[they/them] 🏳️‍⚧️, 🏳️‍🌈, disabled, disgruntled. Former librarian, future dust.
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Missing Woman, 74, Who Vanished After Casino Trip, Found Alive in Woods 3 Days Later

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The outlet reported that Bloomquist's brother said his sister had hit her head after falling out of her bed the day before she went missing, so he believes the disappearance may be linked to her having a concussion. He said she didn't want to be treated at the hospital at the time, and wanted to go to the casino instead.

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synapsecracklepop
15 days ago
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Casino's cheaper than the hospital, for most folks.
ATL again
HandEFood
15 days ago
Only because the casino kicks you out when you run out of money.
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Fake job seekers are flooding U.S. companies that are hiring for remote positions, tech CEOs say

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An image provided by Pindrop Security shows a fake job candidate the company dubbed “Ivan X,” a scammer using deepfake AI technology to mask his face, according to Pindrop CEO Vijay Balasubramaniyan.

Courtesy: Pindrop Security

When voice authentication startup Pindrop Security posted a recent job opening, one candidate stood out from hundreds of others.

The applicant, a Russian coder named Ivan, seemed to have all the right qualifications for the senior engineering role. When he was interviewed over video last month, however, Pindrop’s recruiter noticed that Ivan’s facial expressions were slightly out of sync with his words.

That’s because the candidate, whom the firm has since dubbed “Ivan X,” was a scammer using deepfake software and other generative AI tools in a bid to get hired by the tech company, said Pindrop CEO and co-founder Vijay Balasubramaniyan.

“Gen AI has blurred the line between what it is to be human and what it means to be machine,” Balasubramaniyan said. “What we’re seeing is that individuals are using these fake identities and fake faces and fake voices to secure employment, even sometimes going so far as doing a face swap with another individual who shows up for the job.”

Companies have long fought off attacks from hackers hoping to exploit vulnerabilities in their software, employees or vendors. Now, another threat has emerged: Job candidates who aren’t who they say they are, wielding AI tools to fabricate photo IDs, generate employment histories and provide answers during interviews.

The rise of AI-generated profiles means that by 2028 globally 1 in 4 job candidates will be fake, according to research and advisory firm Gartner.

The risk to a company from bringing on a fake job seeker can vary, depending on the person’s intentions. Once hired, the impostor can install malware to demand ransom from a company, or steal its customer data, trade secrets or funds, according to Balasubramaniyan. In many cases, the deceitful employees are simply collecting a salary that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to, he said.

‘Massive’ increase

Cybersecurity and cryptocurrency firms have seen a recent surge in fake job seekers, industry experts told CNBC. As the companies are often hiring for remote roles, they present valuable targets for bad actors, these people said.

Ben Sesser, the CEO of BrightHire, said he first heard of the issue a year ago and that the number of fraudulent job candidates has “ramped up massively” this year. His company helps more than 300 corporate clients in finance, tech and health care assess prospective employees in video interviews.

“Humans are generally the weak link in cybersecurity, and the hiring process is an inherently human process with a lot of hand-offs and a lot of different people involved,” Sesser said. “It’s become a weak point that folks are trying to expose.”

But the issue isn’t confined to the tech industry. More than 300 U.S. firms inadvertently hired impostors with ties to North Korea for IT work, including a major national television network, a defense manufacturer, an automaker, and other Fortune 500 companies, the Justice Department alleged in May.

The workers used stolen American identities to apply for remote jobs and deployed remote networks and other techniques to mask their true locations, the DOJ said. They ultimately sent millions of dollars in wages to North Korea to help fund the nation’s weapons program, the Justice Department alleged.

That case, involving a ring of alleged enablers including an American citizen, exposed a small part of what U.S. authorities have said is a sprawling overseas network of thousands of IT workers with North Korean ties. The DOJ has since filed more cases involving North Korean IT workers.

A growth industry

Fake job seekers aren’t letting up, if the experience of Lili Infante, founder and chief executive of CAT Labs, is any indication. Her Florida-based startup sits at the intersection of cybersecurity and cryptocurrency, making it especially alluring to bad actors.

“Every time we list a job posting, we get 100 North Korean spies applying to it,” Infante said. “When you look at their resumes, they look amazing; they use all the keywords for what we’re looking for.”

Infante said her firm leans on an identity-verification company to weed out fake candidates, part of an emerging sector that includes firms such as iDenfy, Jumio and Socure.

An FBI wanted poster shows suspects the agency said are IT workers from North Korea, officially called the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Source: FBI

The fake employee industry has broadened beyond North Koreans in recent years to include criminal groups located in Russia, China, Malaysia and South Korea, according to Roger Grimes, a veteran computer security consultant.

Ironically, some of these fraudulent workers would be considered top performers at most companies, he said.

“Sometimes they’ll do the role poorly, and then sometimes they perform it so well that I’ve actually had a few people tell me they were sorry they had to let them go,” Grimes said.

His employer, the cybersecurity firm KnowBe4, said in October that it inadvertently hired a North Korean software engineer.

The worker used AI to alter a stock photo, combined with a valid but stolen U.S. identity, and got through background checks, including four video interviews, the firm said. He was only discovered after the company found suspicious activity coming from his account.

Fighting deepfakes

Despite the DOJ case and a few other publicized incidents, hiring managers at most companies are generally unaware of the risks of fake job candidates, according to BrightHire’s Sesser.

“They’re responsible for talent strategy and other important things, but being on the front lines of security has historically not been one of them,” he said. “Folks think they’re not experiencing it, but I think it’s probably more likely that they’re just not realizing that it’s going on.”

As the quality of deepfake technology improves, the issue will be harder to avoid, Sesser said.

