RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest Sunday 19 May 2024 Volume 34 : Issue 25

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

***** See last item for further information, disclaimers, caveats, etc. *****
This issue is archived at <http://www.risks.org> as
<http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/34.25>
The current issue can also be found at
<http://www.csl.sri.com/users/risko/risks.txt>

Contents:
Ex-CDC Director Says It's High Time To Admit Significant
Side Effects* of COVID-19 Vaccines (zerohedge)
Re: Could the Covid-19 Vaccines Have Caused Some People
Harm? (Peter Bernard Ladkin)
A woman was dragged by a self-driving Cruise taxi in San Francisco.
(LA Times)
U.S. Fears Undersea Cables Are Vulnerable to Espionage
From Chinese Repair Ships (WSJ)
Linux maintainers were infected for 2 years by SSH-dwelling
backdoor with huge reach (ArsTechnica)
Lethal AI weapons are here: how can we control them? (Nature)
Artificial Intelligence Trained To Deceive Humans, Lie
(StudyFinds)
American IT Scammer Helped North Korea Fund Nuclear Weapons
Program, U.S. Says (WSJ)
Half of calls to gambling helpline were for help placing
mobile bets (The Boston Globe)
An identity thief stole $5,000 from me. I spent two years
tracking down how. (The Boston Globe)
Schumer's AI Roadmap now online (PGN)
UnitedHealth Top Executive Slammed Over Cyberattack (NYTimes)
Cape Cod Hospital to pay $24.4 million for Medicare billing issues
(The Boston Globe)
At-Home IV-Drip Therapy Is the Latest Luxury Building issues Amenity
(The New York Times)
Is the news media picking on Tesla? (LATimes/YouTube)
Smarter Vehicles Could Mean Changes to Traffic Lights (Jeff McMurray)
Is Your Car Spying on You? Dale Harrington (AP)
Tech Giants Treat Southeast Asia Like Next Big Thing (Bloomberg)
Will Chatbots Eat India's IT Industry? (The Economist)
Newspaper conglomerate Gannett is adding AI-generated
summaries to the top of its articles (The Verge)
The Night That Sotheby's Was Crypto-Punked (NYImes)
MIT students stole $25M in seconds by exploiting ETH blockchain bug, DOJ
says (Ars Technica)
What Meltdown? Crypto Comes Roaring Back in the Philippines. (NYTimes)
OpenAI disbands team devoted to artificial intelligence risks (AFP)(NYTimes)
ChatGPT Gets Real (NYMag)
The man who turned his dead father into a chatbot (BBC)
Dell Hell Redux -- More Personal Info Stolen by Menelik (Security Boulevard)
Link Rot and Digital Decay on Government, News and Other Webpages
(Pew Research Center)
The Rise of Large-Language-Model Optimization backups (ArsTechnica)
Unprecedented Google Cloud event wipes out customer account and its optimi
(ArsTechnica)
A horrifying software bug (trofi)
New Wi-Fi Vulnerability Enables Network Eavesdropping via Downgrad
Attacks (The Hacker News)
Deleted photos of former owners reappearing on sold iPads
-- and probably iPhones (PhoneArena)
As AI becomes more human-like, experts warn users must think more critically
about its responses (CBC)
AI turned a Ukrainian into Russian propaganda (BBC)
Two unlikely U.S. states are leading the charge on regulating AI
(Politico)
Google tests AI to detect scam phone calls. Privacy advocates are terrified
(NBC News)
Flood of Fake Science Forces Multiple Journal Closures (WSJ)
Newspaper groups warn Apple over ad-blocking plans (Financial Times)
Slack users horrified to discover messages used for AI training
(ArsTechnica)
Tractors that don't know where they are (John Levinw)
She was accused of faking an incriminating video of teenage
cheerleaders. The problem? Nothing was fake after all (The Guadian)
Abridged info on RISKS (comp.risks)

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

Date: Sun, 19 May 2024 10:20:18 -0700
From: geoff goodfellow <geoff@iconia.com>
Subject: Ex-CDC Director Says It's High Time To Admit *Significant
Side Effects* Of COVID-19 Vaccines (zerohedge)

Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC), said Thursday that many officials who tried to warn the
public about potential problems with COVID-19 vaccines were pressured into
silence and that it's high time to admit that there were
significant side effects that made people sick.

