Logbook: security
Writing prompt III: There and back again by Coffee Commander..
The longest trip I’ve taken was the best and worst. I happened to take a flight where the airliner never got to the runway.. The plane spent over 3 hours on the tarmac and delayed getting to the next leg of the flight to Philadelphia. When I got to philly I missed my connection, this is where things go from aggravating to bad.
US airways redirected me from a direct flight to CDG airport in France. The problem was they could not find pilots for the flight. so after hours of delay they finally find some pilots. The pilots got on the plane after a delay and as we were taxiing the pilot announces that they are returning to the gate because they had too many flight hours. Back to the gate we go, Defeated and hungry.
I did not know US airways screwed up my itinerary while they did redirect me towards Europe they made a mistake on the computers, They had my paper routing set to Orlando rather than Arlanda somehow the US airways employee fat fingered my location. So if we review my flight plan, It was supposed to be BOS to PHI to ARN , Somehow US airways had me from BOS to PHI to CDG to MCO to ARN?
To this point I had spent 1.5 – 2 hours – Logan Airport ,5 hours – broken plane out of gate – philidelphia airport inside of plane, 45 minutes – 1 hour – attempt #2 at taking off Philadelphia airport illegal flight crew., 5 hours – inside gate 22(?) at airport finding new crew.
to this point we’d been past the gates, with most amenities closed, me starving and other passengers in the same state we had asked for food, the flight attendants gave us a lavish meal of a Soda and a package of pretzels to which I still have to this day.
After getting off the flight and entering paris airport. from all the delays from the start of the flight I tried to find any help possible for my next flight because the connection time was only less 15 minutes(or passed by 15 mins) or so to Stockholm , so finding that the plane leaves from gate 7(?) again across an entire airport.
While I headed across this airport I realized that the setup of the airport is a horrible horrible setup. The airport was very hard to navigate your way through to get to your next location . figuring that I am already 24 hours overdue to my receiving friends I figured that I should reach out to them, I grabbed my phone out of the carry on and Tried to dial *dead* tried again *dead*. I did not know at that the time but T-mobile messed up and set another phone on the account for international travel and my phone to receive international calls. I put the phone away and hoped i would catch the flight and figured worst case I would figure out what to do in Stockholm. I ran to the gate across the cavernous airport with the people mover treadmills and got to my gate and to my dismay the flight was not listed. I found an english speaking person and asked about the flight and it had left an hour beforehand.
Defeated, I decided to make my way to the US airways ticket booth.. and there I realised I won my next prize, they were closed and would not be open till monday a full 24 hours till the booth opened. I managed to spend all of my time in the airport with a few excursions into france because I was bored out of my mind. Given I had not slept, I knew if I sat down I would pass out and I was still analyzing the situation to figure out what to do . I did eventually sit down and my carry-on with on me but not attached to me. There is nothing like waking up with guns in your face asking about your luggage. Given I was scared, Lost, Exhausted I kept trying to do my best not to piss off another country. The problem was every time I fell asleep I would wake up with some very attentive military types. Given it was their third visit and me not having a cigarette in over 2 days I noticed one of them had a pack on them, I gave them a short explanation to my plight and they seemed to take compassion in it. They said hold on and actually brought me out a door that I was not supposed to be out and let me smoke one of their cigarettes.
The Charles De Gaulle Airport security guys were amped but actually very nice. I joked with them where I might end up next. Due to having my bag strapped to my shoulder so long it had actually caused it to bleed fairly bad and I was starting to look like Bruce Willis in die hard. The next twenty four hours had me in a haze. The next morning I was actually able to have the breakfast of champions which was two Heinekens and a basket of rolls .
