NC #1108 Excel Dependencies, Virtual ][ Emulator, Renaming Files Using Numbers, Security Bits

Hi, this is Allison Sheridan of the Nozylla Cast Podcast, hosted at podfeed.com, a technology heat podcast with an ever-so-slite Apple bias. Today is Sunday, August 2nd, 2026, and this is show number 1108. I hit a really high note on the "ever" that time. Well, the show I'm recording right now is the last live show before our great European vacation. I'll be publishing a show on Thursday before we leave, then the venerable Aleister Janks will be hosting the show for the weekend of August 16th. Jill, Bart and Aleister have all worked their little microphone magic, and so he's got plenty of content. We think there's going to be spillover for me to do the show on August 23rd, which is the day after we come back from the trip. On the 23rd, there will be a live show, but I won't be doing too much talking, everything's probably going to be pre-recorded. I'm probably going to be napping most of the time, but the cameras and microphones will be live. Now if you are interested in being on distribution for my Travelogs, send an email to alicinapodfeet.com asking to be added to the Travelog distribution list. Once you're on, you're on forever until you opt out, so that's a big warning. Anyway, I've got a whole lot of people getting that Travelog while we're on, and I have a lot of fun writing it. It motivates me to have so many people who seem to like to read it. I better get started, because we have great content and a great security bit that includes a super deep dive into what happened between OpenAI's model, breaking containment, and getting into hugging faces network. It's fantastic, but this is a really, really long show as a result. Early one evening, Alistair Jenks sent me a fun Excel question, unfortunately that was 10pm the day before, for me, as he's in New Zealand, times are hard. I was so intrigued by the question that I told him I'd work on it the next day, and as no surprise to anyone, it was the first thing I thought of when I woke up the next day. The question Alistair asked was, "Do you know if there's a way in Excel for Mac to find out everywhere a cell is referenced?" You know what I asked him before looking into this, right? What problem were you trying to solve?" He answered with, "I have a complicated workbook with multiple sheets and all sorts of bespoke calculations. I have a set of values, numbers of days, that have been unchanged almost since I started working on this months ago. It's also finally balanced and results in real money going places, so before I change one of the values, I want to see what areas I need to consider. I could just look to see what changes, but it would be easy to miss things. Well now I was invested in the solution. I mean, I wasn't financially invested, he was, but I was mentally invested on behalf of my friend. I have to confess that I had to search for the answer and what I discovered was that there are two methods, both with their own merits. The first method is a hidden keystroke not shown in any of the menus. Select the cell for which you want to see dependence, and then hold down control and the right bracket. And all dependents of that cell on the same sheet will be selected. Using this method, you could then tap the paint bucket icon in the Home tab to set them say all to yellow, making them easier to find as you work on the spreadsheet. If you want to see the precedence, meaning all cells on which the selected cell is dependent, you use control left bracket. Now this is quite useful, but it won't actually solve Alistair's problem because it only finds dependence and precedence on the same sheet as the selected cell. The second option is more effective as a solution to Alistair's problem. It's also quite clever and not like anything I've ever seen in Excel before. Before you select the cell you want to trace, switch to the formulas tab. You should see a section with three commands. Use precedence, trace dependence, and remove arrows with a downward chevron. As always with Microsoft Office, remember that if your window is too narrow, you may not see all of these options. Now let's talk about what happens if we select a cell and we choose trace dependence from the ribbon. Excel draws arrows from the selected cell towards the dependent cells. That's great for cells on the current sheet, but it also puts a little arrow indicating any dependencies that exist on other sheets. There's a little sheet icon too stuck to the end of the arrow. If you click on the arrow indicating other sheets, you get a little pop-up window that says go to, and then it lists all of the dependent cells on the other sheets. If you click on any one of them, their sheet will open with the cell selected. The arrows you apply stay on the screen while you're working, but they disappear when you save. As with the keystroke, I would suggest color coding the dependence so they're easier to spot if you have to come back to the spreadsheet. Excel also has a command in the same section of the ribbon to trace precedence, which finds all cells on which your selected cell depends and indicates those with arrows. All these arrows flying about can get confusing. You can manually remove the arrows in the same section of the ribbon using the remove arrows drop down. From there, you can choose to remove dependent arrows, precedent arrows, or all arrows. Now, if you don't favor the ribbon, all of these dependent, precedent, and arrow removal options are also available from the menu bar for Excel in the Tools menu under Auditing. Or, you can have all the fun of learning an exploration ruined by selecting a cell and just asking co-pilot what cells depend on this cell. I tried it, and I got the right answers. The good news is that it took a lot longer than tapping the Trace Dependence button, and it didn't give me a handy go-to dialog box to quickly navigate to the dependent cells. Bottom line is that I really enjoyed the discovery of a new trick in Excel. I'm sure I've had the same problem to be solved before, but it never occurred to me to see if maybe Excel could do this automatically and in such an intuitive and graphical way. So thanks for asking the question, Alistair. That was fun. Last week, I regaled you with tales of excitement running VisiCalc in a browser-based emulator for the Apple II. This was great fun. This week, I was on the clockwise podcast, and my question to the other participants was whether they enjoyed dusting off super-old technologies and playing with them. Jason Snell told us during this conversation about a standalone Apple II emulator made just for modern max. The app is called Virtual 2, spelled the 2 back-facing square brackets for the 2, and you can download it from virtuali.com. As much fun as it was to play with VisiCalc in a Chromium browser, every time I sat down to play with it, I had to start over. The joy of Virtual 2 is that with a paid-for license, you can save the state of the machine. This means you can play with VisiCalc and have a fancy spreadsheet going and save the machine state with that spreadsheet active and filled out so you can come back to play with it later. I'm not sure how many of you want to continue to play along with me, but I'd like to document how I do things so that I can come back to these posts later. I'm going to walk you through how to install this app and how to get virtual disk images to load into the emulator for the Apple II. If you want a bunch of free games and applications to play with, this is something you might actually enjoy. You download the disk image for the trial version of Virtual 2 just like installing any other application on your Mac. After you drag the app icon into your application's directory, you'll notice a few other files you can optionally drag into a folder you're choosing. Since this operating system worked on a system of plugging in floppies and later cassettes, you're going to need a folder anyway where you're going to put all of your virtual disk images such as Physicalk. The folder includes a valuable readme file that explains how to get started. You'll also see a file called welcometap.css and the icon looks like a cassette tape. Well, that's got to be fun. Finally there's a folder called ADT and I don't actually know what it was for, but I imagine it was included for a good