A new way to create podcasts using AI

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I have been creating podcasts on and off — mostly off — since 2007, when Paul Gillin and I came up with the idea to talk to each other about war stories from the tech PR world. (You can listen to the very first pod here.) That series would eventually evolve into several different pods that Paul and I would do over the years, with the most recent episode here. In between these shows, I would freelance pods to various clients and publications such as eWeek and various IDG ones.

Dick and Jane: We LookI tell you this because today in the span of a few minutes, I managed to create some very credible podcasts out of previously just my written content, using a new Google tool called notebooklm.google.com. You upload your documents (PDFs or text files) and it converts them into two-host conversations that use some of it, along with using AI to bring in other information. The two “hosts” sound great: one is a male voice and the other a female voice. Call them Dick and Jane. The AI adds in almost the right amount of temporizing with “ums” and “likes” and back-and-forth byplay into the conversation. You can download the audio files here and hear it for yourself:

  • I wrote a handbook for CSOonline recently about AI security posture management. Here is the pod:
  • I also wrote an article for Internet Protocol Journal about the history of the Interop Shownet. Here is that pod:

I did almost no additional work to create these pods, other than search my own hard drive to find something that I wrote. Both of these samples are about ten minutes long. And while I wrote every word in both articles, the pods use examples that I never wrote (that were actually quite good) and bring in other information.) Using their ML routines to keep things more conversational works reasonably well and you almost believe that Dick and Jane are two live humans talking to each other about something that they “just read.” I could do with a few less inserted “likes” which seem to be the basic conversational building block of a certain generation. One thing that Google hasn’t coded into its system is to have the two hosts talk over each other, which I find annoying on other pods that have multiple human hosts.

Google’s tool is still very much in the experimental stage, but it is free to try out. In addition to creating podcasts, you can also query the content you upload just like any AI system, and it will also provide a summary and FAQs and other supporting things around your content. I would suggest that you don’t upload any private content however.

What does this mean for podcasters? Well, uh, things are going to get very interesting. While the Dick and Jane voices aren’t yet configurable, they are pleasant to listen to and seem 85% human. It also portends that my podcast business is probably dead in the water, not that I ever relied on it to produce any significant revenue. Given that I don’t cultivate any political outrage, or any outrage (other than from non-working tech or over-promised products), there was zero chance that my podcasting career would ever take off.

If you do produce some pods that you would like me to listen and compare to the original source materials, do drop a note in the comments.

Ways to harden your VPN

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Susan Bradley writes today in CSOonline about ways to improve your password hygiene, especially if you are using a VPN to connect to your corporate network. I am horrified to report that I am guilty of doing Bad Things according to Bradley, and what is worse, that I should know better. Let’s review her suggestions:

First, one of the common attacks is taking advantage of password fatigue, whereby someone can gain access to your accounts by trying to figure out your password that was published on the dark web. She writes: “Too many people merely add a letter to a password rather than choosing a better passphrase.” That hand going up in the front of the room is my own. There is no excuse for it — I have a password manager that can make my passwords as complex as need be. Sometimes I add a character in the middle of my previous password. Far better to use multi-factor authentication, she says. I would agree with her, but many of the hundreds of my logins don’t support MFA. That is another travesty, to be sure. But color me lazy.

Another no-no is defending your login by looking for what is called “impossible travel” — whereby your login happens in one place, and your credentials are used in another place halfway across the planet shortly thereafter. VPNs check for this using location tracking. Wait, I thought this was good practice? Not any more: Bradley says this offers a false sense of security and we shouldn’t rely on geolocation blocking. Attackers have figured out ways around the blocks or obscure their locations.

Finally, she offers this wisdom: “It doesn’t hurt to reevaluate your current VPN platforms and consider alternatives such as managed-cloud VPN solutions, bearing in mind that MFA should be mandatory on all accounts.”

Bradley also runs AskWoody, another excellent resource.

