RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest Monday 16 May 2022 Volume 33 : Issue 21

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/33.21>
The current issue can also be found at
<http://www.csl.sri.com/users/risko/risks.txt>

Contents:
The dangerous business of dismantling America's aging nuclear plants
(WashPost)
Crypto is dead (Spectator)
Phishing attack pop-up targets MetaMask users visiting popular crypto sites
(The Verge)
The COVID Testing Company That Missed 96% of Cases (Propublica)
Everything is somehow interrelated, redux (PGN)
The Man Who Controls Computers with His Mind (Ferris Jabr)
Some Top 100,000 Websites Collect Everything You Type -- Before You Hit
Submit (Lily Hay Newman)
Sad delivery robot gets lost in the woods (Futurism)
Estimated $163 billion from pandemic unemployment benefits were misspent or
stolen (WashPost)
AI Employment Systems may reflect various forms of bias (EEOC Warning)
Russians plunder $5M farm vehicles from Ukraine -- to find they've been
remotely disabled (CNN)
Russian troops are tracking Ukrainians' Chinese drones (CNN)
Flytrex expands drone delivery into Texas (TechCrunch)
Finding it hard to get a new job? Robot recruiters might be to blame
(The Guardian)
Radical Ruling Lets Texas Ban Social Media Moderation (WiReD)
A magnet for rip-off artists: Fraud siphoned billions from pandemic
unemployment benefits (WashPost)
He gave Instagram photos of his baby. Instagram returned fear. (WashPost)
Re: Companies envision taxis flying above jammed traffic (Steve Bacher)
Abridged info on RISKS (comp.risks)

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Date: Sat, 14 May 2022 15:00:11 -0400
From: Gabe Goldberg <gabe@gabegold.com>
Subject: The dangerous business of dismantling America's aging nuclear
plants (WashPost)

Accidents at New Jersey's Oyster Creek power plant have spurred calls for
stricter oversight of the burgeoning nuclear decommissioning industry.

Joseph Delmar, a spokesman for Holtec, defended the company's record, saying
it takes safety and security seriously. The recent incidents ``are not
reflective of the organization's culture,'' he said, adding that the worker
who knocked down the power line ``did not follow the proper safety
protocols.'' Delmar said the company has decades of experience building
equipment to store nuclear waste and employs veteran plant workers to
dismantle reactor sites.

``While the decommissioning organization may seem new, the professionals
staffing the company are experienced nuclear professionals with intimate
knowledge of the plants they work at,'' Delmar said in an emailed statement.

Accelerated decommissioning

Founded and wholly owned by Kris Singh, an inventor and entrepreneur, Holtec
says it is pioneering a new model of accelerated decommissioning. At the
24 U.S. reactors currently undergoing decommissioning, over half are
expected to take two decades or more to complete the process, NRC data
shows; Holtec pledges to return nuclear sites to safe, clean usable land in
as few as eight years. Singh did not respond to requests for comment, and
Holtec did not make him available for an interview. [...]

``I went from a staff of six to a staff of two, all having extra
responsibilities, doubling our workload and learning new criteria of the
positions,' the manager said in the letter, which was posted on the NRC's
website.

In a settlement with the NRC announced this year, Holtec agreed to pay a
$50,000 civil penalty, hire a new corporate security director and conduct
external security assessments. [...]

In 2017, Holtec opened the doors of a stately new manufacturing center in
Camden, N.J., that showcases Singh's accomplishments. Employees arriving at
the main office building on the Krishna P. Singh Technology Campus walk by a
parking space reserved for the CEO's chauffeured Rolls-Royce and into an
atrium where more than 100 patents bearing Singh's name are on display.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/05/13/holtec-oyster-creek-nuclear-plant-cleanup/

[In "only" eight years? PGN]

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

Date: Mon, 16 May 2022 06:25:56 -0600
From: "Matthew Kruk" <mkrukg@gmail.com>
Subject: Crypto is dead (Spectator)

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/crypto-is-dead

When Britain voted for Brexit, Macron boasted that Paris would eat the City
of London's lunch. It didn't quite work out that way, with most league
tables continuing to put London as the number one or two financial centre,
with not a single EU city in the top ten. Emmanuel Macron's government has
now announced that it has invited Binance, a crypto-currency exchange site,
to set up a European HQ in Paris. You have to ask: has Macron leaped onto a
bandwagon that has already started to lose its wheels? [...]