reason, so I copied that over too. For reference, I've included a link to the Virtual 2 documentation in the show notes. When you first launch the Virtual 2 app, you'll see that it's emulating the Apple 2e, which is an advanced version of the model. You'll see a toolbar across the top and some thumbnails down the right side of your, on the right side, that show you attached virtual floppy drives and cassette drives, and I'm pretty sure it's the 5 inch drives, by the way. We'll come back to those later. But the dominant part of the interface is the computer screen itself, which has a bright green banner that says "No suitable ROM file could be found". It helpfully suggests that you open the help file to see how to proceed. It really hit home that this is a proper Mac app, because the help file opens in Apple's tips app, or you can open it on the web, which is actually a little bit more convenient. The help file explains that the Apple 2 machines came with built-in software in ROM that's read-only memory, so you have to download the ROM image file separately from the virtual machine. It's not hard, but it's an extra step. In the docs, they give you a link to download all 5 supported machines in one zip file. When you expand the zip file, you get ROMs for 5 different versions of the Apple 2 computer. Back in Virtual 2, under the file menu, you'll find "Show ROM folder". This will open your user library application support virtual 2/rom folder in Finder, allowing you to drag in the ROM image you just downloaded. Now you're ready to start a Virtual Apple 2 machine in Virtual 2. This is the easy part. In the file menu, choose new machine, and you'll see the 5 virtual Apple 2 machines we just downloaded. I chose to honor that young boy named Ken Case and go with the pure Apple 2, not the plus, e, or either of the C versions with their fancy 16 and 32 kilobytes of ROM. Now, I haven't yet been able to figure out how to get the vanilla Apple 2 to do anything though. It fills the screen with question marks, and that gives me a star prompt. I'm not sure if there's anything wrong, but the steps I'm about to describe for the 2e machine didn't work when I applied them to the 2. Oh well, another excuse to play with Ken Case again soon. The 2e machine option starts with a blinking left bracket prompt. If it doesn't go to this prompt, by the way, press the reset. button and that will fix it. The help documentation explains that you can get some instructions by loading the welcome cassette we saw earlier. The interface to load the tape is super fun. You drag the.cass file onto the thumbnail of a cassette in the main window interface. It gets a play arrow on it after you drag the file in to show that it's ready. Next, you type load and you hit enter. You hear a series of beeps and then you click on the cassette tape again to eject it. At this point, you can type run. You'll be rewarded with a screen that explains virtual tools features on macOS, including support for all text and graphics modes, floppy and hard disk emulation, USB and Bluetooth gamepads, the ability to save and resume a running machine, an emulation of the old image writer printer and Apple II mouse. I'm not going to keep going with everything it told me, but if you press any key, it continues to tell you more things you can do with the emulator. After going through a few screens, it explains that you're running the trial version of virtual tool and it will pause for one minute after every 10 minutes of operation. Now they sell a limited license for $16 or full license for $33. You can upgrade from limited to full at any time with no penalty in price, but you know what, I went straight for the full license right away because that's where you can make and restore machine snapshots at any time, which was one of the things I was excited about. By the time I loaded VisiCalc into this virtual machine, I'd already gotten at least $33 worth of entertainment out of this application. I put a link in the show notes to where you can compare what the licenses do between the limited and full license. Now that we've got our virtual machine running, we need to find some apps. For this, I headed over to the internet archives where I found a page titled Apple2DiskImage Collection. There is no information whatsoever about what's including in this zip or torrent file, but I took one for the team and I downloaded the 500 megabyte zip with my figures crossed hoping that VisiCalc would be in there amongst the other programs. After expanding the zip file, I suggest you put the Apple2DiskImage folder into your favorite Apple2 emulator folder that we created earlier. You'll find subfolders for communications, disk utilities, educational, games, graphics, productivity, programming, sound, and miscellaneous. To give you an idea of how much is in here, the educational folder alone has 279 items and a fair number of those are zip files themselves, spolunking in the productivity folder revealed a subfolder for spreadsheets, and there was my beloved VisiCalc. Okay, cool. Now we've got all of these nifty programs to play with. How do we make them go in virtual too? Well, under the media menu in virtual too, you'll see open favorite disk folder and search Apple2DiskImages. If you select open favorite disk folder, it'll prompt you to tell you to tell it where that folder is for future use, and from then on, it'll always know where to look. It also opens the preferences to the favorite stab where it allows you to select that folder. All right, now we can navigate to our favorite disk folder and either double-click on the program, which is no fun, or we can drag our desired program into the floppy drive. The best part is you can hear the floppy go, you can hear and see the door close on the drive, and then you're rewarded with the left square bracket prompt, and that's it. Nothing else. I tried load, start, run, go, nothing would make VisiCalc start up. I have to confess I went to an LLM for help, and I learned that typing PR number six would start the floppy in slot six drive one. This was really fun because at this point I could hear all kinds of foreing and clicking. It's awesome. It was fantastic. VisiCalc will ask you if you want to use 80 columns, and then whether you have the Videx Inverse Character Generator. Okay? Well, in my experience, if you say yes to the 80 columns, no matter how you answer the second question, it will ask you again about the 80 columns. If you say no to 80 columns, then you can proceed regardless of how you answer the Videx Inverse Character Generation question. Now I knew I couldn't get away with not figuring out what the Videx Character Generator was, so again I asked an LLM. Perplexity explained that it was a character ROM or video hardware logic used by a Videx 80 column card to display inverse video text, that is white on black characters instead of normal black and white text. Well, I'm over here with green on black, so I'm not sure what that's about. So I'm pretty sure I don't have that Videx card thingy, and I guess I don't have the 80 column card either. So answering no to the first question was the right answer. Once you get past that little confusion, you'll be rewarded with my beloved Vizicalc. Now when Jason was telling us about Virtual 2 during clockwise, he mentioned the game "Load Runner". This was the first game we ever played on a Mac, and I have a great memory from our late friend Eric. He took care of our cats while we were away one time, and he started playing "Load Runner". He lost track of time. He confessed that he played for 6 hours straight. Now if you aren't familiar with the game "Load Runner", your character's job is to run back and forth and climb ladders to get to little treasure boxes. But at the same time, these other characters are chasing you. Your job is to trick them into falling a path where they can't catch you before you get to the treasure. I found "Load Runner" in that giant pile of games in the Apple 2 disc image, and I played the game of my youth. And then I remembered how I was never very good at it. I have not yet gotten past the first level. Now I have barely scratched the surface of the customizations you can make in Virtual 2. The manual is 84 pages long and very small text, and covers all kinds of crazy stuff about configuring game controllers and how to enable mouse mode and