You don't exactly want convincing evidence; you want a good story.

Let's ask Vint Cerf whether the web was meant to run logic, or just be a document format. I bet no matter what he answers, the world would be like the GIF pronunciation "I don't care if the original creator said it's pronounced like giraffe, I'm gonna say it like gift because I KnOw BeTtEr"

Internet 3 when (because I know that academia does already have an "Internet 2", although I bet due to Internet 1 security issues, Internet 2 is already compromised too)

Our most vulnerable must be getting absolutely hammered by scams. Is anyone working on protecting e.g. elderly people from social engineering? I feel like banks should be proactively suggesting people have a second family member or fiduciary sign off on risky transactions like wiring money to new accounts or pulling out a ton of cash.

I was recently on the phone with a very articulate member of my banks fraud department, or at least I believed they were up until they asked for my two factor code to reset my account. They had visibility into some past legitimate wire transfers which they asked me about along with a fictitious fraudulent one that they “blocked“, and when I pushed back against giving them my two factor code, they had a whole script prepared about needing to freeze my account until I went to a branch with four forms of identification (or just give us the two factor code and avoid the hassle). An acquaintance wired their down payment to a scammer after the real estate firms email system was compromised and scammer inserted their own wire instructions.

Not to mention reports of mythos directly hacking into banking systems. Scary times.

Large groups of people in a poor country steal from rich countries, and your explanation is a morally corrupt culture? not the obviously extremely poor prospects of it's citizens?

> They have none, or worse they can talk themselves into this "Robin Hood" psychosis, where stealing the pension from the elderly is just fine, because they are part of the upper crust of the world.

You're describing a cartoon character. Most of these people are trying to survive, not make some kind of twisted moral stand. Please try to recognise the privilege your place of birth affords you and how much of a global minority you are in. Incentives are everything here.

So what's the implication here? It sounds like you want AI canceled or curtailed, and if you apply the same logic to the internet in the mid 90s, you would have correctly called out the dotcom bubble. Does that we mean we should have also canceled the internet?

It's nearly as if there was a lesson here about some individuals in the human race?

What was that yet about psychos? That 1% of all humans, no matter the socio-economic class, no matter the parents, are just full-on psychopaths.

The question is: what do we do, as a society, about those who only want to harm others?

Is what I see. Which makes sense I guess. Maybe just tell me how you got to the page?

You should also be careful about taking imagined positions to the extreme ..."Does that we mean we should have also canceled the internet?"

That’s a really extreme take that lacks any nuance.

Might as well blame the OS as well for allowing any custom code to be executed.

In retrospect, I think the world would be a much better place if we'd just turned it off in 1998.

That said, OpenAI isn't public, so you can't directly short it easily. I guess you could short Microsoft but I don't know if that gives you enough exposure to truly be worth it, even if you do genuinely believe what OOP claims.

The PDF is linked here, which you can get to this article from the front page:

https://www.interpol.int/News-and-Events/News/2026/INTERPOL-...

As it stands right now, no. Luckily, at least for now, I'm tech savvy enough to navigate it. But the 100, mostly immigrant, elderly residents of my building will not be so lucky.

Two months ago I learned, during a water outage on a Saturday morning, that my building's new assistant manager was an AI bot from EliseAI. What was an actual emergency, it thought, was something that could be dealt with the following week. It told me that management would respond on Monday, which is completely unacceptable during an emergency water outage. I had no water for 3 days & on Monday the actual human manager waffled on why it wasn't immediately fixed & thought it was cute (he giggled & got excited) that I discovered that the assistant manager was now an AI bot.

And just yesterday, I got an unsolicited text from an unknown number that looks exactly like a phishing scam attempt, except that it was sent by the assistant manager AI bot. The text said that I had $130 in unpaid rent & had links to remedy it. WHAT?!! First, it's illegal in CA to give a tenant notice that way. Second, it looked exactly like a phishing scam attempt. I obviously didn't click the links, but I did parse them & found that they belonged to EliseAI. This also happened a month after the human manager gave out a notice about back rent that I had already asked about. He told me I had $0.00 debt on the books. So why the AI bot phishing attempt?

I perused EliseAI's privacy policy and there is no way that I will be knowingly feeding any PII into it.