[The rest of this duplicates Yaffe-Bellany et al. in RISKS-33.20. PGN]

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

Date: Mon, 16 May 2022 17:11:22 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
Subject: Phishing attack pop-up targets MetaMask users visiting popular
crypto sites (The Verge)

https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/13/23071786/etherscan-coingecko-crypto-phishing-ad-popup-coinzilla-metamask

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

Date: Mon, 16 May 2022 18:07:53 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
Subject: The COVID Testing Company That Missed 96% of Cases (Propublica)

State and local officials across Nevada signed agreements with Northshore
Clinical Labs, a COVID testing laboratory run by men with local political
connections. There was only one problem: Its tests didn't work.

https://www.propublica.org/article/covid-testing-nevada-false-negatives-northshore

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

Date: Sun, 15 May 2022 12:03:51 PDT
From: Peter Neumann <neumann@csl.sri.com>
Subject: Everything is somehow interrelated, redux

Today's Earthweek diary of the planet in today's *San Francisco Chronicle":

* Warming threshold: 50% chance the world will exceed the 1.5-degree
Celsius goal by 2026 (UN weather agency). A harbinger?

* Record swarms: Namibia's worst brown locust invasion in history,
while still recovering from a 6-year drought ending in 2019. Fodder
for livestock is rapidly vanishing.

* Huge South Asia heat: Falling birds dehydrated and exhausted in Gujarat.

* Eruption repercussions: The cataclysmic eruption of Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai
volcano brought hurricane-force winds and unusual electric currents to the
ionosphere. Satellites detected giant plumes of gases, water vapor, and
dust.

* Collateral damage: Beyond casualties and destruction in Ukraine, Turkish
marine-life experts say the war is causing a sharp rise in dolphin deaths
along the Black Sea coast, due to underwater noise pollution from 20
Russian navy vessels, driving dolphins ashore or into fish nets. Bulgaria
has similar reports.

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

Date: Mon, 16 May 2022 12:21:25 -0400 (EDT)
From: ACM TechNews <technews-editor@acm.org>
Subject: The Man Who Controls Computers with His Mind (Ferris Jabr)

Ferris Jabr, *The New York Times* Magazine, 15 May 2022,
via ACM TechNews, 16 May 2022

Paralyzed since 2006, Dennis DeGray has regained a semblance of control over
his body via a brain-computer interface (BCI) developed by Stanford
University researchers. Implanted in him in 2016, the BCI enables DeGray to
move a cursor on a computer screen by thought, using machine learning
algorithms that associate different neural activity patterns with different
intended hand movements. DeGray has learned to control various technologies
with his mind, including videogames, robotic limbs, and a simulated aerial
drone. BCI advancements to date have relied on a combination of invasive and
noninvasive technologies. Thomas Oxley at BCI developer Synchron believes
future models will help physically disabled people re-engage with physical
and digital environments.
https://orange.hosting.lsoft.com/trk/click?ref=znwrbbrs9_6-2ea22x233cdcx071866&

[This is really seminal work, and opens up many opportunities. There are
many potential risks -- security, reliability, denials of service attacks,
and more. However, for some reason it reminded me of a book I read in
1978 when it first appeared, which might seem timely now:

Ingo Swann, Star Fire: The War To End All Wars Has Begun --
Rock superstar-composer Dan Merriweather is the world's first true
megapsychic. And when he discovers the true extent of his extraordinary
powers, and his out-of-body voyages reveal the existence of top-secret
U.S. and Russian installations for the development of psychic weapons
more frightening than any nuclear or bacteriological hardware, he
evolves an astounding plan to transform the world. [...]

Note: Ingo was a subject for the SRI team on psychic experiments back
then. PGN]