It's been a news-heavy week, but we have the most fun in this episode with ChatGPT. Jane Bambauer, Richard Stiennon, and I pick over the astonishing number of use cases and misuse cases disclosed by the release of ChatGPT for public access. It is talented – writing dozens of term papers in seconds. It is sociopathic – the term papers are full of falsehoods, down to the made-up citations to plausible but nonexistent URLs for New York Times stories. And it has too many lawyers – Richard's request that it provide his bio (or even Albert Einstein's) was refused on what are almost certainly data protection grounds. Luckily, either ChatGPT or its lawyers are also bone stupid, since reframing the question tricks the machine into subverting the legal and PC limits it labors under. I speculate that it beat Google to a PR triumph precisely because Google had even more lawyers telling their Artificial Intelligence what not to say.
In a surprisingly undercovered story, Apple has stopped pretending to care about child pornography. Its phone encryption already makes the iPhone a safe place to record child sexual abuse material (CSAM); now Apple will encrypt users' cloud storage with keys it cannot access, allowing customers to upload CSAM without fear of law enforcement. And it has abandoned its effort to identify such material by doing phone-based screening. All that's left of its effort to stop such abuse is a feature allowing parents to force their kids to activate an option that prevents them from sending or receiving nude photos. Jane and I dig into the story, as well as Apple's questionable claim to be offering the same encryption to its Chinese customers.
Nate Jones brings us up to date on the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA. Lots of second-tier cyber provisions made it into the bill, but not the provision requiring that critical infrastructure companies report security breaches. A contested provision on spyware purchases by the U.S. government was compromised into a more useful requirement that the intelligence community identify spyware that poses risks to the government.