I haven't tracked down the manager yet to give him a piece of my mind. But in what world is this kind of activity OK? How are non-tech savvy folks going to survive these things? Especially the large non-English speaking elderly population in my building. As far as I can see (I live in SF & am surrounded by it), we're doomed.

Recently I discovered that my mam – a middle-class ex-civil-servant, not rich, but not poor – had £++ sitting in the account that was linked to the Visa card she carries around all day. Why? Just because she hadn't moved it elsewhere. Terrifying, obviously.

All she needed was my encouragement. I think it's in Premium Bonds now: not scam-proof, but at least not trivially scammable.

Their returns are not spectacular and they charge fees but overall they are net positive on returns.

My sister and I were discussing if this was a great idea for him and she pointed out:

"Really, he needs someone he can call to send a check somewhere or send a digital payment and he just calls them and they make it happen."

Ideally, there would be a more generic service that would do this for the elderly. It would be the financial version of those "senior phones" that have big buttons and a "help" button that connects you to a person.

Why do they even bother with India ? Easy manpower and one of the world's largest English speaking nations.

I was with you until then - hasn't it been documented over and over again that at least in some of these places people are basically slaves, they have their passports taken away, kept in a walled compound and not allowed to leave?

You can become a legal guardian, and/or get access and shared ownership on their bank account and monitor it constantly. But yeah , it's a hassle.

There is a very high volume of legitimate calls from Africa, and scammers actually have tons of capital to work with.

And this does not even get into the technical difficulty of defining and detecting a “call” “from” Africa. Voice can be tunneled to U.S. infrastructure and then passed to telephony carriers as a “domestic call.”

Viewing the world as haves and have nots and building giant Walls and moats and hyper-capitalism alone will never solve this..

Dire economic conditions increase crime, that much seems true, but as long as it is profitable, there will be crime, under all economic conditions. It is, as you say, opportunism.

My parents are not yet a concern for this stuff, but I imagine eventually they might be.

So I would get a notification on my phone to approve the transaction/withdrawal.

The elderly still want autonomy, and the scams adapt and change faster than education can get most of the elderly caught up to the risks. That's entirely removed from the technical aspects, which are a whole other level of education on risk. Scams always will move faster than defenders and efforts to block them.

All of which are divorced from the real problem, which is isolation of the elderly. The elderly often jump in to these scams simply because they just want someone to chat with. Many romance scammers will report that all they do is strike up a conversation with people, and quite often that's all it takes to get in deeper on an emotional level than the victim's entire family. The family treats this like a money problem, when it's an emotional gap the scammer is exploiting.

I had a neighbor once who was so poor her gas got turned off. Blind due to diabetes. Still managed to send half her meager social security check to a televangelist, because the televangelist was on TV in her face all day, and her family visited once a month. The elderly were prime candidates for 1-900 psychic numbers for decades because it was someone to talk to. I imagine your grandfather wanted to feel like he was helping someone, and scam letters gave him a perfect way to convince himself he was doing exactly that.

"Ignore anyone asking you for money unless you know them and they do it in-person."

I dont believe in AI voice assistants picking up phones and filtering scammers. Those tbings will fight a losing game considering how the mainstream LLMs are built.

Why would the scammer go thru your detector?

What is a "stable" economy? The US has the world's largest GDP, the highest nominal GDP per capita of any nation with a population over 10 million, the highest amount of investable and liquid private assets of any country in the world, more than a third of the world's millionaires, etc.

And yet I think you'd have a hard time convincing most people that the US is a bastion of ethics and morals.

"Thinking like an attacker is a skill rightly valued among defenders."

and

"Attacking as a business must identify targets, and this is easy only if we believe that attackers have solved a problem that has vexed multiple communities for decades."

Bollocks!

If anything I think that paper serves best as a reminder that just because an idea is clever and logical, that doesn't necessarily mean it's true.[1]

[1] As another example, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Gandhi

There's less need to identify the most gullible when AI drops the incremental cost of responding closer to zero.

This is possibly due to how our brains are wired to trust an already-established narrative and due to the effect that repeated interactions have on trust. When the scammer eventually steers the topic towards money, phenomena such as the Semmelweis reflex [0] may have already kicked in, which can make it super difficult to re-frame the person as a scammer.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmelweis_reflex

Usually, the scammer will think of a scenario that give the victim very limited time to stop and think, or put them in the state that fear takes over their mind

I also asked my parents and inlaws to adopt the same approach. Never pick up, never read any texts from unknown numbers. Those are all untrusted bytes.

