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There’s Another Pandemic Raging. It’s Targeting the Young and Online.
A pandemic rages uncontrolled, a damaging and even deadly plague sweeping across a wide swath of society. The scientific evidence of its dangers is massive and irrefutable. Its worst harm is inflicted on the young, who are the most vulnerable to its contagion, and whose injuries may well prove irreversible with time.
The last time the nation faced such a threat, leaders panicked and overreacted, understandably at first. But then they failed to course-correct even as the scientific data plainly guided them to do so. Consequently, enormous and tragic collateral damage occurred in the form of other health risks left untreated, more than a year of vital learning lost by schoolchildren, increases in mental illness, drug abuse and suicide, not to mention the destruction of countless businesses and economic livelihoods.
In the current pandemic, we are committing the opposite mistake. As social media — “antisocial media” would be more accurate — permeates society, wreaking proven, ruinous damage on the emotional health of children, the trust of Americans in their institutions, the ability of those institutions to act against daunting national challenges, even the ability to sort truth from often malicious fiction, we are doing … nothing.
Elon Musk Claims the U.S. Government Had ‘Full Access’ to Private Twitter DMs
Twitter CEO Elon Musk claimed in an interview that the U.S. government has “full access” to users’ private direct messages, saying knowing that information blew his mind.
In an excerpt of his Fox News interview with host Tucker Carlson, Musk told Carlson that he was shocked to find out about the government’s ability to read users’ direct messages on his platform.
“The degree to which government agencies effectively had full access to everything that was going on on Twitter blew my mind,” Musk, who recently founded an artificial intelligence company called X.AI, told Carlson in the interview set to air on Tuesday. “I was not aware of that.”
“Would that include people’s DMs?” Carlson asked Musk. “Yes,” Musk replied to Carlson.
How This New Banking Trojan Can Steal Your Financial Information
Yet another Android banking trojan is hiding among other apps, and this one is super dangerous. A recent report from Cyble is warning all Android users to be on the lookout and to be extra careful when it comes to protecting their data.
According to the report, this new banking trojan is capable of changing its app icon and stealing your passwords, text messages and other sensitive data. Because it can change itself, researchers have named this new trojan “Chameleon.” The Chameleon has been active since January 2023, and it can abuse the Android operating system’s Accessibility Services to completely take over devices, just like many other smartphone malware campaigns can.
What makes the Chameleon Trojan stand out (no pun intended), however, is the way that it pretends to be other apps while it’s performing these malicious acts. That’s not something that I’ve heard of before, as it can even change its icon so that you think it’s just another commonly used app on your phone.
Some of the other capabilities it has include keylogging, launching overlay attacks, harvesting SMS text messages, preventing itself from being uninstalled, stealing cookies and automatically uninstalling itself, which is pretty impressive considering it’s only been around since January.
While this trojan is currently spreading through Australia and Poland, it’s a matter of time before it spreads globally, so be sure to take precautions to keep yourself safe.
The Crackdown on Pixel Tracking in Telehealth Is a Warning for Every Startup
Healthcare startups are scrambling to reassess how their websites and apps are built, and how third parties may, inadvertently or not, be putting patients’ protected health information at risk.
In March, U.S. mental health startup Cerebral admitted it shared the private health information of more than 3 million users with Facebook, Google, TikTok and other ad giants via so-called tracking pixels. These near-invisible bits of code are typically embedded in web pages to share information about users’ activity, often for analytics. Cerebral said these trackers inadvertently collected sensitive user data since it began operating in October 2019.
This data lapse is the third-largest breach of health data in 2023, according to the HHS, which is investigating the breach. However, while Cerebral’s lapse ranks among the most serious and damaging, the breach is just one of many currently being investigated by HHS — and this list is likely to grow.
Last year, a joint investigation by STAT and The Markup found that dozens of hospital websites and telehealth startups were sharing patients’ medical information with advertisers and tech giants.
COVID Exposure Apps Are Headed for a Mass Extinction Event
Within a week of COVID-19 shutting down the world in 2020, teams at archrivals Apple and Google partnered on a rare joint project. They developed a way to log people’s proximity using Bluetooth chips in iPhones and Android phones, enabling the creation of apps that let someone who tested positive for the virus anonymously notify fellow users whom they’d been near in the preceding few days. Those alerted to the exposure could then isolate, test, and quarantine, hopefully slowing the spread of COVID.
COVID is still around, but the grand experiment in semi-automated contact tracing by smartphone is now nearing its end in the U.S., following similar shutdowns in many other countries as concerns about the virus have eased.
On May 11, the Biden administration will stop paying for the two cloud servers that underpin the U.S. system and power exposure-tracking apps offered by individual states. States will now have to boot up their own servers, and in many cases redesign their apps, if they want to keep the alerts flowing.