Book review: Mapping St. Louis

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Andrew Hahn’s delightful compendium of 40 rare maps of the St. Louis area is informative and an amazing record of the growth — and decline– of the region. He has put together maps from 1767 to the present, including some “fantasy maps” of how contemporary geographers envision the future infrastructure of the city. The maps show how the city developed around the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, and how events such as the Cyclone of 1896 and the fire of 1846 damaged various neighborhoods.

There are many different styles of maps featured, including maps for exploration and navigation, pocket and atlas maps, development and planning maps and pictorial maps.

Two places in the history of the city are chronicled with maps:

There are maps which show the massive population movements of the city — reaching a peak population of some 850,000 in 1950, only to decline to about 280,000 residents today.

Han is a seventh generation St. Louis native, and since 2003 he has worked as director of the Campbell House Museum, an 1851 townhouse in downtown St. Louis.

Andrew Hahn’s delightful compendium of 40 rare maps of the St. Louis area is informative and an amazing record of the growth — and decline– of the region. He has put together maps from 1767 to the present, including some “fantasy maps” of how contemporary geographers envision the future infrastructure of the city. The maps show how the city developed around the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, and how events such as the Cyclone of 1896 and the fire of 1846 damaged various neighborhoods.

There are many different styles of maps featured, including maps for exploration and navigation, pocket and atlas maps, development and planning maps and pictorial maps.

Two places in the history of the city are chronicled with maps:

There are maps which show the massive population movements of the city — reaching a peak population of some 850,000 in 1950, only to decline to about 280,000 residents today.

Hahn is a seventh generation St. Louis native, and since 2003 he has worked as director of the Campbell House Museum, an 1851 townhouse in downtown St. Louis.

Portable air pumps for bike and car: a work in progress

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As an avid cyclist, I have collected a variety of tools to keep my tires inflated, both on the road and at home. These include:

  • A floor pump that has a pressure gauge and fits both Presta and Schrader valve types. We have both here in my family. This is used most frequently, because high-pressure tires tend to lose air over time.
  • A portable pump that has a Presta connection that I carry with me when I am riding. This is useful if I get a flat and have to inflate a new tire just enough to fit it on my rims.
  • A collection of CO2 high-pressure cartridges that can inflate my Presta tires up to full pressure. These are good for a single blast of air.

My social feeds have been filled with various ads for portable electric air pumps. In the distant past, these things were portable in the same sense that the first portable computers were: they were bulky and you wouldn’t want to carry them very far. But the latest generation of pumps weigh about a pound and could easily be carried with you on a ride, or fit in your car’s glove compartment. They range in price from $40 to $120, mostly made in China, and resemble an old-style walkie-talkie in dimensions. I bought one of the cheaper ones on AMZ.

The features that I wanted included:

  • Rechargeable battery via USB. The battery should last through a few inflations of your car tires, because you are pushing a lot more air. The unit that I got needed infrequent recharging. The pump’s screen should give you a rough idea of how much charge is available. Having a USB cable also makes recharging from your car simple, if you have the right cables.
  • A long enough hose that fits between the tire and the pump, so you can maneuver the pump around the target tire more easily.
  • Fits both kinds of tires. The way my pump does this is with a small and imminently losable adapter that screws on to the Schrader valve if you want to inflate a Presta tire. This adapter is very hard to fit on the valve stem, and gets tight enough to ensure you aren’t deflating your tire before you even start the inflation process. It took me a few tries to figure out the process of attaching and detaching the pump from both bike and car, and it would be easier if the vendor had two separate hoses, rather than the add-on adapter, but I didn’t find a unit that came that way.
  • Easy operation and usable screen. My pump shows the existing pressure when attached, and you can set it to stop automatically at a given pressure for both bike and car scenarios. That is helpful, especially for bike tires that can be easily overinflated. It also shows battery status too.