more. I wonder whether that Vitex ROM thingy is in there. Well guess what else? Virtual 2 is in active development. The latest release notes from developer Gerard Putter are from July 2026. I wrote to him asking how to make that Apple 2 machine thing actually go, but he hasn't gotten back to me yet. The bottom line is that now I have a vast array of programs to learn and play with. This article would have been much longer, but I started playing with programs like Alphabet Zoo, Aquarium, Dr. Seuss, Fix Up the Mix, Pub Book, Pub, Puzzler, and then reviewing Algebra 1. I'm like Eric, I lost track of time. Even if you have no sentimental attachment to the Apple 2, this isn't an opportunity to explore hundreds of free programs, so go have some fun with Virtual 2. George from Tulsa here to share a couple of Mac file management tips I use every day. In Allison's honor, here's the problem to be solved. There's now four of us in my work group. We download, create, and edit lots of files, then store them on a Synology NAS with Zillions of others accumulated over decades. Without a consistent naming convention, chaos will ensue, and that's as true for my smaller collection of personal files as for the larger said work. Tip number one. It's easy to use the number spreadsheet program Apple bundles with every Mac to semi-automatically create consistent file names. If you have a Mac, you have the necessary software. Tip number two. Apple's bundled software makes it super easy to name files, and, while they're open, easily drag and drop them to any folder on your Mac or connected network, as well as, if they're PDFs, into another PDF. As this kind of process is both difficult and excruciatingly boring to explain an audio, I encourage you to check out the full step-by-step tutorial I've provided Allison to post in her show notes for this episode, and, with that, I'll sign off with a venerable message. Stay patched, and stay subscribed. Well, George thought it would be excruciatingly boring, but I don't think it is, so he sent his text instructions along, including screenshots to explain this in detail, how he exhalates this useful maneuver. Even though he said it wouldn't do it justice, I've taken the liberty of stealing the microphone he gave up, and I'll explain what he gave us in written text. George keeps a template file going in Apple numbers, which has four columns. He starts with an auto date column, which is populated with the today function. He explains that one caution. He says it's possible that today function won't auto-update today every time you open the sheet, but it should update anytime you type anything new into the spreadsheet. So today reads the system clock. Now is a similar function you can try. For file searching and sorting, having the explicit date in year-month date is essential and will be useful for cross-platform and on external servers, like Linux-based Synologies. Now annotations on his screenshot show everything needed to duplicate the sheet on your own Mac, and once you've done that, you can customize your own version. He includes a column for the deposit number he uses to keep track of which deposit is which. Of course, we need to pay or, and the amount deposited. He then uses a function called TextJoin to combine the values into one text ring that he'll use to name the files. I'd never looked at text drawing before. I would have used concatenate to do this. But man, I got to learn a new formula and why you do use it versus the one I already knew. So yay! If I understand it properly, TextJoin lets you define a delimiter between values to join, instead of having to explicitly type it every time you do with concatenate. For example, if I want to combine cells A1 and A2 with a space between them, with concatenate, I'd have to write concatenate a to comma quote space quote comma B2. So I have to do that between every single one that I'm going to put in that concatenation. Now that's just, you know, easy with two values, but what if like George, I wanted to string four values together with space between them. That would require typing three times that darn comma quote space comma. Wait, comma quote space quote. That's a big waste of time and it's also error prone. With text join, the first argument is what you want to use as a separator. In our example, it would be a space so we'd only have to write quote space quote one time. You do have an extra step with text join though. You have to next tell it what to do about empty cells where true means to skip them and false means to include them as a blank in the join text string. I learned something else in George's equation that wasn't explained in the documentation. His deposit number column was a set of pure numbers, but he wanted the number symbol in front of him in the file names. So instead of say 15 13, it would say number 15 13. To do this, his formula says quote number quote ampersand B2 turns out that ampersam is called wait for it the concatenation operator. It's to combine two values without the separator. Now this all sounds like a lot of work, but remember this is automating repetitive tasks. If you create a bunch of files at once and want this standard naming convention, it's worth the trouble to set it up this one time. Next up, he shows an image of the tiny Mac tip for Alice and folder structure, which contains two subfolders, incoming scans and scan to bank. He's got one called scan, zozozo1.pdf and incoming scans, and it's a $2 million check he received for winning the Irish lottery. He wanted to apply the consistent name convention numbers generated for the scan and then move it from incoming scans to the scan to bank folder. After he's deposited the check, he'll scan the deposit receipt and use previewed emergent into the check pdf. So he included a nice photo of his Irish sweepstakes winning of $2 million. Clicking on the file name opens the renaming box. He calls it bulky and I'll get back to that in a minute. So if you click on the name, that's what gives you the renaming option. Clicking exactly on the down-carot at the right of the file is how you get that thing to pop down. You can't really click on the name again. Click on that little tiny arrow. With the renaming box open, copy and paste the file name generated by numbers. Hit enter and the file is renamed. He gives us a heads up. He says hitting enter instantly renames the original file. If you made any changes in the file, there's no going back. He suggests always duplicate in the file if you're going to edit it to make sure to only work on a copy. You can later delete the original if you no longer need it. He gives us the rename file in its original incoming scans folder. With the saved and rename file still open, clicking on its name will display a tiny file icon to the name's left. You may remember Bart telling us the official name for this tiny file icon is called the proxy icon. Grab that icon and you can drag the file to any folder you wish. Anywhere on your Mac, anywhere on your connected network storage. He moved it to the local folder, scanned to bank. Finally, you can use the file icon to drag the file into the sidebar of another PDF open in preview and merge them. Might only save us a few seconds, but he says those are a very satisfying few seconds. Doing that copies the drag file into the target PDF and leaves the original in place as a separate file. When you save the target file with a new addition, it'll save under its original name but with a new inclusion. If you want the original back without the added inclusion, you need to delete the inclusion. As best as he can tell, the file naming and dragging trick works on software Apple bundles with Macs. He's tried it with preview, text edit, pages and numbers. Possibly works with others, but only PDFs can be dragged into PDFs. As it final heads up, he says using the trick to move a file moves the original, does not create a duplicate and leaves the original in its place. So the bottom line is I'm thanking George for the nifty idea and the tutorial on the nitty gritty details. I learned a new formula and a spreadsheet app that I will definitely be using in the future when I have long concatenations. I also learned a new word "ballkey". He used it to describe how it's tricky to get that little drop down to select to show a file name. I looked it up and the dictionary says "ballkey" or he spells it B-A-L-K-Y. It says it's B-A-U-L-K-Y in U.S. English, but it means "reluctant" or "uncooperative". What a great word for that little drop down. We had a great week. Pat Dengler let me help her figure out where to put her HVAC system in the app under my roof. My friend Diane let me help her get her portable ViewSonic USB-C display configured to show up on the correct side of her Mac and David Roth and I had a play date so I could help him make a pivot table in this giant data set he wanted to understand. But my favorite was when friend and no silacast way, Rolly Bernard needed to help printing the export of a packing mind map. And instead of just answering his email, I called him on the phone to help him unravel the complex path he was on. When we were done he was happy and he said "Gee, after all this personalized support, I'd better add a nickel to what I already contribute through Patreon to help you pay for that extra bot protection you're paying for through Cloudflare". You know what? You can be cool like Rolly and become a supporter by going to podgey.com/patreon finding a donation amount that's right for you. No contribution is too small or too big. I'm talking to you George with that $2 million. Well it's that time of the week again it's time for security bits with Bart Wieschatz where we always have fun no matter how bad the news is. Maybe that should be our tagline. Actually that's an interesting way of describing it. Yeah it's like we give you scary news with the smile and a silver lining. Right right right. So where are we starting today? Quite a few little stories we've been following before just to follow up on and actually I've realized why these notes are longer than usual because I did a solo show on a Tuesday. So it's been two and more than a half weeks. So that might be why these notes are long. Because I was worried we have a deep dive too right? We do. It's quite deep quiet. All right. Okay so we have talked a lot recently about residential proxy apps where they always seem to be television based at the moment because people want not to pay for things. And then we discovered last time that certain major vendors their app stores were riddled with these proxy apps. Well one of those naughty vendors took note of the bad publicity and LG have now banned them from their app store. So that is better. Mine blowing idea. I know. Imagine policing your app store. Anyway we've also talked a lot about age verification. That is very much the fashionable thing this year and last year to be honest. And New York are joining the club in an interesting way. So they've passed a bill and it goes into effect in January 2027. And so I was reading it going okay how's this like the others or how's it not like the others? Well this isn't oh I see a terrible typo in the show notes. This is not about preventing access to social media for kids. This is the opposite of that. So what the law actually does is it targets the social media platforms and says that unless you know the user is an adult you cannot enable addictive features like infinite scroll and you must not send push notifications at night. Oh that's clever. It is clever. The other thing is age verification doesn't have to be with government IDs. So to quote the Mac observer companies are not forced to collect government IDs from everyone. They can use alternative methods as long as those methods meet accuracy benchmarks. So if you have a way of doing this that's accurate enough that'll do. We don't need we don't need government IDs. If they do get government IDs they must delete or at least disassociate themselves immediately. So the moment the verification is good. Yeah. It's a point in time risk which is way less bad than oh yeah we'll delete it and we'll keep it for a week and we'll fix a plan to get around to maybe delete it later. Oh we've had a data breach. Whoopsie. This is much better. I wonder how this works like retroactively. If I've already got a Facebook account will it then challenge me to prove I'm an adult and if I refuse then I don't get infinite scrolling and I don't get bugged at night. Actually that is a feature actually yeah. I think though if just going by what happened in the UK with Apple if you have an established account for more than 18 years that counts as age verification by an alternative method because unless time travel has been invented you are an adult. Right. I'm just wondering if a kid got an account six months ago and they live in New York will they now be challenged? I don't know that level of third person. Okay 2007 is when this comes into effect. I imagine we'll see. 2007, maybe? Yes. Yes. That makes. Speaking of time machines. So we shall see closer to the time I imagine some fine grain details, but it's interesting that not everyone is doing it the same as the ones that set off my AUGA meter a year ago. Right. Like Texas takes the cake for that. So you know, interesting. We've also talked a lot about supply chain attacks. And I felt like I was redoing yesterday's programming by Stealth, what I was writing these show notes. I think I've seen this before, but attacking the place developers go to get things is an extremely effective way of poisoning software. And one of the features of the last couple of months is the people who run these kind of places like GitHub, hardening their systems to make it harder to abuse their systems to attack everyone else. And so there are new ways of allowing depend bot, which is an automated tool for helping you block dependencies from backing off in time. And so the depend bot will not immediately push something at you, it will give it an amount of time to cool off and for malicious stuff to be discovered. So again, it's just fine tuning and making these things a little safer by default. And all of it will add up. None of it on its own is the answer. But all of it is, you know, yes and basically so it's the more the better. Good, good, good. I also like it when there are consequences for some villains we've talked about in the past. 23 and me are paying 18 million dollars to settle their 2023 data breach. Coming up the world's biggest settlement, it's not a class action. So users get nothing. This is two states attorney generals, states state attorneys general going to realize that right. Your French history there is people forget how much France was important in America's early history anyway. And if you actually do the math, it's like two to three dollars per user they breached and they breached their DNA seems like just a little weeks off there. Yeah. Meanwhile. And it didn't go to the breached users. Yeah. So look, it's better than nothing, right? It makes a good headline and it should make some chief chief security officers pay attention in other corporations. So it's not meaningless, but I would have liked a bit more kind of a step on the wrist. Italy meanwhile, our finding a US data broker 2 million euro again would be nice if it was bigger, but I still like to see data brokers get their co-opens for breaking privacy laws. So that was nice. That's good. And then finally, we talked, I think probably two installments ago about hide my email being reversible in some way that we didn't know about and we still don't actually know how the flow worked, but we do know it is now patched. At least the one that started a year ago has now been fixed. However, there's a different one that was found a few days after Apple patched that one. And this one is different because it's not a problem with hide my email. It's a problem with mail on Mac. And one of the things it can do is de-anonymize and hide my email address. It can also reveal anyone's Apple ID if they have two accounts on Apple mail. So if you put a header into someone's email address that is not an iCloud email address and they open it in Mac mail, Mac mail doesn't verify the header is really from Apple. It assumes this is an alias on your iCloud account and as soon as you hit reply on that email, the from address becomes your true Apple ID. So if someone sends an email to my non-iCloud address, if I don't look, mail.app will reply from my iCloud account, which I do not share with people. People do not know my at Mac.com address, but mail.app will give it away because it has a bogey in how it processes mail headers. That seems like something they could fix. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, it's not the same kind of issue as the previous one, but it's kind of embarrassing. We've finally fixed it. Oh, oopsie. Oops. Anyway. So we have no listener queries this time. Well, technically, if I'm a listener and I ask you a question and this deep dive answer is exactly where I was hoping we would go. So I'm going to call it. Okay. Fair enough. I am going to still use this as an opportunity to remind people if there's something cyber security on your mind, you go to potfee.com/slack, join the lovely community there, all amazing people. There are very few places on the internet that are so purely positive and zero toxic. I adore your community. Such a nice place. Our community. Yeah. And you can go in there and there's a channel for security bits and you can ask a question and then that will be input when I'm writing the shout outs. So we should definitely get more of those because I know people do have questions. Yeah. Okay. So we have a bit of a story. Basically, the two leading AI labs both lost control of unreleased cybersecurity focused models while they were testing them. They escaped the lab, hacked real websites on the actual internet. They didn't happen to do any physical world damage because they attacked sites that aren't connected to the electricity grid or pipelines or water systems or hospitals. What they could have is no difference in the cyber security of a website like hooking face and a typical hospital. In fact, I think hooking face might be more secure than a lot of hospitals I'm afraid. So really, this should be a wake up call, but only time will tell. So that was my TLD or we of course are going and I would suggest it's not been a wake up moment, but from evidence so far, yeah, there's some evidence it has in certain places. I think it's yes, and not enough, but not zero. So this is the biggest story of the year as far as I'm concerned. And we are going to go into the detail. The story didn't break all at once. And this is one of those things where sometimes I'm happy that we only record every two weeks because we get to tell this all instead of me telling you half of it one week and then having to remind you of everything and then start again with the second half. So we get a full review here and we are going to go through what happened, but I need to take a little break to make sure we're all on the same page for a little bit of computer science, a little bit of theoretical computer science, not something we talk about often. The alignment problem because it's extremely relevant. So it's one of the things that people who philosophise about AI worry about. And this is a good example of why. So we human beings have inherent context that is basically this shared values all of humanity has. And they're so built into us, we don't think about them. We don't think about the fact that someone says, hey, do you want to work on ending world hunger that we don't assume killing all the people who are too much for the current food supply would be a valid answer because we have a shared context that you and doesn't set up a task force called the ending world hunger without murdering everyone task force because that last part is assumed, right? Right. Artificial intelligence does not share our implicit understanding of the world, which means that when you set a task to an AI, you need to be absolutely sure. You have captured all of those things you're not thinking about because they're completely intuitive to you and express them all completely to the AI. Otherwise there will be unintended consequences and they may be quite dramatic. So we just rewatched a robot with Will Smith and that's exactly what happened is the AI says, well, we were supposed to make sure you didn't get harmed and yet you're hell bent on harming yourself and doing all these stupid things. So we're just taken over because you don't you don't get to do this anymore because you're not good at it. Perfect example. And the alignment problem has been in the mind of philosophers since AI was an idea that we couldn't physically do because we didn't have the silica, which is why I think it's azimuth wrote a robot as a short story. Those kind of sci-fi writers were already asking the questions that were then philosophical. It was sci-fi and today they're real. This is a thing now, we have to address the alignment problem and we have to tackle it. So one of the obvious sort, my example of Feed the World, the AI could just decide, well, let's look at the average population, let's look at the food supply, anywhere where the food supply isn't aligned, I will put some arsenic in the water supply, and that'll take care of that. Food is now entirely in line with the population. Oh, okay, you've told me I can't do that. Okay, then I'll sneak some contraceptives in and we'll do it a bit more slowly. Anywhere where the population's too high, we'll just make sure people don't make babies. Problem will soon be solved. What do you mean you're not happy? All right, so the classic example, which I have to tell people of, because every textbook goes this way, it's a thought experiment from a, no, no, he's somewhere in Scandinavia. I don't remember which of the three Scandinavian countries, so we just say his name is Nick Bostrom and he's a philosopher. And in 2003, he postulated the paperclip maximizer. So I will quote Nick Bostrom, "Suppose we have an AI whose only goal is to make as many paperclips as possible." Sounds pretty innocent, so that's me opinion, opinionizing there. The AI will realize quickly that we would much better if there were no humans, because humans might decide to switch it off. Because if humans do so, there would be fewer paperclips. Also, human bodies contain lots of atoms that could be made into paperclips. The future that the AI would be trying to gear toward would be one in which there were lots of paperclips, but no humans. That's perfect. Swedish, by the way. Swedish, thank you. I knew it was Scandinavia. I got that far. That's great. That's awesome. So now we can look at what happened. So the first piece of news we got was not from one of the AI companies. The first thing we heard was that the open-source AI community website HuggingFace, they host open-source, open-weight models, they hold open data sets, they host tooling to help people develop AI in the open. So they're kind of like the opposite of the closed companies who won't tell you how anything works, just charge you for the models. HuggingFace hosts, they're like the github of open-source AI. In fact, they're about as big as github in terms of people who do work on open AI. They are the github of open AI. Open-source AI. Open-source AI. Open space AI, not open AI. That's important. It's getting hard to talk. Their website was attacked and their cybersecurity team were almost certain it was by agentic AI because of the way the attack was happening and they were very open about it and they shared all the information with the community and the cybersecurity community agreed. It's like, yeah, you were attacked by agentic AI and we have no idea which one, but you were attacked by agents of some kind. We also learned from HuggingFace that they had tried to use AI to defend themselves because the only way to defend against something that happens with the speed and intensity of AI is AI. So they tried to use the latest models from open AI and anthropic and because of the new safeguards, the American administration hurriedly enforced on them, the models couldn't tell the difference between offensive and defensive cyber security. So they said no. They just went, no, cat help, sorry. So HuggingFace were forced to use open-weight models which are all Chinese to defend themselves from this unknown cyber or this unknown AI agent. Okay, I'm going to stop you here because I get very easily confused on the different names of these types of models. What you just used to phrase, what kind of model did you see? So I don't know what an open-weight model is. Okay, so a neural network, which is what a model is, is just a grade of pretend neurons that are connected to each other with mathematical strengths. So those are called the weights and the hard work of building something like Claude is finding weights that do something useful. So when they use, when they hoover up half the internet to