And then we have a prime number of months. Checkmate OP

Exactly—could easily have been much worse, and anyone without at least a little IT knowledge might not have realised. Kind of shows the lengths they’ll go to now, getting employed at targets etc.

My dad l, who worked in tech / IT his whole life (retired now) l, had a problem with his ISP. Called to report it and the next day they called him back, got him to install ‘remote support software’, etc. He eventually saw what they were up to and pulled the plug. Turned out 2 guys at the ISP were selling support tickets to the scammers.

So the expectation was there—who knows how many people they got before they were found.

I want to hear the story about the fixer’s mother. She sounds impressive.

You can easily diffuse that situation by hanging a tea towel around her shoulders like a cape and saying “look, now you’re Super Angry”

Since yours was the first reply I came to that didn’t just ‘react’, I’d like to challenge 1 point in your list (the rest I pretty much agree with), and that is the first one. For context, I worked in AI (or ML as it was known then) in the 1990s. The models were very much based on ideas from neuroscience (my CS PhD supervisor was a biologist). Saying “they can’t think” requires a precise definition of what “thinking” is, and I’ve not seen one so far.

For sure, the most current LLMs are not what we might call human-level sentient, and have only seen a fraction of what a human baby would be exposed to in terms of training data. But as far as the way they process that data, perhaps they are “thinking” in the same way a brain would think if all it ever ‘saw’ was text. Perhaps they think in the same way an insect or small rodent thinks. And as they grow larger / more sophisticated, the same as a dog or cat? Or a small primate? You can see where that’s going.

Anyway, I enjoyed The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Mallaby. My PhD was based on the early work of Yann LeCun, and putting all those names and the motivations behind them into a full picture was eye-opening.

And didn’t mean to be snarky—but it’s probably a good thing they didn’t just name the plugins in the headline as avoiding them by name isn’t the solution here…

Did you try reading it?

It enables malicious versions of legitimate Obsidian plugins (‘Shell Commands’ and ‘Hider’) that are present in the shared vault.

Note these are deliberately altered versions, not the originals.

Pretty sure this is kind of how lots of memory works in general—very spatially oriented and you can use that to your advantage. Look up ‘memory palace’ for example.

It does—portable app too.