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Saturday, August 30, 2025

Technology, human weakness, and Trump's thing for fraudsters, grifters, and scammers

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When I started researching computer crimes in the late 1980s it quickly became clear that digital technology was creating a lot of new oppor...
Wednesday, June 11, 2025

How jagged AI botches research: an in-depth example of artificial jagged intelligence at work

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Annotated screenshot of Google AI making errors describing the Vienna computer virus During a recent research project at the intersection of...
Friday, May 30, 2025

AI turned my 6,000 word academic paper into a 5-minute podcast, without asking

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I got a disturbing surprise in my email inbox a few days ago when a message appeared saying: "An AI created a podcast of your paper ...
Wednesday, April 23, 2025

2024 sets a record for cybercrime losses and at $16.6 billion it's a lot higher than I predicted

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This chart of losses due to Internet crime per year from 2014 to 2024, as reported to IC3/FBI, shows they have now reached $16.6 billion The...
Saturday, March 15, 2025

Internet crime losses are on the rise, but how fast? We could get latest IC3 stats as soon as this week ... or not

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UPDATE, April 4, 2025 — After writing this article last month (March, 2025), I realized that the focus of the article, the IC3 annual repor...
Thursday, October 24, 2024

Welcome to Online: risks, harms, and duty of care in the virtual high crime neighborhood we all inhabit

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Welcome to Online (see Alt text for credit) Is the constant news of fresh cybercrimes getting you down?  Has your personal information been ...
Saturday, July 20, 2024

Global IT Outages and Monoculture: The “potato famine theory” of information system insecurity

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Painting: An Irish Peasant Family Discovering the Blight of their Store, by Daniel MacDonald The following article explains the problem of ...
Monday, April 01, 2024

Internet crime keeps on growing, as do efforts to understand the harm it causes

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Internet crime losses 2014-2023, as reported to IC3/FBI,  and compiled by S. Cobb Losses from Internet crimes reported to the FBI's Inte...
Wednesday, November 29, 2023

QR code abuse 2012-2023

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QR code abuse is in the news again—see the list of headlines below—whch reminds me that I first wrote about this in 2012 ( eleven years ago ...
Saturday, November 04, 2023

Artificial Intelligence is really just another vulnerable, hackable, information system

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Recent hype around Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the amazingly good and bad things that it can and may do has prompted me to remind the w...
Wednesday, April 12, 2023

What is ChatGPT and how can AI get things wrong: an annotated example using jackware

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You can't trust what ChatGPT says ChatGPT is, as you probably know, a computer system that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to answer q...