As for “Ivan X,” Pindrop’s Balasubramaniyan said the startup used a new video authentication program it created to confirm he was a deepfake fraud.

While Ivan claimed to be located in western Ukraine, his IP address indicated he was actually from thousands of miles to the east, in a possible Russian military facility near the North Korean border, the company said.

Pindrop, backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Citi Ventures, was founded more than a decade ago to detect fraud in voice interactions, but may soon pivot to video authentication. Clients include some of the biggest U.S. banks, insurers and health companies.

“We are no longer able to trust our eyes and ears,” Balasubramaniyan said. “Without technology, you’re worse off than a monkey with a random coin toss.”

AI generated deepfake scam is 'phishing with a twist', says Fortalice Solutions CEO Theresa Payton

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synapsecracklepop
15 days ago
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Need to find a NK spy to revamp my resume, I guess.
ATL again
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English Is a New Top Coding Language.

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Or so Sarah Butcher reports:

If you’re wondering which coding language to learn for a software engineering job in banking, Goldman Sachs’ CIO Marco Argenti seems to be aligning himself to the people who suggest an advanced knowledge of the English language and an ability to articulate your thoughts clearly and coherently in it, is now up there alongside Python and C++.

Writing in Harvard Business Review, Argenti says he’s advised his daughter to study philosophy as well as engineering because coding in the age of large language models is partly about the “quality of the prompt.”

“Ambiguous or not well-formed questions will make the AI try to guess the question you are really asking, which in turn increases the probability of getting an imprecise or even totally made-up answer,” says Argenti. In the future, he says the most pertinent question won’t be “Can you code?,” but, “Can you get the best code out of your AI by asking the right question?”.

Asking the right question will partly depend upon being able to articulate yourself in English and that will depend upon, “reasoning, logic, and first-principles thinking,” says Argenti. Philosophical thinking skills are suddenly all-important. “I’ve seen people on social media create entire games with just a few skillfully written prompts that in the very recent past would have taken months to develop,” he adds.

I know nothing about coding, but Stu Clayton, who sent me the link, does, and since he thinks this is of interest lächerlich, I’m passing it along. Anything that places value on “advanced knowledge of the English language and an ability to articulate your thoughts” is probably a good thing.

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synapsecracklepop
345 days ago
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This sounds suspiciously like the BS I was sold 25 years ago about being an English major, wrt how my "critical thinking skills" etc would be so desired by employers across many industries.
ATL again
freeAgent
345 days ago
I can see how this may not be complete BS, but at least in any near-term scenario I can envision, a human is also going to need to review any code generated by an AI and be able to correct or modify it where necessary, and that obviously requires a human who knows how to code without an AI intermediary.
freeAgent
345 days ago
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Los Angeles, CA
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1 public comment
denismm
345 days ago
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So basically you need to be able to speak English in a specific constrained way that gets consistent results from a computer program that generates code for you. That is called a PROGAMMING LANGUAGE. Just use a normal programming language that doesn’t require a huge energy-wasting black box instead of an optimized compiler.
cosmotic
345 days ago
Humans use energy too, at some point the efficient way might be the ai
jickmagger
344 days ago
most code is not energy efficient, but to make it so would be too difficult to write. It would be something like a long LastPass password, only fathomable to AI, which is the way things are going. Coders will be obsolete very soon
cosmotic
344 days ago
The cost to do any sort of math is going to be WAY more efficient on a computer than a human. A computer can do more calculations in a second than a human would take over their entire lifetime. At 2000 calories per day, that computer is going to roast the human.

Why Children Need Risk, Fear, and Excitement in Play

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synapsecracklepop
414 days ago
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When I took my kids to playgrounds, I'd sit on a bench and read, with earplugs or headphones, and the reassurance "I'll be right here if you need me." 95% of the other parents would be playing with their kids, or worse, leading the kids through the activities with manic martial merriment: "Swing here! Hop hop hop! Now climb here! Not so high! NOT SO HIGH! Are you ready to come down? Don't run! Don't spit! Don't yell! Why are you crying?" Who was it for, and why?
ATL again
JayM
420 days ago
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Atlanta, GA
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There's an effective morning-after pill for STIs but it's not clear it works in women

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The antibiotic doxycycline hyclate can be used after sex to prevent sexually transmitted infections.

Doxy-PEP can be taken a few hours after sex and is effective at preventing sexually transmitted infections. New research finds it's less effective for women but that may not be the final word.

(Image credit: Rich Pedroncelli/AP)

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synapsecracklepop
474 days ago
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And no mention whatsoever of efficacy for transmen. Will it? Won't it? Why or why not? If only there were some way to tell...
ATL again
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No longer brushed off: A Minnesota clinic tries to rewrite medicine’s approach to miscarriage

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WOODBURY, Minn. — By the time Taylor Teske came to be sitting on an exam table in an obstetrician’s office in Minnesota, her medical records marked a devastating journey: nine pregnancies, one baby, eight miscarriages.

The first miscarriage happened in June 2018, almost as soon as she found out she was pregnant. Teske told her boss at the vascular clinic where she worked that she was pregnant, and he asked if she wanted to sneak a look using the clinic’s ultrasound. He searched for sounds on the black-and-white screen. Minutes passed, but nothing happened. An obstetrician-gynecologist later confirmed that Teske was having a miscarriage. 

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synapsecracklepop
601 days ago
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A long and important piece. I know too many people who've faced repeated, often unexplained miscarriages -- and now with the potential for the clotting issues caused by COVID/long COVID, I fear we'll only see more. Because many people only work with OBGYNs, not reproductive specialists, it's even more important they know about what's in this.
ATL again
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