Are we talking about the same thing?

But the US have a Gini coefficient of 0.418, so a high income equality

""" The global spread of the syndicates’ operations has been driven in part by pressure from authorities in Southeast Asia.

A major crackdown on scam centres in Myanmar this year, pushed by Beijing, led to around 7,000 workers from at least two dozen countries being freed.

But the UN report warns that while such efforts disrupt the scam gangs’ immediate activities, they have shown themselves able to adapt and relocate swiftly.

‘It spreads like a cancer,’ UNODC’s Hoffman said.

‘Authorities treat it in one area, but the roots never disappear, they simply migrate.’ """

These criminals may even belong to the same groups that were targeted by law enforcement in Southeast Asia. they do not actually need to recruit local people. They only need to use advertisements for high-paying “overseas jobs” to attract people with the necessary technical skills and capabilities.

It is true that we see correlation between richer countries and lower level of crimes - across all layers of society.

Chinese models are going to keep getting stronger. Maybe the Free World™ should increase their people's access to and education about AI too.

But I feel like I have to answer when my son is at school/camp.

Phone? The network could spot sources exhibiting robocall patterns. AI could analyze live conversations and warn the recipient on certain patterns.

Instant messaging? There's spam and abuse screening built into most IMs already. AI could [locally/privately] analyze conversations.

Email? Ditto; analyze conversations, a bit deeper than basic junk mail filters already do.

The solution is that in the West, many Boomers are isolated from their families because many of us move for work or college. Get them some friends, a community, a local shuffleboard group or something so they're not so desperate for any connection that they answer every phone call and email with desperation.

- tamper with index fund rules so that the 401k's of the masses are bearing the risk of your risky investment

- bribe a border agent to let you through to see a friend

Rich countries have created a definition that makes it a poor country thing, conveniently ignoring the type of corruption that is institutionalized (and in some cases even legalized) in many rich countries.

It sounds extremely obvious and infinitely practical.

How often are you (or your parents) legitimately asked for money via email / internet? I mean, my answer is: never. My parents' answer is: never. My parents-in-law answer is: never.

Better to strike at the root of the LLM-scam business model wherever we can.

If someone really wants to get a hold of you, they can knock on your door.

Unless you ban mentioning other IM platform or communication channel, they will always try to get you on something less monitored

For example a romance scam where the scammer pretends to be your girlfriend who loves you for 6 months and then asks for money to cover an emergency.

Or a stock market scam that might even pay out small profits before convincing you to go all in.

We actually had an experience with a bank fraud team recently and they relentlessly ask over and over "is the recipient in financial difficulty?". They're not passing judgement on them but trying to work out if you've been convinced that they are and you need to send them money [urgently] to help.

This happened in Canada. I don’t think having socialized healthcare makes as much of a difference as one would hope.

"If you scam us, we'll scam, you back" ?

I too am unconvinced.

That and trying to walk my parents through turning this sort of thing on already was a 3 hour long process. That they will in no way remember even with a checklist.

There is unlikely going to be a technical way to solve this social problem, as is usually the case.

Last week I finally had an onslaught of spam voicemails, several in an hour, that caused me to disable voicemail notifications altogether. I'll just check them when I'm expecting something now, similar to mail. My phone app was successfully filtering the calls so I wouldn't see them, but it still got routed to voicemail which then created a notification.

Asking for money is common over voice or whatsapp in some countries for things like medical care, funerals, weddings, police "fines", school fees etc.

I think it can be true that we have in effect far more corruption in the west than what is readily recognized at the same time that it’s true that we have less corruption than most other countries.

Voice stuff is just narcissists trying to get their way.

The fix of course is an enforced requirement from higher authority that health care providers communicate only by means that prove identity of the source -- never calling from an unverifiable number.

How to make that happen, though ... ?

Meanwhile in a pig butchering scam you have emotionally desperate people (who often would go for figurative scraps) being fed fake romance before being slaughtered (having a lot of money extracted from them, which usually ends in the end of the fake relationship as results don't materialize for the victim, e.g. the lover not showing up)

In most western countries the corruption is mostly between entities with legal income, in poorer countries at least one side has its main income from illegal activities.

"You're my daughter? Then tell me the name of your twelth pet centipede."

