Security News for the Week Ending October 27, 2023
US Marines Strap a Rocket Launcher to a Dog
By the way, it was a robot dog and it not only worked, but the dog survived launching the rocket. This was a demonstration and the dog was one that they bought on Amazon for a few thousand bucks. Imagine what they can do with a mil-spec dog. This will definitely save soldiers lives. Credit: Vice
New Warning – Food Delivery Robots May Deliver a Bomb Instead
Oregon State University warned students not to open any food delivery robots this week due to them potentially containing a bomb rather than a pizza. The school corralled all food delivery robots in a remote part of campus to investigate. Never considered this one and it would be pretty easy to do. Credit: Vice
Politics is a Full Contact Sport
Susanna Gibson is a democratic candidate for the state’s House of Delagates. Unlike deep fake porn, she and her husband consensually posted them having sex on Chaturbate. Probably not the wisest thing to do, but apparently legal. The Virginia Republican party mailed out thousands of fliers to votes marked 18+ only. Likely this was to make sure that any teenagers in the house that got the mail that day would open it. The Repubs could get in trouble over this because Virginia has a revenge porn law that this could fit into, but it also may escape that law because they did not include any nude pictures of her. She would certainly not be the first adult performer elected to public office. Credit: Vice
Google, Scared of Microsoft and Amazon, Ups Investment in Anthropic
Several months ago Microsoft announced it was investing $10 billion in OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT. The investment war continues. Google announced it was investing $500 million in Anthropic, maker of ChatGPT competitor Claude. Then Amazon announced it was going to invest $4 billion in Anthropic and Anthropic agreed to make Amazon their cloud infrastructure platform. Now Google fearing that it was going to be beat up by both Amazon and Microsoft, invested another $1.5 billion in Anthropic. While this doesn’t match Microsoft’s own investment in OpenAI, it is definitely getting close. Credit: Cybernews
FTC Adds Its Own Breach Disclosure Rule Timeline
This is the problem with the U.S.’s sector by sector compliance regime. Even though the SEC already has a breach reporting rule (4 business days), the FTC decided to create their own rule just for non-bank financial institutions like mortgage lenders and car dealers. That requirement is 30 days. I guess that is because the SEC’s rule only covers public companies and many mortgage lenders are not publicly traded. Eventually the government will get its act together, but it won’t happen soon. Credit: The Record
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