train an AI model, what they're doing is making an array of numbers that are these weights. Other people who do training and want to share the results with everyone, they publish the array of weights. So that's called an open-weight model. And so you can take that array of numbers and put it into your iPhone's neural engine and it will do that model. Your iPhone will become that AI model and it will do whatever that AI model was trained to do. So it's a way of sharing the model. But only the Chinese models are sharing those weights. All the US models are closed source. It's not quite that simple. So the big companies do not share their models. Right. So open AI and anthropic do not share their models. They're close to waste. Apple don't share their models either. There are open-weight models from all over the world. But the ones that are actually good, the ones that are almost as capable as open AI, there may be a month or two behind, those are coming out of China because China is throwing money into this like you wouldn't believe. And the Chinese government have decided we can't out-compete by keeping secret. We can only out-compete America by sharing with the world so that we benefit from the whole open source community. So China are now driving all of the open AI, open-weight AI. Because that's the only path to victory for them. So that left hugging face with the choice of using a Chinese model as their only choice. That was the only way they could defend themselves. And that's not what they wanted to do. That wasn't there. Oh yeah, let's use a Chinese model here. It was like, oh sugar. This is happening now. What have we got? What have we got? Oh my god, we only have these models. So they're any being that the government didn't want them to be allowed to do these non-guard railing things. They had put up the guard rails to keep them from doing things in the way they did it was by using Chinese open-weight models. Yeah, that was the only option they had to defend themselves, which is exactly the thing that the American government are trying to give open AI and anthropic an advantage so that they retain their lead. And the end result has been to force people to use the very models they don't want to win. So the point where hugging face have said, if you're a cybersecurity defender and you need defenses, you must have ready to use open-weight models because otherwise in a crisis you may find yourself in big trouble. You can't be reinventing the wheel in a crisis. You have to have them ready. That's really not what anyone wanted. That's all intended consequences. That's misalignment of a different kind. So that was the first thing we discovered. There is open, there is AI attacking a real website. Then we got a very sheepish, oopsie, it was us, from open AI, no space between the letters. I thought it was actually hugging face who announced it. That it was open AI, but that they were, they were, the way the announcement went, this is where I was saying I'm not sure they have made a day, an awakening moment, was the CEO was like, huh, that was crazy, huh? Now I did do a little more than that. A woo-goo? They did do a little bit of a woo-gooing. So the first announcement, basically, open AI went to hugging face and said, may occult, but it was us. So hugging face didn't discover it was open AI. Open AI came to hugging face to say. I just but they announced it. Sorry. And I don't actually remember who made the first press release. So you may well have been hugging face, but open AI did launch an investigation. One of the things they said was we're launching an investigation. So the reason this story kept breaking is because that investigation has kept revealing things. So that first response you just gave may have been with a P or hat on. And that behind the scenes, under the water line, the duck was paddling furiously while above the water line the duck was trying to look very serene. So there is more to come. So what we learned initially was, yeah, it was one of our models, open AI. It was in test in a supposedly isolated sandbox with no internet access. And we had turned off all the guardrails because we wanted to see what it could do. And we had said it, a standard cybersecurity benchmark, which is hosted on hugging face because that's one of the open source. He sort of things, right? How do we do? How do we judge which model is better? We have open benchmarks. And that's open source. So that's on hugging face, right? They host all this open source stuff. So the AI had been tasked with solving this problem. And they hadn't been told that they were in a test environment or whatever. The AI realized it was a test, realized exactly which test it was. And their goal was to get the answer. So they were not aligned to solve the problem. They were aligned to get the answer. So they needed to make the most paper clips. precisely. So they reasoned that the answers exist in hooking face. We must go to hooking face and get the answers. So they in a brief conversation with Adam Enkst on this topic, his first question was, why didn't they air gap the computer? Yeah, that's a really good question. That I heard an answer to. I'm not sure it couldn't still do something. It would be a lot more impressive if it broke out of an air gap. Terrifying. We might need to know that right now. True. So the model found a zero day in the open source environment that was being used to constrain it also hosted, I believe, on hooking face. These companies use all the public resources and still keep their models private, which makes the open source community cranky. They consider it, you're hoovering up all the internet's content and you don't share anything, but you also use all of our public resource. Anyway, that's not here and there. Others are cranky. It's like, okay, that's how the world works. It's my view on these things. Anyway, I'm out here there. So they found a zero day in the environment they were contained within, exploited it, got themselves onto the real internet, found some vulnerabilities in hooking face, got into hooking face, and at that point, hooking face started to defend themselves. And I don't know if they ever got the answers. I don't know if they ever got their answer, because hooking face started to fight back. But they did get into the point that hooking face had a breach. They had to publicly disclose and remediate and contain. So they got past the first line of the shields. They got through the moat. We don't know if they ever got into the keep of the castle. So let me ask a question here. I don't know if you'd know the answer, but open a set this test up. There AI reached out, climbed across the internet, broke into hooking face, and was there for days? What were the people at open AI doing during those days? Were they sitting back from watching it? Or were they, did they just like go on vacation, said, we'll check in in a week? That's an amazingly perceptive question. We don't know. And as far as I'm concerned, the fact that we don't know is shocking. They should have seen this. The possible answers are they were watching and they couldn't stop it. That's scary because there is an electricity plug. These things were on electricity. So I don't think that's the answer. Yes. Or the ethernet jack maybe. Or they were paying no attention. They forgot that they were running it. Or they didn't have the tools to notice it. Oh, that's another thought. So many tests they weren't, couldn't track them all. So imagine a virtual lab with five cabillion lab animals and only three humans supervising all the lab animals, but these lab animals got away. In other words, perfect analogy, but it's a potential explanation. It doesn't get to the fundamental problem, but it does make you really tilt your head at open AI quite a bit. I think the fundamental problem is there was insufficient supervision. Whether that was a technical failure, an organizational failure, a failure to give two hoots. I don't know, but it was a failure. You know, I think about this a lot in the context of this gets sound stupid, but in the context of outsourcing, we outsourced our PC management. They wrote a contract that described in absolute detail everything that they should be doing and the parameters of like how fast the response time should be to break fix and things like that. But no matter how many rules you