What Shape Is the Universe? Gizmodo
NSA Agents Horrified People Spying On Their Personal Conversations Babylon Bee
Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, February 22, 2025 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness.
Five highlights from this week: Musk Ally Demands Admin Access to System That Lets Government Text the Public; How Phished Data Turns into Apple & Google Wallets; Identity is the Breaking Point—Get It Right or Zero Trust Fails; Chase Says Making Payments Over Social Media Is Too Messy, Will Block Zelle Transactions; and FTC Launches Inquiry into Big Tech Censorship Practices.
LinkedIn is a weird, workaholic wasteland and a total gold mine for Microsoft
LinkedIn may not be the first platform you think of when you think about our modern obsession with social media. But the site’s strange mix of job postings, constant spam, professional advice you didn’t ask for, humble and not-so-humble bragging, as well as the occasional actually useful bit of professional connection or networking has quietly turned itself into a look gold mine for its owner, MicrosoftMSFT $402.26 (-1.01%).
Gabbard to fire more than 100 intelligence officers over “explicit” chats Axios. Smooth move!
FBI Also Wants to Break iCloud Advanced Data Protection Michael Tsai
No, AI can’t decide whom to fire or many other DOGE goals
Washington Post – no paywall – Identify “mission-critical” jobs? Spot dead people on Social Security rolls? Government needs AI -— but what DOGE appears to be doing doesn’t add up. The U.S. DOGE Service is pursuing an “AI-first” strategy to remake the government. I understand why it’s an alluring idea: Bring a noted technologist like Elon Musk to Washington.
Unleash artificial intelligence. Let the data determine what’s wasteful. “He’s created these algorithms that are constantly crawling through the data. And, as he told me in his office, the data doesn’t lie,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) said last month.
But I hear a different story when I talk to technologists who’ve long advocated for government automation. There’s little reason to believe that AI — impressive as its advances may be — can accomplish even a fraction of what DOGE might want us to believe right now. Data most definitely can lie…”
If we could just take a tool and eliminate fraud in the federal government, I would be 1,000 percent behind it,” said Lynn Overmann, the executive director of Georgetown University’s Beeck Center, a think tank for practitioners in government automation. “Technology can be a really powerful tool to tackle some of the problems that they claim to be tackling. They’re just not using it that way.”