RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest Monday 6 May 2024 Volume 34 : Issue 23

ACM FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS (comp.risks)
Peter G. Neumann, founder and still moderator

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This issue is archived at <http://www.risks.org> as
<http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/34.23>
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Contents:
Could the Covid-19 Vaccines Have Caused Some People Harm?
Thousands think that their cases have been ignored. (Apoorva Mandavilli)
Electric car driver turned away from hospital car park (BBC)
Drones Changed Myanmar Civil War, Linked Rebels to the World (NYTimes)
Hacker Free-for-All in Fight for Routers (Dan Goodin)
Politicians Use Social Media to 'Buy' Votes (New Scientist)
Zeekill: From teenage cyber-thug to Europe's most wanted? (BBC)
What Happens When a Romance Writer Gets Locked Out of Google Docs (WiReD)
Apple Password Reset Propagations (Marvin Schaefer)
AI Lobbying Frenzy in Washington Dominated by Big Tech (Will Henshall)
When grief and AI collide: These people are communicating with the dead
(CNN Business)
The Sam Altman Playbook (Gary Marcus on AI)
Tiffany Haddish started tracking down her online trolls and calling them on
the phone (NBC News)
Microsoft announces ZTDNS (Cliff Kilby)
Former 'Employee Express' Phone Number Being Used by Fraudsters, Warns IG
(FedWeek)
How Scammers Are Stealing Food Stamps From Struggling Americans (NYTimes)
Medical Debt Shows Up Less Often on Credit Reports (NYTimes)
More on Google Chrome and the vanishing UNDO function!
Universal Music Artists Will Return to TikTok (NYTimes)
If your iPhone alarm has gone quiet, Apple says it's working on a fix
(The Verge)
Re: Phone Keyboard Exploits Leaves Billion Users Exposed Martin Ward)
Re: Boeing's problems (Martin Ward)
Re: Can AI-powered drive-throughs save the day for fast food operators?
(Steve Bacher)
Re: Developers seethe as Google surfaces buggy AI-written code operators
(Steve Bacher)
Re: Net Neutrality and Black Boxes (Bob Rahe)
Abridged info on RISKS (comp.risks)

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Date: Sun, 5 May 2024 14:06:16 PDT
From: Peter Neumann <neumann@csl.sri.com>
Subject: Could the Covid-19 Vaccines Have Caused Some People Harm?
Thousands think that their cases have been ignored. (Apoorva Mandavilli)

Apoorva Mandavilli, *The New York Times*, 5 May 2024,
National Edition front page

[This a really important article. The notable sections of this
article lengthy article are these, with brief PGN-ed summaries:]

``I'm not real.'' Patients who they experienced bad side effects say
they have received little support or acknowledgment.

Listening for Signals. There are gaps in the official reporting,
e.g., individual shots were not recorded in mass vaccinations.

A Red Flag. Other countries have sought out reports of bad side
effects and reached conclusions the U.S. has not.

Pervasive Misinformation. The rise in the anti-vax movement has
made it difficult ... to candidly address potential side effects.
[several fascinating individual cases are noted in some detail.]

[This article affects quite a few people who apparently were
seriously impacted -- e.g., death or long-term Lyme-disease-like
co-infections -- resulting from vaccination. One extreme case was
one of my old friends who was one of 9 people who were vaccinated at
the same time by a clinic, 6 of who died soon thereafter from what
appears to have been a bad batch. If you browse on How Bad Is My
Batch, you might get this URL, into which you can put your batch IDs:
https://knollfrank.github.io/HowBadIsMyBatch/HowBadIsMyBatch.html)

My own conclusion is that much of the conventional medical response
is what has happened in the history of Lyme disease -- for many
years, doctors refused to admit that chronic Lyme disease even
existed (e.g., it had crossed the blood-brain barrier and was mostly
untreatable), characteristically attributing it to psychological
problems. I think bad-batch reactions and long-Covid have both have
received the same general reaction -- they are anomalies and were
typically discounted -- although now perhaps the medical profession
is seeing a glimmer of credibility in some of the reports. PGN]

[PS. I am not an anti-vaxxer, just a questioner of the blind
one-size-fits-all approach. PGN]

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 5 May 2024 16:57:56 -0400
From: Gabe Goldberg <gabe@gabegold.com>
Subject: Electric car driver turned away from hospital car park (BBC)

A father who was taking his child to Alder Hey hospital in Liverpool says he
was turned away from the car park because he was driving an electric vehicle
(EV).