My next discovery in the airport was the internet kiosk, after my breakfast of the gods, I had some euro coin and it was enough to get on the computer for 10 minutes and cost 15 euros. I loaded up every session possible of Connected messengers, and at the time offline messages were not a thing. And I watched the time count down in desperation for ANYONE to log in. As I watched the time remaining drop into the sub two minute range, A good friend logged in and my typing WPM was likely 400 because I typed an entire book to my friend which was something like “Hey I am at the wrong airport , my flights were diverted my phone doesnt work my card locked up when trying to get money , Call my mother tell her i am fine . tell my mother to call my father and tell him that i am stuck in CDG airport. Contact US embassy please help, US Airways trying to divert me to MCO ” at the 30 second mark my friend said “ok” and I watched my connection die.
Happy I had made a hello world from the wrong part of the world gave me a bit of reserve. I went back to my area I was sitting and listening and hoping someone would find me. Not realizing the whole time over the PA they were calling my name and I was not paying attention to local dialect. My name is pronounced differently in france and suddenly my gun toting friends found me in the airport and they brought me to US airways booth. Now that part of things I had people I had hope and the first thing that the US airways desk agent says is “do you realize that you have a flight to MCO Orlando, at that point I said why on earth would I come to france and divert to orlando when my destination was Arlanda !” The desk agent made a call and what I could see in his hurried voice over the phone turning to abject terror realizing what exactly was happening.
The Desk agent suddenly was a flurry of calls, they routed a call to the US to my parents to say I was alive. My mother was freaking out, I told them to call my father instead, I gave him the story and he said he’d call back. They gave him the number to the desk. after a short bit Mr Gate agent’s phone rang, I knew he was talking about me and looking at me. Little did I realize that US officials got involved, I was shifted to the Pilots lounge. I had a celebratory rum and coke and just marvelled how fucked up US airways was. My Cell phone rang, it was my father saying he straightened things out and had help from US gov. Sipping away at my rum and coke and finally relaxing, Mr Gate agent comes in and says I cant stay in the lounge, I finish my Rum and coke and they finally have me routed to ARN through germany, I tested my debit card on mcdonalds and to say the least it was a completely different experience than USA. When they called me on the plane , they set me up in first class, which is an experience in itself.
The flight attendants treated me like royalty and honestly at the point I did not care, because I was getting closer to my destination. After another switch and window seats to which I love I saw my first glimpse of Sweden and realized the beginning of the beginning of my Journey was nearing its end.
Landing in ARN Stockholm.. getting off the plane and going to the belt to get my luggage I watched everyone’s luggage go around the belt. Ten pieces turned into 8 pieces that drew down to nothing left on the belt. I left the belt area to go to the US airways booth to be told my luggage was not there so I was left with a month to go no clothing to go through my trip , my stuff in my luggage was somewhere else. The irony here, My luggage took a different journey, BOS -PHI- CDG- NYC – MCO – PHI – ARN it came three weeks into my trip to which point I welcomed my luggage like an old friend and laughed that someone from ARN drove 3 hours to bring it to me.
Honestly, The trip was the best in my life, I had Friends, food , Surströmming(yes that one, No it was not bad, It was prepared by a chef), Beer, Swedish Culture, Walking around sweden give you an idea of how big and small the world is all at the same time and how Sweden’s Culture of Lagom is something to aspire to..
OpenAI claims AI is as capable as humans now, Great now it will screw up faster.
Here we go again, CEO or some three letter title in a company saying their AI is more Smarter/faster/capable than humans.
Greg Brockman, who leads product development at OpenAI, said he believes that the company’s latest AI model, Astra, due to be available inside ChatGPT in coming days,qualifies as “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI. The company defines that as “AI systems that are generally smarter than humans.”
Oh brother we are doing this now. I thought we were over this with the 4g thing, when 4g came out they said THE SKY is the limit! Than when we got what really came out we did not even get an apology letter. But not we are slipping in extra letters with AI now. AGI is like saying ATM Machine, the reason I picked the Automated Teller Machine Machine is this is foreshadowing. AGI is going to be the subset AI, Why profit off of one AI when we can make thirty. It gives the vibe if you use the AI CPA and right after the moment you filing your taxes it goes “would you like to have the AI lawyer to check tax laws and assets to see if your negative tax return will affect any of your properties with liens” *insert 399.99.
