lot of things happening right now.

CISA releases data on how well 7,791 critical infrastructure orgs were adopting their security goals. Healthcare, water systems, communications, and government facilities are doing the best so far. MORE

Arctic Wolf found a likely zero-day being used to hack Fortinet firewalls that have management interfaces exposed to the internet. MORE

A new zero-day in Ivanti's VPN products is being actively exploited by suspected Chinese hackers to breach corporate networks. MORE

SonicWall is rushing to get customers to patch a serious authentication bypass bug in their SSL VPN that's actively being targeted. The vuln affects both SSL VPN and SSH management interfaces and they’re directly emailing customers telling them to patch. MORE

Greenland is becoming increasingly critical for U.S. military strategy in the Arctic, as Russia already has 50+ Arctic bases and the world's largest icebreaker fleet. MORE

The White House and some intelligence agencies are now saying there's about a 50-50 chance that a foreign actor did target US personnel with some kind of energy weapon, which is a major shift from the CIA's 2023 assessment that basically ruled out deliberate attacks. MORE

AI / TECH

Apple is actually building the AI we all want. I’m telling you, they’ve been quiet about this AI stuff but that’s because they’re doing it quietly just like always. Look at #2 in this list! They are the ones who have the context to make this work. MORE

OpenAI's o1 keeps randomly switching languages while solving problems—and no one knows why. o1 will sometimes switch to Chinese, Persian, or other languages mid-reasoning, even when asked questions in English. MORE

Zuckerberg says Meta will start using AI to replace midlevel software engineers in 2025. He claims they'll have AI systems that can effectively work as company engineers writing code, eventually planning to automate all app development at Meta. MORE

Nvidia released a blueprint for creating digital twins of robot fleets in factories and warehouses. They're virtual environments where companies can test and optimize their robots before deploying them in the real world. MORE

OpenAI released their new "Economic Blueprint" that outlines how the US can win the AI race against China while managing the tech's risks. They say there's $175B in global funds ready to invest in AI projects that could flow to China if the US doesn't act fast. MORE

OpenAI is starting to build its own robotics team, hiring for its first hardware roles. If you thought AI was big, wait till you see robots. And then AI-powered robots. Remember, there are hundreds of billions of dollars behind replacing human workers. MORE

Dell is changing their laptop names to just Dell, Dell Pro, and Dell Pro Max, copying Apple like most everyone. First it was phone form factor. Then it was packaging. And now everything’s a Pro and Pro Max. MORE

Apple might launch a new app called "Invites" to help manage events and meetings more effectively than Calendar. I hope they do. Really surprised Calendly and the like are the best options out there. MORE

Stack Overflow is seeing a massive decline in new questions, dropping 77% since 2022. MORE

Amazon is winding down some of its DEI programs and integrating others into existing processes. Meta just killed most of their programs and their entire DEI department. The company cited changing legal landscape as the reason, following similar moves by Microsoft and Zoom to roll back their diversity initiatives. MORE | MORE | MORE

💡The corporate world continues to move towards the Alaskan Fishing Boat Model. There’s no DEI on an Alaskan Fishing Boat.

And if robots could do the work there wouldn’t be any boat crews on them either.

Expect this to accelerate in the next 4 years.

HUMANS

Meta just made huge changes to their content policies, including allowing hate speech against many different groups. MORE | MORE

💡I think my opinion on this might be different than a lot of people in the Bay Area. I want platforms to have full, nasty reality available for me to see.

But I don’t want to see it 99.9% of the time, so I want filters to be able to block it out. The worst situation is when they allow it, don’t filter it, and don’t let me filter it because they want hate because it generates clicks.

That to me is the problem, not the fact that the platform is unfiltered.

The economy added 256,000 jobs in December 2024, way above the 155,000 that economists expected. The unemployment rate dropped to 4.1%, and November's numbers were revised down by 15,000 to 212,000 jobs. MORE

🌎️ ☀️ A rare seven-planet alignment is coming to Earth's night skies in February 2025, letting us see all the planets in our solar system in a row at once. But I’ve been enjoying tons of them for like a month already. Mars and Jupiter are gorgeous, and Saturn is to the upper left of Venus in the west. MORE

Germans are using DIY balcony solar panels to cut their electricity bills, with over 400,000 of these "plug-in" systems now installed across the country. MORE

Young people are increasingly avoiding relationships, and it's happening all over the world. Japan's already low marriage rate dropped another 12% since 2019, while a third of 18-34 year-olds globally say they're just not interested in dating or relationships. MORE

In 1965 the US government tried replacing Mexican farmworkers with American high school athletes, and it failed spectacularly. The Department of Labor recruited 18,100 teenagers for the "A-TEAM" program but only 3,300 actually worked the fields, with many quitting within weeks due to brutal conditions like 110-degree heat and minimum wage pay. FAFO. MORE

IDEAS

My thoughts on Zuckerberg and Musk showing us raw internet. Basically I want that, but with the ability to tune out what I don’t want to see.

Reality Through Filters

The last few years have given me some clarity on where I stand on the topic of internet censorship. I was a bit wishy-washy on it for a while, but for tech platforms like X and Facebook, I think I finally have an opinion.

danielmiessler.com/blog/reality-through-filters

DISCOVERY

I’ve had this for years. Super useful.

New NVIDIA Free AI Courses MORE

massport80 — A researcher scanned the entire IPv4 internet on port 80 using masscan, finding 71 million open ports and analyzing the results with nmap. MORE

You Can't Optimize Your Way to Being a Good Person — A deep look at why our obsession with moral optimization and quantifying ethical behavior might be making us worse people, not better ones. MORE

🪄Terminal Setup Guide — Julia Evans explains what's needed for a modern terminal experience, and it's more complicated than you might think. She outlines 10+ must-have features including multiline paste support, infinite shell history, and 24-bit color support. MORE

Philips Hue users will be able to create custom scenes using voice or text commands like "Give me a scene for a garden party," and the AI will either recommend existing scenes or generate new ones. MORE

RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

Don’t clutter your mind with anything before starting work. Treat your morning clarity as a precious resource! You want that energy to go into difficult work, not distraction and fragmentation.

I think of it like me starting with mental energy at 100 (on a perfect day). So let’s call it 90 😁. If I then open social media, or news, or emails, or whatever, my energy shatters. It’s spread into the ether like a prism scatters light.

Now my energy is at 47.

Don’t waste those points on trash. Spend them on your most creative / difficult work.

APHORISM OF THE WEEK

❝

I can bear any pain as long as it has meaning.

Haruki Murakami

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