Paul Freeman-Powell said he was told to park next to nearby grass because
his car *could explode*.

The hospital says it has temporarily banned access to the car park while it
improves its sprinkler system.

But industry figures have challenged the decision, pointing to research that
indicates petrol cars are considerably more likely to catch fire than EVs.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c90zjne2v0jo

The risk? Progress? Misinformation? Cluelessness?

[Mono-lith-ium Phobia? PGN]

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 6 May 2024 11:35:16 -0400 (EDT)
From: ACM TechNews <technews-editor@acm.org>
Subject: Drones Changed Myanmar Civil War, Linked Rebels to the World
(NYTimes)

Hannah Beech and Paul Mozur, *The New York Times*, 4 May 2024,
via ACM TechNews

Rebel drone units have managed to turn the tables on the military in
Myanmar. Drone pilots in Myanmar describe turning to groups on chat apps to
download 3D printing blueprints for fixed-wing drones. They also gain
insight there on how to hack through the default software on commercial
drones that could give away their locations. The drone pilots also post
videos taken from drones on social media to boost morale and help raise
money.

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 6 May 2024 11:35:16 -0400 (EDT)
From: ACM TechNews <technews-editor@acm.org>
Subject: Hacker Free-for-All in Fight for Routers (Dan Goodin)

Dan Goodin, *Ars Technica*, 1 My 2024, via ACM TechNews

Hackers are surreptitiously coexisting inside compromised routers as they
use the devices to disguise attacks motivated both by financial gain and
state-backed espionage, according to researchers at U.S.-Japanese
cybersecurity software company Trend Micro. In some cases the co-existence
is peaceful, with financially motivated hackers providing spies access to
already compromised routers in exchange for a fee. In other cases,
state-backed hackers take control of devices previously hacked by the
cybercrime groups.

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 6 May 2024 11:35:16 -0400 (EDT)
From: ACM TechNews <technews-editor@acm.org>
Subject: Politicians Use Social Media to 'Buy' Votes (New Scientist)

Chris Stokel-Walker, New Scientist, 2 May 2024, via ACM TechNews

A study of political advertisements on social media by researchers at
Germany's Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich found that German political
parties could sway an individual voter with just ?4 ($4.31) of advertising
spend. The researchers looked at more than 21,000 advertisements posted on
Facebook and Instagram during Germany's 2021 federal elections. Using a
statistical model, they determined that a candidate's votes rose 2.1% for
every 200,000 times their advertisements were seen.

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 4 May 2024 18:11:46 -0600
From: Matthew Kruk <mkrukg@gmail.com>
Subject: Zeekill: From teenage cyber-thug to Europe's most wanted? (BBC)

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cyxe9g4zlgpo

A notorious hacker who was one of Europe=E2=80=99s most wanted criminals has
been jailed for blackmailing 33,000 therapy patients with their stolen
session notes. Julius Kivim=C3=A4ki's imprisonment brings to an end an
11-year cyber-crime spree that started when he rose to prominence in a
network of anarchic teenage hacking gangs at the age of just 13.

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 5 May 2024 18:24:08 -0400
From: Gabe Goldberg <gabe@gabegold.com>
Subject: What Happens When a Romance Writer Gets Locked Out of
Google Docs (WiReD)

In March, an aspiring author got a troubling message: All of her works in
progress were no longer accessible. What happened next is every writer’s
worst fear. [...]

When she saw the word *inappropriate* in the notification, Renee worried her
work had been dinged for its spice. “I thought I was the problem,” she
says. “I thought I had somehow messed it up.”

But she hadn’t. At least, she hadn’t messed it up in any way she could hope
to avoid in the future. Google never specified which of her 222,000 words
was inappropriate. There were no highlighted sections, no indicators of what
had rendered her documents unshareable. Had one of her readers flagged the
content without discussing it with her first? Was it a malicious attack on
the files? Had someone at Google decided her content was too spicy? Renee
hadn’t turned on any of the AI functions in Google Workspace, so she doubted
it could be chalked up to a bot banning her books. After all, a 2016 paper
coauthored by Google researchers revealed that its recurrent neural network
language models had been fed thousands of romances. If for some reason a bot
was crawling her work, wouldn’t it recognize what it was looking at?