One question was could the new electric unit replace both my hand pump and CO2 cartridges on my rides? Even the smaller units still weigh more than the combination, but it is possible, although you probably have to carry it on your person or if you have a big enough bag on your bike. (My hand pump has a bracket to fit on my bike’s frame ) However, this means using the new pump twice when fixing a flat during a ride: once to get some air in the tire before you put it on the rim, then re-attach for the full inflation. It would be nice if the new pump could snap on and off the valve like my other pumps, but I didn’t see any units that offered that kind of mechanism.

I am not recommending my specific pump, and am calling the whole genre a work in progress. Some of them get very hot as their tiny pump motors work overtime to push the air through, especially for car tires. Some weigh a lot more making them difficult to carry in the back pockets of your jersey. The attach/detach process can be tricky: one time I unscrewed my valve stem completely when trying to remove the short air hose. And there doesn’t seem to be any relationship between price, quality, and user satisfaction from what I could tell.

On cargo cranes and undersea cables

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What do cargo cranes, drones and undersea cables have in common? This isn’t a trick question. All three have significant intersections with Chinese businesses, and all three could be considered critical infrastructure elements that has got our Congress worried. And while normally I wouldn’t highlight the fear mongering (we have enough of that, especially lately), this seems to merit some attention.

A joint Congressional report was released this week which focuses on Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries, a Chinese company which accounts for roughly 80% of the ship-to-shore port cranes operational in the US, and 70% of the worldwide port cranes. These are those huge structures that take cargo off and on container ships. What has got Congress worried is that the cranes are fitted with cellular modems which may have remote software installed. Much of the control systems used by these cranes is subcontracted to industrial suppliers such as ABB and Siemens. However, their gear is shipped to Shanghai and installed by the Chinese before the crane is sent to the ultimate port destination. The investigation found that these companies allow for their gear to be sitting in China for long periods of time outside of their operational control. As you might have guessed, there are no US-based crane manufacturers.

The report cites that more than a dozen software vulnerabilities from SZHI have been reported to American but not Chinese security regulators, saying that it could be a potential national cybersecurity issue.

Let’s move on to drones. The U.S. House of Representatives voted on Monday to bar new drones from Chinese drone manufacturer DJI from operating in the United States, one of a series of measures aimed at China that lawmakers are considering this week. The bill, which still needs to be approved by the Senate before it could become law, would prohibit the company’s products from operating on U.S. communications infrastructure. It would not prevent existing DJI drones from operating in the United States. DJI has 80% of the US drone market share and 54% of the global drone market. Again, one motivation for this proposed ban is the potential for data collection from their operation. Another is the recent fears about Tik Tok data ownership.

Finally, Tom’s Hardware reports that the US and EU are working on a draft statement about undersea communications cable ownership. The proposed language would intentionally exclude Chinese ownership and ask member countries to only consider “trusted suppliers from allied countries,” and require cable operators to have supply chain and data security measures in place, along with more transparent ownership documentation. The lofty proposed language doesn’t specify any enforcement mechanisms, however. The cable market is not yet dominated by any Chinese supplier and is quite competitive. The major US supplier is SubCom.  You might have guessed that here the US dominates in terms of cable ownership, with Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook/Meta owning or leasing at least half of all undersea bandwidth. I am not sure whether FAANG or China would be more of an issue to our regulators.

It is hard to sort out the technology issues from the political, something we have seen with the various Tik Tok screeds. it is clear that figuring out what is happening, understanding the extent of Chinese market control, and understanding whether insidious remote control software is actually present or could be present is a difficult lift.

CSOonline: AI-SPM buyer’s guide

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Widespread adoption of generative AI across businesses has increased the need for contingencies, including AI security software. It is a tall order because AI’s reach into an organization’s infrastructure and data is enormous, meaning that there is a broad spectrum of protective measures required. This is one of the reasons why attackers are drawn to AI abuses.