Do you even read what you write? If you institutionalize corruption to reduce competition between different corrupt factions, you end up with a not endemically corrupt society?

Here's what it actually means: if you institutionalize corruption, you end up with an endemically corrupt society that is incapable of even recognizing corruption for what it is.

> ...at the same time that it’s true that we have less corruption than most other countries.

No, the corruption is just more sophisticated so that we can pretend it isn't corruption. Just look at campaign finance. In many ways, it's even more insidious than companies handing over paper bags full of bribe money to politicians and government officials.

The amounts are bigger, the number of people who get a piece of the action is great and it's all "legal" so the corruption is more durable. And, again, everyone gets to pretend that it's not corruption.

In relative terms?

So what you're saying is that Trump and his family grifting Americans for a couple billion dollars so far in his second term is better than, say, Hun Sen and his family grifting Cambodians for somewhere between $500 million and $4 billion over ~40 years because the US economy is so much bigger than Cambodia's?

Do you realize how much dirty money moves through and is laundered and stashed in the US? And how many billions of dollars a year in "legal" income financial institutions and other "legitimate" business entities, not to mention the US Treasury, collect from facilitating this?

It should be a simple, pink-elephant-type nonsense question and answer that you rehearse a few times in person and make sure they never share with others. “Q: What’s your favorite leprechaun? A: Rutabaga” or something. Even cognitively impaired folks can, with a few rehearsals over a day or so, retain that easily, I’ve found.

Reminding them to practice it when people reach out pretending to be me takes a bit more rehearsal, but I’ve found that it sticks reliably even then.

Both options are endemically corrupt but removing most kinds of corruption is an improvement.

One of them said, and I'll never forget, "Thank you for being reasonable".

It is all but impossible to calculate how much wealth has been "destroyed" and, more importantly, how much wealth has been transferred from the middle class to the upper class by way of institutionalized corruption that many people, you included, won't even acknowledge as a form of corruption.

Meanwhile, members of Congress are laughing all the way to the bank.

Trying to sell software into Cambodia puts you squarely in a procurement situation where you're going to encounter the patronage networks that are responsible for the corruption.

So since you seem to be suggesting the Cambodians have a disposition towards "act[ing] in a corrupt way if presented with the opportunity" (versus, say, Americans who you seem to think just elect corrupt politicians but have no disposition towards corruption themselves), why don't you share your experiences with the "lower strata" of Cambodian society as a software salesman?

In case anyone else is still reading this, there's an important context here: the US dropped 2.7 million tons of explosives on Cambodia during the Vietnam War. This is more than the Allies dropped in all of WW2.

The bombing was a direct cause in the rise of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, and an estimated 20-25% of the country's population (1.5-3 million people) died under the Khmer Rouge. People in rural areas still die every year in Cambodia due to unexploded ordnance.

American action against Cambodia was part of the First Indochina War, in which France was fighting to maintain a hold on its French Indochina colonial empire. In principle, the US got involved to stop the spread of communism but in reality, it was also doing France's bidding.

The result: millions of innocent people were killed by US military action. Cambodia and Vietnam were left destitute after the war, and the US, having lost, engaged in an economic war against Cambodia and Vietnam through the 1980s. In 1990, the nominal GDP per capita in Cambodia and Vietnam was under $200. People literally had nothing. Hunger and threat of famine was widespread.

So anytime you see a Westerner hinting that people in countries like Cambodia and Vietnam are more likely to "act in a corrupt way if presented with the opportunity", as if they are a less moral form of human being, you can read it for what it is: just a continuation of the racial, cultural and economic superiority complex of the West that has caused mass destruction all over the world and still somehow finds a way to blame its own victims for their misfortune.

> ...the corruption there is very thorough and continues well on down to the lower strata of society.

This coming from a person who apparently never lived in Cambodia and might never have even visited, but who tried and failed to sell software to Cambodians.

This is a perfect example of the Western superiority complex. The average person in Cambodia is 27 years old. Well over half the population lives in rural areas, where median salaries are under $300/month and higher education enrollment is not even 25%.

The implied suggestion that Cambodians are a more corruptible form of human is as sad as it is ridiculous.

Culture is real. Different countries have different levels of corruption. The US is currently getting worse on this measure.

The average Cambodian is a "poor" person trying to get through the day with limited awareness of the power structures in Phnom Penh. Even the ones who have some awareness of the system they live in know they're powerless to change it.