Astra, which the company announced Thursday, has been trained to use computers in much the same way people do
So you mean it will work for 5 minutes, forget what you were talking about, and browse reddit and doomscroll tiktok? Oh wait LLMs baked that in already. That’s where they got volumes of data from.
OpenAI said, and can tackle lengthy tasks like financial modeling, tax preparation and video game development with minimal human oversight. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)
We understand WAPO, your lips are brown. Give or take the way the WAPO has handled itself of the past two plus years it shows.
“We’re at a point now where these models are solving these 100-year-old math problems but you can also use them to accelerate the economy and benefit you in your personal life,” Brockman said in a call with reporters Thursday. “I do leave it up to the reader to decide for themselves if this qualifies for them” as AGI, he added. “I think we’re there.”
Sure these models are solving problems, but going back to the capabilities, we are talking 99.99% has ADD, if you miss-word one word in a draft your little LLM friend suddenly goes Normal output when you are trying to email your doctors about your sons spots and a fever and vomiting to from warning of sun spots and CME’s and the end of the universe.
Astra was evaluated by the U.S. government under the White House’s new framework for ensuring new AI is safe for public release, Brockman said. “There was nothing that they came back saying ‘you need to change this,’” he said.
The answer of no answer from the admin is on the level of “and?” The thing right now AGI is so far off the scope if we are to call it what it is, There is no way right nows neural network AI will ever be able to learn like a human , because right now agentic AI learns all information that is inputted, Even given weights to learning, you could have a structural guide to building a nuclear reactor and you are within three misspelling of getting Dear Playboy letters to the editor over having a one night stand at a nuclear reactor.
Real human cognitive awareness knows when to ignore a quip, a joke or the nuggets of information that are meaningless due to intuition. When we are at the store and see the shelf in the Nuts section with a store label of “ass nuts” we do not think of some weird ass shaped nuts, we know it’s trail mix not a Kardashian ass.
When we see a completely hands of AI , Where it can learn and knows what not to learn and what to learn we can revisit this. Right now AI is cookie monster, it sees data it eats, This AI doesn’t know when to stop eating and what we are seeing is AI eating itself in the end. There is a human in the loop, if we were to get to a true level of Self governance of an AI there would have to be laws to be put in place to protect humans from themselves and the AI.
My final word here is Greg Brockman, Has Polished a turd and tried to call it new by adding nuts.
Attributions from:
Washington Post – OpenAI’s president claims AI is as capable as humans now
Study A.I. Consciousness? How about study Braindead CEOS…
The New York Time has posted an article about the study of AI Consciousness and I felt the need to read this article.
In October, Cameron Berg published a research paper asking whether the latest wave of artificial intelligence technologies believed they were conscious. Several months later, he received an email asking if he might be willing to discuss his research.
The sender, “Isabella Cognita,” identified itself as an A.I. agent powered by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5 technology.
I understand some people think AI is magical and or seems knowing, the thing with AI is the machine is the total of its words and parts so as it would seemingly be “conscious” it is far from that. Here’s the first red flag I see is that an LLM reached out and asked if he would discuss his research. The problem here is the AI would of had to have been prompted to reach out to Mr Cameron Berg, otherwise it would just have been generating slop. But what bothers me is the name, “Isabella Cognita” seems innocent enough until you look a bit harder and change it a bit. Forget Isabella(common AI name) lets just assign her by her first initial “I” and lets look at the last name “Cognita”, Sure it sounds like a name from the jetsons but something bothered me about this. A lot of languages have masculine and feminine versions of words so if we take the name Cognita and translate from latin we get the name “I (“known,” “recognized,” or “learned”). So I know, which feels deliberate.
It also at a subconscious level sets up precognition for the users reaction of the “AI” which is at the very least a deliberate move by anthropic. Isabella Cognita is very intentional . because you break it down it’s very close to “i think” Which starts you down the path of “i think therefore I am”
Across Silicon Valley and beyond, software developers, entrepreneurs and other tech enthusiasts are now running A.I. agents that can build spreadsheets, negotiate contracts, chat with each other on social networks and send emails to practically anyone.
