Probably written by AI…

A decade or so ago National Geographic had a reality TV show called Worlds Toughest Fixes, where they went around and documented all sorts of major repair & other big construction jobs. One episode had them replacing the steam turbine in a nuclear power plant. I really enjoyed that series.

Some other fixes they documented included a valve on the Alaska oil pipeline, replacing an antenna on a 2000 foot tall tower, and launching a rocket in French Guiana. It’s a fun series if you’re into this kind of stuff.

I work in IT for a tech company that is embracing AI to an extent. We have a ticketing system for managing all the work we do. Tickets can range from simple tasks that take literally 5 minutes to complex multi-part collaborative projects that take weeks.

Recently I’ve been getting tickets that read like a miniature novel, with formatted sections labeled things like “summary”, “acceptance criteria”, and so on. It’s all clearly AI generated, and it makes it difficult to understand exactly what is being asked. I don’t need (or want) three pages of word salad when the requestor could have simply said “write a script to alert us when the API key ‘X’ is set to expire in 7 days”.

When I see tickets like these the first thing I do is go back to the requestor and ask them exactly what they want from me. Often times what they want is not what it sounds like their AI generated ticket is asking for, or at least specific details are wrong. And I have absolutely no problem wasting their time when they waste mine with this AI slop.

I worked in IT at a university about 15 years ago. As part of a research project I helped set up a Tor exit node. Within a few hours of it taking on traffic I was contacted by the universities IT security team. They were seeing all sorts of malicious traffic originating from that system and wanted to know what was going on. They had the system shut down immediately.

A few years ago I was given a technical deep dive into Akamai’s bot detection systems. One area they were quite focused on were bots impersonating mobile devices, and in particular mobile apps. It’s commonplace for attackers to try to mimic the behavior of mobile apps because it often provides more direct access to the data they’re looking for than trying to scrape websites.

To counter this threat Akamai developed a library for their customers to incorporate into their apps. This library collects a bunch of haptic data from the mobile device, such as the tilt sensors, accelerometers, finger taps/swipes on the screen, and other available data. It then encrypts it and sends it along to Akamai along with the data the app sends. Akamai then analyzes that haptic data and uses it as part of their bot detection analysis.

It is VERY difficult for a computer to mimic the truly random way a mobile device moves in space, or the way your fingers tap/swipe on a screen. If you were asked to draw a straight line from the upper left corner to the bottom right corner of your smartphone, not only would it not be perfectly straight but it would be quite fluid in its randomness. Writing a computer program to simulate that would be very tough. You’re far more likely to get lots of short straight lines with jagged angles than something that looks like a human drew it. And computer algorithms can quickly analyze this sort of data and return a confidence score indicating if it appears to have been created artificially or not.

So my guess is that when that QR code is scanned it will launch a Google app that will collect some similar haptic data and send it off to Google along with a unique id for that captcha. Google will then quickly analyze that haptic data to determine if you’re a bot or not.

Our solar panels are probably the best investment we ever made. Year to year our electric bill averages out to zero, even with charging our EV. Over the summer our batteries participate in our electric utilities virtual power plant program, which pays us around $2000 each year for the excess electricity we provide. And our state has a renewable energy program that pays us for every megawatt our panels generate, no matter what it’s used for.

This has been the norm for high ranking US politicians for decades. About 10 years ago I attended a talk by former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard. She described how, as PM, she would regularly take walks along a river in Perth and talk with the folks she would encounter. She had a couple personal security guards who would be with her, but it was all very informal.

When Hillary Clinton visited as US Secretary of State she came with an escort of a dozen or so Secret Service in her entourage. On a whim Gillard suggested going for a walk like she usually did. The Secret Service freaked out that this hadn’t been planned weeks in advance, that the walking route hadn’t been scouted out ahead of time, that they didn’t have agents pre-positioned along the route, etc.

I recall that Gillard said they actually did go on a short walk, but the entire Secret Service entourage was very nervous the entire time.