I examined nine vendors’ tools that handle AI security posture management (AI-SPM). This is an emerging field and unfortunately that means most products are nowhere near as comprehensive or as integrated as they could be. You can read my buyer’s guide in CSOonline here. For your reference, here are a collection of AI SPM screenshots

Book review: Casket Case by Lauren Evans

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Normally, I try to write reviews without any spoilers, but the main spoiler has already been revealed in the blurb about this very inventive and realistic novel about a very modern relationship. She has inherited her family business, and falls in love with a handsome gentlemen. What saves this from being another romance is that the business is a casket showroom, and he is actually a representative of Death. His job is to visit someone who is about to die and comfort them in their final moments. It is an interesting conceit, and his business doesn’t get revealed to her until halfway through the novel, at which point their love affair has fully blossomed. The book nicely deals with mutual trust, sharing one’s feelings, and one’s place in the family in a way that is fresh and interesting. This novel could border on the trite or the macabre, but doesn’t. And the topic of death for me personally is a tough one, having lost my adult son a few years ago to cancer. But Evans treats the topic with a great deal of sensitivity and verve, and I won’t give away the ending but this is a book that is interesting and well worth your time as well as well-written. Highly recommended.

Direct admissions: a new way to get into college

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For the past couple of years, high school seniors have been part of an interesting experiment called direct admissions. Basically, there are systems that allow them to get conditional pre-acceptance offers, without having to fill out much of an application in advance, or even think about where they want to attend. What makes these offers interesting is that they arrive unsolicited. There are a few caveats, but hundreds of students are now attending college using this method.

Back in the pre-historic era when I was a high school senior when I had to walk uphill both ways to school, we had to fill out applications by hand. There was no CommonApp, a system by which a thousand or so colleges agree to basically open source the application process. They are one of the entities involved direct admissions, I’ll get to them in a moment. Each place had its own essay to write. You also had to take standardized tests from places like the College Board, the dreaded SAT or ACT. And then there were the application fees.

Direct admissions puts all that aside. You have to have good grades, of course, or good enough grades for the particular school that you want to attend. But that’s about it. No more stuffing silly clubs to pad your pre-college resume. No more parental nagging about whether you have written word one on your essays.

Not every college is on board, yet. But it clearly is the coming wave. As costs to attend college continue to rise, the onerous application process has to be simplified. One private venture is leading the charge called Niche. Their website has a portal for students to enter the direct admissions world and while there is some information to fill out, it doesn’t seem all that difficult.

There are several states that have signed up to include every graduating high school senior in the program. They notify all graduating seniors in the fall where they have been accepted, based on their GPAs. Minnesota, for example, has 55 two and four year colleges — both private and public — part of the program. Students then have to complete an application to the school of their choice. Missouri has several schools that take direct admissions, including probably one of the best engineering schools in the state.

CommonApp began testing direct admissions in 2021, and now has more than 70 participating schools. Niche began its program in 2022 and now has its own group of 100 or so schools. (Forbes has more details here.) The two have somewhat different qualification criteria. With CommonApp, students have to live in lower-income households to get app fees waived and be the first in their generation to enter college, and can only apply to in-state colleges. Niche doesn’t have any income or geographic threshold.

As the NY Times wrote earlier this year, colleges want more students and need more applicants to maintain their student population. Idaho, which is one of the states with a program, found that student enrollment increased by several percentage points in the first year.

Now, you might guess that the top tier Ivies aren’t on board with direct admissions: they get plenty of attention from the best students. But for many other schools, this could be a way to attract students that may have never considered or even heard of the school. And who doesn’t like getting a “you may already have been admitted” notice? It could be a big ego and motivational boost for some seniors.

If you have a kid that has used direct admissions, please post your experiences, I would be interested to hear from you.

The AI takeover of photography

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I have been a casual camera user for decades, ever since I got a simple box camera in my teens. I actually had a job as a professional photographer when I got out of college, and built my own darkroom in several homes for printing black and white pictures. This obviously was during the pre-digital era. The past few years I have been enjoying my smartphone’s camera, which keeps getting more and more capable. Going digital meant no more darkroom, and being able to print to an online photo processor by uploading my images. Here is a photo that I took recently.