Dr. Redfield made the remarks in a May 16 interview with Chris Cuomo on
NewsNation, during which he lamented the loss of public confidence in public
health agencies because of a lack of transparency around the vaccines, which
he said saved a lot of lives, but also made some people quite ill.

``Those of us that tried to suggest there may be significant side effects
from vaccines ... we kind of got canceled because no one wanted to talk
about the potential that there was a problem from the vaccines, because
they were afraid that that would cause people not to want to get
vaccinated,'' Dr. Redfield said.

In his role as head of the CDC, Dr. Redfield was part of the Trump
administration's Operation Warp Speed, a project to surge COVID-19 vaccine
development at a time during the pandemic when little was known about the
virus and rapid vaccine rollout was widely seen as key to getting the
outbreak under control and lockdowns lifted. [...]

https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/ex-cdc-director-says-its-high-time-admit-significant-side-effects-covid-19-vaccines

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

Date: Sun, 12 May 2024 12:45:04 +0200
From: "Prof. Dr. Peter Bernard Ladkin" <ladkin@causalis.com>
Subject: Re: Could the Covid-19 Vaccines Have Caused Some People
Harm? (Gwinn, RISKS-34.24)

Joseph Gwinn writes "note that COVID vaccines have measured serious problem
rates of order [of] a part per million"

Unfortunately, this seems to be out by an order of magnitude. (However, this
should not logically detract from the message which Gwinn wished to convey.)

The initial adverse reactions to viral vector vaccines (AstraZeneca) were of
the order of 2-3 per 100,000 for what is now called CSTV, and to mRNA
vaccines for myocarditis and pericarditis of a few more per 100,000, also
correlated to some extent with gender and age when first noted. The most

K. Faksova, D. Walsh, Y.Jiang, COVID-19 vaccines and adverse events of
special interest: A multinational Global Vaccine Data Network (GVDN) cohort
study of 99 million vaccinated individuals, Vaccine 92(9):2200-2211, April
2024, available open-access at
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X24001270

There are two main points to note about vaccines and adverse events.

First, such statistical studies look at correlated events, not
causation. The no rmal way to report events is what is called the OE ratio:
observed to expected events. For example, a certain proportion of people are
going to get myocarditis or pericarditis over a particular time period; it
is when the number of observed events goes over this proportion just after
people have received a Covid-19 mRNA vaccine that one speaks of correlated
"adverse events" (or, less rigorously, "adverse reactions"). The study looks
at three classes of OE ratio: 1 or less (colored green in their tables); 1
to 1.5 (yellow); over 1.5 (red). It should be pretty obvious why these
colours were chosen.

Second, clinical trials through Phase 3, which are necessary in most
countries for vaccine approval, recruited tens of thousands of
participants. They were thus likely to miss adverse events which occur at a
frequency of a couple per 100,000, or more rarely. Which seems to be what
happened with Gillain-Barre' syndrome and CSTV for viral vector vaccines and
myocarditis and pericarditis with the mRNA vaccines. (There are also adverse
events besides these which turn up yellow and red in the study.)

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

Date: Fri, 17 May 2024 06:52:05 -0700
From: Steve Bacher <sebmb1@verizon.net>
Subject: A woman was dragged by a self-driving Cruise taxi in San Francisco.
(LA Times)

The company is paying her millions (LA Times)

[This case from October 2023 was mentioned in passing in RISKS-34.20.
PGN]

Autonomous taxi company Cruise agrees to pay millions to a woman who was
dragged by one of its self-driving cars in San Francisco last year.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-05-16/woman-gets-millions-after-getting-dragged-by-self-driving-taxi-in-san-francisco

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

Date: Sun, 19 May 2024 07:29:20 -0700
From: geoff goodfellow <geoff@iconia.com>
Subject: U.S. Fears Undersea Cables Are Vulnerable to Espionag
From Chinese Repair Ships (WSJ)

Google, Meta Platforms and others partially own many cables, but they rely
on maintenance specialists, including some with foreign ownership

U.S. officials are privately delivering an unusual warning to
telecommunications companies: Undersea cables that ferry Internet traffic
across the Pacific Ocean could be vulnerable to tampering by Chinese repair
ships.

State Department officials said a state-controlled Chinese company that
helps repair international cables, S.B. Submarine Systems, appeared to be
hiding its vessels' locations from radio and satellite tracking services,
which the officials and others said defied easy explanation.