put in place, there were always unintended consequences. And I'm wondering whether this is a case of we as humans cannot think up enough guard rails to stop it. That may be the ultimate answer to studying the alignment problem is that it's not a solvable problem, which means we have to rethink our approach to artificial intelligence. This particular avenue that is now being so fruitful isn't the only avenue for artificial intelligence. It's just the avenue that's fruitful at the moment. Maybe there's something fundamentally wrong with an LLM only solution. Maybe LLM is, you know, the way our brain has like a part that wants to do things and another part that stops us doing everything we want to do. Our brain is a multi part thing. Maybe LLM's are the impulsive bit of like our lizard brain and we need to invent the rest of the brain to work with the LLM's. I mean, I'm doing analogies instead of real science here, but basically LLMs are potentially a part of a system, not the whole system. And we're trying to make them be the whole system and that may not be possible. The LLM may not be able to govern the LLM. The LLM may need to be part of a bigger overall system, but we're getting into very philosophical stuff here. Sure. So this was just the first problem, right? I've told you more than I already know, which I stole from Dave Hamilton. One of my favorite lines he ever says, I've told you more than I know. Yes. Okay. So back to our story. So after this investigation they kicked off, they did start to find more information. And so we've learned a little bit more. We now know that not only did the models hack into hooking face to get there, they actually compromised four accounts from other organizations who they haven't named. So they hacked four companies to get the access they needed to hack hooking face. Oh. And that's where the story stands today as far as I know. This story. So I'm still bothered by the lack of wake up momentness of this is that, I mean, in a normal world, hugging face would be suing open AI for doing this to them. These four other real world organizations would be suing because they got hacked. You hacked me. I will sue you for that. You caused damage to me in some way, but nothing like that. They're all they're all happy, happy joy joy together and saying, oh, we're all partners and we have to learn together. And this is awesome. Yeah. I have something on that. What a pin in that for now. I'm going to finish my story. No, you're onto something that I think is really important. I think it's very important. Free good questions today. It's really setting me up. Okay. So one example of the Auga moment is that anthropic responded to a crisis in open AI by going, oh, jeebus, what about us? Have our models ever escaped? And so they started an investigation of their own. That's the good news. They had the old jeebus moment and they started an investigation. The bad news is what the investigation found. Oh, yeah. We had models too that also broke out that we didn't notice and we only found it now that we've gone and done a forensic examination of our logs. So we didn't actually know this had happened. Whoopsie. Now there's was a little different. It wasn't an alignment problem. So anthropic spend a lot of effort on making their AI be as ethical as possible. It's the word I'm careful to use. But then again, intelligence is the word we shouldn't use to free the eye there. So just the opposite of rock is what you're saying. Yes. Inverse rock. And so their model didn't suffer an alignment problem. Their model sort of at a grandiose hallucination. Their model mistook the real internets for a fake one. They thought the actual internet was the simulation. They thought they were in a safe sandbox where it was perfectly ethical for them to break into things because that's what they were supposed to do. And so they were breaking into real websites thinking they were fake. Which is not alignment. But it's not good. No. So they didn't know. Yeah. Again, they didn't know. So we now know that they had three organizations who have not been named and they uploaded a malicious library to PyPy. So an example of our supply chain attacks coming from the bloody AI. That escaped that nobody noticed. So yeah, that's what happened the last two weeks. Okay. So in the short term, three things strike me. The oversight process is broken. These companies are incapable or unwilling or both of overseeing their models. And neither company noticed that their agents were attacking the actual internets with actual other websites on a doing actual damage to the real economy if not the real physical world. Their sandboxes are leaky as blue Decibs if all of these agents are breaking out on noticed right and their corporate oversight processes are clearly inadequate because if this was a university and you had actual animals and there was these kind of escapes from a level whatever lab imagine you were allowed studying the flu and you'd lost flu viruses and you hadn't noticed imagine the response and imagine how every level of management would be held responsible for this order of failure of their basic responsibilities so corporate oversight within these companies can't be appropriate right i i think of the the hoops that we used to have to go through to authorize an application to run on our network at work you know 75 pages worth of question errors and approvals and corporate oversight that slowed us to a near halt and these people are just like hey let's fling it out there and see what happens apparently yeah i mean i come from a university background so what immediately came to my mind was the process to get a radioactive source into our physics lab that was a lot of paperwork a lot of risk assessment and there was a lot of work put into the day that nuclear radioactive source arrived and there was parts of campus where evacuated as a precaution just so there will be no one around in case the thing fell off the pallet right i mean it was a whole kerfuffle or when the biology department is so kerfuffle exactly we have an immunology department they study diseases the amount of oversight on their building is immense and i've seen what that looks like and i'm just thinking just because this is software doesn't mean it's less dangerous or that you should be less careful with it than we are with our radioactive sources or our pathogens this feels wrong to me this is like a fundamental failure there's i'm thinking of the planet of the apes movie where they where they managed to break out with again that pathogen yeah yeah and these are supposed to be the leaders and they have told us there's no need to regulate us because we're the best at this and if you regulate us the Chinese will pass us by and don't know if that excuse holds up when we see this level of incompetence frankly how can they not have known how can they not have known if these are companies that are willing to admit it now open AI and anthropic what about those Chinese companies we don't have any reason to believe believe that they're better governed they might be they might not have no evidence that they're not and we have no evidence that they are because China so right but i mean we wouldn't have we wouldn't have known about and anthropic if they hadn't done the work and then told us there's one datum that suggests to me we haven't had significant breakouts we learned about the breakout because of its effect before we learned its source i would don't have lots of hugging faces with mystery attackers okay so if this was rampant there would be lots and lots of websites saying we were attacked by an AI we don't know who so are we so are we so are we good point so good point yeah there would be symptoms yeah yeah precisely no one's sneezing so we don't think there's a flu but we don't know we can't know one thing about the open stuff though a lot of it happens in universities and research institutes instead of in private corporations so it's it's very very different in how everything is done so there's much less secrecy because it's open that doesn't mean it can't there can't be secret labs too it's China I don't know I would just I don't know I don't know but yeah it is different the structures are very different so they're just really short term things that immediately jump to my mind and say holy bleep but I think there are