Well, I come bringing bad news, although it initially doesn’t seem that way. First, cameras are getting smarter. It isn’t just a matter of better resolution images, but better software. The new Google Pixel 9 has something called Reimagine, which has some very neat tricks for in-phone picture editing as shown in this threads post by Chris Welch..This used to be the domain of a skilled Photoshop operator. Now you just tap on the right buttons.

Second, AI is moving into more “original” photography. Google’s ImageFX is now available in preview here— you type in a description of a photo that you are interested in, and within a few seconds, it creates a few images that you can choose from. My prompt of a “high-resolution photo-realistic interior of ornate teal art deco living room” brought the following image:

That is a pretty nice setup. Note the lighting effects, and reflections in the glass table  and mirror are pretty darn good.

So what is the bad news you may ask? Well, as someone reminded me, what we are seeing here are the absolute worst images that AI has produced, and the quality will only get better, much better given the pace of AI development. Soon the lenses on the back of your phone will be redundant. Those travel photos that you took of your last trip to someplace exotic? Chances are someone else has been there, posted the pix, and some AI engine has gobbled it up. Just a few clicks and you can be added in the foreground. What about pictures of things? Now Google’s Lens has been improved: it is now part of the Android OS and you can do all sorts of tricks with it to identify what you are seeing on a web page or IRL. No need to set up a pesky set of lights or to compose the perfect image. Just crop with your finger.

While you mull that over, I want to leave you with one last image, of a real electric power station near Budapest. At least, I think it is real and not some AI construct. But soon, it won’t matter much, just as we have forgotten all about using stop bath and learning the zone system.

The evolution of how brand impersonation attacks use social media

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A new academic study of more than 1.3 million social media accounts was given recently at this month’s Usenix conference in Philadelphia. The paper, entitled The Imitation Game: Exploring Brand Impersonation Attacks on Social Media Platforms, makes for interesting reading and sadly shows just how well developed this ecosystem is. Ironically, as business brands pay more attention to social media interactions with their customers, they also enable imposters to launch attacks because people now expect companies to interact with social media. This means that there are many scam accounts that impersonate the brands to create confusion. These lure customers into providing private data and can result in stolen funds and further attacks. The research claims to be the first large-scale measurement of the social scamming ecosystem.

The research team, which was composed of academics from Germany and the US as well as from Paypal, identified almost 350,000 usernames performing various typosquatting techniques to impersonate more than 2,800 brands across Twitter (I know it is called something else, don’t remind me), Instagram, YouTube and Telegram.

Typosquatting is using deliberate typos in user and domain names to make it appear that paypel_support is really the people answering your connection problems. It is not a new problem when it comes to domain names, but as I wrote earlier this year for DarkReading, its use is proliferating in a variety of ways. One way that I didn’t mention is how fraudsters are using it across social media networks. Twitter “is the primary platform for brand impersonation attacks, with fraudsters frequently using typosquatting in their usernames. Roughly a third of these deceptive profiles also use official logos to appear more legitimate.”

The team found that brand impersonation involves multiple steps: after setting up a fake profile (oftentimes using the real brand’s logo to lend legitimacy), the fraudsters engage with customers through posts and offer phony incentives such as discount cards, free services and the like. But the attackers then collect sensitive data, including identities, credit card numbers and other details that are used to engage them in other fraudulent activities.

The most commonly targeted brand is Netflix, which is troubling because right now Netflix is sending out numerous legit messages heralding a change in their account pricing. Apple is the second most targeted brand.

The researchers have several suggestions to try to stem the tide, but admit these will be tough to implement. One of them is pretty obvious: in their work with Paypal, they found that many brands haven’t done their homework and failed to use Know Your Customer methods and continually scan for stolen identities, monitoring their brand mentions online or check for fraud card usage. One recommendation is to send out a quick autoresponse to a customer query to try to engage them before the scammer does. Another is for social media platforms to validate a brand when a new account is created, so that the owner of the proposed paypel_support account really is someone@paypal.com and not fakeuser123123@gmail.