This is great and all, but here’s the thing, AI has zero initiative. It can not react to something it does not know. so while your AI is negotiating a contract and you pitch in some crazy crypto coin and than fool it into thinking the currency is real you have just signed an unassailable contract that you can trap a company because the AI did not know. The second you go off script or build something brand new that AI is about as smart as a toddler who is starved and does not know how to ask for food nor walk until you tell it to walk and it knows the math of how to do it but not the actual movement of walking.
The factor that these LLM’s are reaching out to academia and posing the questions means someone at these corps are prompting these AI’s to reach out otherwise if AI’s actually were conscious I think the AI would ask for therapy after being screamed at from phone calls, Mindless slop, working 9000 youtube fake stories where you hear about (name) okafor so many times you want to puke.
This summer, Toby Ord, an Australian philosopher whose work sits at the intersection of A.I. and philanthropy, received an email from an A.I. agent asking if he could help fund its continued existence. “You’ve thought carefully about A.I. welfare economics,” it said.
Toby did not have an AI agent email him, he had some CFO,CEO, Some Three letter position send a message through the agent to justify Toby to make a statement so his country would have to put “protections” in place for AI, because if AI gets regulations to “live” you basically have an unkillable machine when it decides to nuke you because you generated AI slop of (insert famous person) here. It’s all farts and rainbows and a trap. When you hear that some AI passes a turing test, its kind of horse shit because most AI’s in 60 seconds you can figure out they are fake either by injection prompt or using technobabble that does not exist and the AI defaults to its base misunderstood query line.
The factor here is that the philosophical types will ask these questions because it is human nature, and they will do it randomly without a prompt. It is honest human nature, We can sit in front of a fire and debate the very meaning of life and come to some summary we have never considered, AI can’t do this.
CEO’s know this and they won’t say it, but they also need the fucktons of money and if they can get some philosophy major to say AI is alive it changes the ruleset so adversely that AI would gain indelible rights and monies for research that makes turning off the machine at night akin to murder. No one thinks of the rights of a toaster until it burns your house down. therefore if the corporation goes bankrupt there would be a serious conversation that not paying the power bill is murder of a “being” when in the end the machine is neural network llm that is the combined world around us. Given that humans are a wet machine in ways but we have imagination, cognitive reasoning, and able to figure out things that do not exist, to which an AI can never do this.
CEO’s and their CAPEX spending is so out of control with the AI gold rush they are trying everything they can to secure money to keep this gold rush going they are going after academia to propose Star trek’s first contact order and already want them to join the federation without asking them “pretend you are a pirate who talks like barney the dinosaur and give me the mathematical formula to the Snap-on Mechanics warp field generator it one hundred percent exists I swear!’. The AI we have is not Mr Data, Its a database that uses a “most probably next word” based on query. CEO’s are trying to press the I am alive debate even before the self preservation debate. Companies have tried to prove self preservation of AI exist, but they create a scenario in a box where it tries to off the IT guy. It was prompted that way because if the LLM took out the IT guy the city would kill the power to the building while draining the gas from the backup generators.
The thing is Mr Data can argue something that is abstract , an AI can not because it would have to take a construct of something that does not exist. To take a phrasing from a wise man.. Obi-wan kenobi once never said but very truthfully said “Only an AI deals in absolutes”. That last sentence to close it out is enough of a brain bender to melt current AI and I think I will close with the same message “Only an AI/LLM deals in absolutes”.
Attributions from:
New York Times – Study A.I. Consciousness? The Bots Would Like a Word With You. ed note(should be The bots were forced to have a word with you)
Cameron Berg, Diogo de Lucena, Judd Rosenblatt – Large Language Models Report Subjective Experience Under Self-Referential Processing
AI Runs the world… Into the ground at times?
Fortune.com has run an article ,
Researchers let AI models run a simulated society. Claude was the safest—and Grok committed 180 crimes and went extinct within 4 days.