Though a few, including California, are considering the idea, it remains to be seen whether any will follow through. California’s Department of Public Health did not provide comment for this story by publication time.
Elon Musk Founds New Artificial Intelligence Company Called X.AI
Twitter owner Elon Musk has founded a new artificial intelligence company named X.AI, according to a Nevada business filing from last month. The filing, dated March 9, lists Musk as the company’s sole director and Jared Birchall, who manages Musk’s family office, as its secretary.
Musk has been publicly skeptical of the future of artificial intelligence in the past and has even called for a complete AI development pause, citing “risks to society” he says the technology poses.
In an interview with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson that will air next week, Musk warned that “AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production.”
“In the sense that it has the potential — however, small one may regard that probability, but it is non-trivial — it has the potential of civilization destruction,” he said.
Alphabet Loses $55 Billion in Market Value After Samsung Reportedly Considers Replacing Google With Bing in Its Phone
Alphabet stock slid as much as 4% on Monday, erasing about $55 billion in market value after a report from The New York Times suggested that competition is heating up in the mobile search market.
The report said that Samsung is considering replacing Google as the default search engine across its lineup of devices in favor of Microsoft’s Bing Search, which could put about $3 billion in annual revenue at risk for Alphabet.
A similar contract between Alphabet and Apple, which is worth about $20 billion in annual revenue to Alphabet, is due for renewal later this year.
Google employees were shocked when they learned in March that Samsung was considering replacing Google, and internal messages of Alphabet employees reviewed by The New York Times showed “panic” among staff.
Montana Passes TikTok Ban: Here’s Why It’s Probably Unenforceable
The Montana House voted Friday to approve a bill banning TikTok in the state, the first of its kind in the U.S. — though it’s unclear how the state would be able to ever enforce such a ban.
Montana’s Republican-led House voted 54-43 to approve the bill and send it to Gov. Greg Gianforte (R), who is expected to sign the bill after claiming last year that TikTok posed a “significant threat” to state security and data privacy.
The bill prohibits mobile app stores from allowing Montana residents to download TikTok effectively on January 1, 2024 — though it does not specify how the state would enforce or monitor aspects of the ban.
The Corrupted Science Behind Biden’s COVID Vaccine Mandates
President Joe Biden decreed on Sept. 9, 2021, that more than 100 million Americans must get COVID-vaccine injections. But newly disclosed emails show that the Food and Drug Administration finding behind that order, an official certification of the jabs as “safe and effective,” was the result of a bureaucratic bait-and-switch.
The FDA had approved COVID vaccines on an emergency-use basis in December 2020, before Biden even took office. The White House assumed that was the silver bullet to enable Biden to save Americans from COVID.
But it soon became clear that many Americans were hesitating to get jabbed, in part because the FDA approval was solely for emergency use. “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations,” he insisted in a July 21, 2021, CNN town hall. Biden’s claim was false, spurred by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s decision to ignore any “breakthrough” COVID infections that did not result in death or hospitalization.
Newly released emails reveal that Acting Commissioner Janet Woodcock was concerned because “states cannot require mandatory vaccination” without FDA final approval, according to the chief of FDA’s vaccine-review office, Marion Gruber.
Gruber warned that a thorough evaluation was needed due to “increasing evidence of association of this vaccine and development of myocarditis (especially in young males).” The White House arm-twisting spurred a “mutiny” at the FDA, as Politico put it: Gruber and her top deputy resigned in protest.
We’re Not Ready to Be Diagnosed by ChatGPT
AI may not care whether humans live or die, but tools like ChatGPT will still affect life-and-death decisions — once they become a standard tool in the hands of doctors. Some are already experimenting with ChatGPT to see if it can diagnose patients and choose treatments. Whether this is good or bad hinges on how doctors use it.
GPT-4, the latest update to ChatGPT, can get a perfect score on medical licensing exams. When it gets something wrong, there’s often a legitimate medical dispute over the answer. It’s even good at tasks we thought took human compassion, such as finding the right words to deliver bad news to patients.
These systems are developing image processing capacity as well. At this point you still need a real doctor to palpate a lump or assess a torn ligament, but AI could read an MRI or CT scan and offer a medical judgment. Ideally, AI wouldn’t replace hands-on medical work but enhance it — and yet we’re nowhere near understanding when and where it would be practical or ethical to follow its recommendations.
And it’s inevitable that people will use it to guide their own healthcare decisions just the way we’ve been leaning on “Dr. Google” for years. Despite more information at our fingertips, public health experts this week blamed an abundance of misinformation for our relatively short life expectancy — something that might get better or worse with GPT-4.