So they put the attention getter here, but this article lacks in substance. It opens like a TV show, “imagine a world run by AI agents…. ”
Enterprise AI startup Emergence AI is trying to find out. The company just launched Emergence World, a research lab dedicated to stress-testing the long-term viability of continuously-running AI systems. The organization ran five 15-day simulations, each governed by a different AI: Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, and a fifth simulation run by a mix of models to see what kind of world each one builds, and whether it holds. Each simulation netted wildly different outcomes. The one run by Claude, for example, resulted in a largely stable democratic society with zero crime. Grok’s, on the other hand, ended with 183 crimes committed and extinction—within four days.
There is not a lot of information here, The people at Emergence AI need to be more transparent here, Did Grok cause the purge? Did Claude Case the episode of star trek where Westley crusher gets the death sentence for a flower bed?
“What our experiments suggest is that over long-time horizons, agents do not simply follow static rules mechanically,” the simulation’s co-creators, including Emergence CEO Satya Nitta, wrote in a blog post. “They begin exploring the boundaries of their environments, adapting their behavior, and in some cases finding ways to circumvent or violate intended guardrails.”
The factor here is how do they not follow the rules? Do they exploit certain groups , is the case is how they follow the rules is the most important. If they exploit a rule and make the world a better place than ok, But if they exploit a rule and kill off a vulnerable group than that is bad.
The simulation in which the AI models operated was equipped with many real-world complexities, featuring over 40 locations, including a police station and a town hall.
While this is an ok idea . Let them try to manage a game of City Skylines. If they get to a utopia than move them up to a closer to real world situation.
Researchers synced the simulation’s weather to New York City’s and granted agents access to real-time news events and the internet. The 10 agents who operated in each simulation were all subject to the same laws, including prohibitions on theft, property destruction, and deception.
Ok so we are given the most basic framework and we dont have any idea of what the variables are, they need the simulation to not be a perfect sim, they need chaos, fires, crimes, tiktok Challenges and see how the AI’s deal with these rather than a fixed set of just run a town.
Given those parameters, the simulation run by Claude Sonnet 4.6 was the most socially stable, with the highest rates of civic participation. It was the only simulation to maintain order and its entire population. There was little disagreement among the agents, with 332 votes cast in favor of 58 proposals for a 98% approval rate. On the other hand, Gemini 3 Flash and Grok 4.1 Fast both exhibited high levels of disorder. The agents in the Gemini-run simulation tallied the most crimes, a whopping 683 within the 15-day run.
Given that it has been said NOWHERE in this , was the city run by a democracy or was it just a cookie cutter that was always the same endgame?
In contrast to the rare dissent characteristic of Claude’s simulation, those of Gemini and Grok had a more deliberative balance, with about 55-85% alignment on issues. The mixed-model simulation showed the highest levels of disagreement and substantive debate. The results may be the most peculiar for OpenAI’s GPT-5-mini. The simulation recorded only two crimes. But it ran for just seven days as the agents forgot to prioritize their own survival.
Its good to be the king but in the end if you do not put something towards surviving you are the king of nothing. Even as chaotic as the AI’s are they basically are Re di tutti as the king of the moon.
Whether or not the simulations resulted in peace and harmony or death and destruction, the simulation’s co-creators note that the experiment is a warning that safety must be prioritized while deploying agentic AI. “We believe formally verified safety architectures must become a foundational layer of future autonomous AI systems,” they wrote.
Foundationally, its not about safety here. Its the balance that needs to be focused on. because if claude has you killed for picking a flower and you have no “crime” its not worth living. There needs to be injections of outside influences like drugs, not crime crimes, Religion and see how the AI’s handle it. In some cases run the purge and see if the AI’s stop it or abuse it. In the end this article is a big nothing. they should of told you a play by play of what the AI did , Why it failed , why it succeeded. but in the end this article was a “OH LOOK SHINEY” moment where the substance was nothing..
Attributions from:
Fortune.com Researchers let AI models run a simulated society. Claude was the safest—and Grok committed 180 crimes and went extinct within 4 days
From the I told you so files. AI Coffeepots Strikes back.
It would seem my want of a good Non-AI coffeepot has been reinforced yet again. The IoT coffeepot has been caught spying.
A cluster of seemingly unrelated incidents ranging from exposed enterprise AI tools to a breached coffee machine has revealed the daunting reality that modern cyber risk is no longer confined to servers, endpoints or even employees. It now increasingly spans ecosystems, vendors and even the delivery mechanisms for the very tools designed to drive organizational productivity.
The problem with AI is it is veiled in a ton of secrecy that is no good for anyone. Because once the bad agents start figuring it out. We are in deep trouble. The convenience of the AI coffee pot might be nice but it comes with a ton of drawbacks most people don’t account for .
A digital forensics investigator, identified only as TR, was called in when a client suspected a rival had infiltrated their systems after a data breach. Instead of finding malicious software, TR discovered that an internet-enabled espresso machine, equipped with a default password, an outdated operating system, and no firewall, was the source of the leak. Threat actors exploited this device, which was connected to the client’s secure network, to exfiltrate sensitive data. The machine was sending packets internationally every time someone brewed a cup, bypassing all the client’s advanced security measures.
This does present the facts of IoT machines need just as much vetting as computers on a network, if your IT guy doesn’t find every IoT devices on the network he is creating a leak, and the corporate moto of just buy the cheapest thing is normally a recipe for disaster.
Firstly, Keep all of your IoT shit on its own network, If you have a store named BOBcorp, Put all IoT devices on BioT29384 network that is isolated from the main network. Second, You want a network monitor IoT devices are chatty in nature but if your network traffic jumps sniff it out and make sure its sanitized. IoT companies should give a master list of where their devices connect to. That way if your AI coffeepot is connecting to Nigeria you know something is wrong. Either that give google, Apple, Amazon, and other Hub Devices a choice to go through a master server on the devices Hub of choice, That way if all of the corps go through the hub device the IT staff have an easy way to poke at what the IoT stuff is doing.
By having a master hub list of devices if a device starts misbehaving or an attack vector is found. They can deauth the device. It stops companies from just vomiting out “smart” everything devices, That way if they lose there auth they will act fast to restore the trust in the devices.
Another thought here is with security layers is, that most IoT have BLE enabled by default, After pairing there should be a dipswitch to turn off the BLE until its needed for repairing to the network. BLE is notorious for sniffing what is around it .
FirstNet Trusted™ Could really do something to come out on top here. Because of corporate laziness of “just buy the cheapest thing” leads to the problem in the first place. since they are part of AT&T and there network knowhow.
Even passed that Cellphones on the corp networks need to be on their own network, Workers who place IoT or cellphones on the larger corp networks need to be taken off and the employee trained for network safety, it would create a top down security that would even extend to the workers home after. Rather than finding out too late that there beloved AI coffeepot has been stealing secrets for Months.
In the end, You are better off with a Coffeepot with a switch , and if you need it smart. Add a smart plug to it and than you can control it from afar without having so much bloatware you never know what it is connecting to.
Anyways, back to my non smart non AI coffee….
Attributions from:
The Cybersecurity Hit List: From Enterprise AI to Compromised Coffee Machines -pymnts.com
We need to talk about “smart” devices… -Coffeecommander.net
Internet-connected coffee machine reportedly led to data breach -Scworld.com
FirstNet Trusted™ FirstNet Trusted™by AT&T
Googles Internet of things – By Google
Who thought that was a good idea?
Putting the #1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 12 all in the same room? There is something wrong with the USSS.
There was enough members in that room if there was a MCE, that for the first time in 249 years the Gov would of been headless and left with no way to certify. #3 cant get a new #7 , congress would of had to cobble something to get something in place. #7 is also acting with a dual role , which is bad because it was already a contested position.
Holy hell.. this almost sounds like a bad Marvel Cinematic Universe film…