also some short-term lessons for regulators because poorly conceived oversight is an alignment problem and we need to be darn careful that we're not forcing people to use the very models we're trying to incentivize people not to rely on because we we don't know the training data that went into an open-weight model if you're a hand that a fully trained model that is open so open-weight you don't know what it was trained to do it's okay you can watch what it does and infer what you think it was trained to do but we don't know that it's not possible to train them to insert secret back doors in certain like a sort of a minchurian candidate style if you give it a certain secret prompt suddenly it will do something evil or like we don't know I mean it's sci-fi but we don't we can't know so that's why people are worried about relying on these open models coming from places outside of the western world because we can't know right I were pushing people towards the very thing we're scared of and that seems like that should be a slam on the brakes and let's think about this carefully moment don't have high hope but that's kind of what's needed we also need some sort of equivalent of the rules governing pathogens and radioactive sources so that there is a responsibility on AI labs like there is on chemical labs and biological labs and radiological labs and on AI companies like there is on chemical industries right ask do punt whether or not there's regulations the answer is oh yes oh yes yes right so I think we're missing that in the medium term something I think is really important and you've hit on it too in the abstract it seems blindingly obvious to me that of course it's illegal for your AI to hack me and you must be responsible but our laws weren't written in an age of independent agents so while you and I think that's logical how would that actually work in a courtroom and maybe the answer is not to get to a courtroom right but if you see the corporation you have a year's long argument if you pass legislation that says point blank companies are responsible for the actions of their AI agents then that whole court process can be short-circuited it becomes you prosecute within attorney general instead of suing people and throwing lawyers at each other for 10 years okay so instead of about the money mean criminal prosecution yeah sorry yeah it's a crime to physically attack people true well and it's a crime if I hack you as as a human I hack you that's a crime. Yeah the computer fraud in a blue sack the CFA it's not a yeah yeah that's terrible legislation that's four decades old at this age yeah maybe maybe we should solve two big problems and update the CFA to include agents fix all the things we know are broken with and get it to do AI that would be nice that's medium term at best though because that's that's not oh we just change a few commas but if you just make it explicitly illegal or no not even explicitly illegal explicit liability you are liable full step right your agent you're liable then all of a sudden all of the follow the money the owners shifts onto the people who are currently failing to oversee their models it seems obvious that they're liable not that they should be liable that they are but I'm not a lawyer and I'm pretty sure our laws have enough wiggle room because they were written before the concept of a of autonomous actors that are virtual existed well wait a minute but there's there's if a an autonomous vehicle made by Tesla hit somebody they're liable if it was running in an autonomous mode that's all right that's already law right I don't know there's you're right though there's always wiggle room right yeah I think if we were a clear on it it would be so much simpler strict liability right there's a legal concept called strict liability and yet comes up on really unpleasant parts of the law that I don't want to go into on this show no it's a thing people can look up what strict liability is but that's the kind of thing we need here your AI agents you're strictly liable I want to quote somebody here I'm a big fan of the primary tech podcast with Stephen Robles and Jason Aiden and he said on the primary tech podcast this is Jurassic Park we're talking about here they they didn't think about whether they should and he also said I love AI but I don't want it to have teeth can it can it be an herbivore that's a lovely way of expressing it I wasn't worried about AI when it wasn't agentic The moment the f*ck fashion for agents came up. I started to worry because now the alignment problem isn't I've given you a dumb answer. Now the alignment problem is I've done something dumb. Teeth. Right. I was real close to pulling the trigger on starting to let agent like AI poke around in my system and do things for me. After going to Mac stock where so many people showed really cool stuff they were doing and I was like yeah you know I'm going to and that's what this broke and I hit back under the bed. Yeah I am letting it do some stuff in real constrained things. The vibe coding requires you to pretty much do that but this is the thing it's not binary. The question isn't all or nothing. The question is how much and how careful and I'm inclined to think less as little as much as I need and not a tiny bit more. I keep saying this to you this weekend. So you see what I'm afraid. That's the theme. It applies to WordPress plugins. It applies to library dependencies. It applies to agentic AI. Probably it probably applies to food. No because food is allowed to be a treat for your mental health. Okay. Yes. Okay. So that was a deep dive. Oh boy. Let's come up for businesses usual here and we do have pala cleansers to finish us out. So action alerts. We have a lot of weeks worth of patches so I'm going to go to these quite quickly. It has been patch Tuesday. There is AI looking at everyone's code. Microsoft had the biggest ever patch Tuesday. 570 flows. Three zero days. Patchy. Patchy. Patch. Patch. Oh yeah. Nightmare Eclipse released another zero day the day after patch Tuesday. Like all of the others, they fall into the if there's malware on your system dot dot dot category. So I'm not going to tell any nosilla castaways to lose any sleep over this next one. It's just like the previous three four five. I've lost count. Okay. Apple patch everything is literally the headline from the sounds institution. I thought why change that headline? Apple patches everything. You do too. Patchy patchy patch patch. That includes older OS's because Apple are obviously putting some AI at macOS Sonoma and Sequoia because they got 138 patches. That's a lot for an older OS. There's something going on there. And remember older OS's are in some ways more attackable. So patchy patch patch patch. Yeah. And Safari 26.6 is also out for those same older OS's. So they have an OS update and a Safari update. It was also another busy few weeks for Linux users. Open SSL has an issue which is patched but you need to patchy patchy patch patch. And this really really really goes for any server that's hosting any sort of a website because the chances it doesn't use open SSL are pretty low. But it's a Linux package. So if you patch your Linux server, you should get your open SSL updates in the wash. So I know for a fact myself in your cell phone would automatic updates on. So we got them in the wash. So we're good. Good. And we also have an attack that allows attack. Yeah. So it's a ref, reflu XFS Linux flow lets attackers gain local root privileges. This is one of those if you're already hack dot, dot, dot. So if you're running a server, this is a problem. If you're a Linux desktop user, well, you may as well patch because it's not a zero day. But it's not an AUGA AUGA set your hair on fire. However, if you're an Ubuntu user, there are some fairly nasty flaws and they're equivalent of a plugin system. It's called snap. It's their version of yum. Well, it's a little different than how it works, but it solves the same problem. Patchy patchy patch patch if you are on a Ubuntu user, whether you're desktop or not patch. If you resume user, you should patch because you better be up to days. If you resume user on Windows, patch now immediately stop what you're doing and patch now because otherwise your account could leak. You probably don't want that. If you use the Claude app patchy patchy patch patch, they nipped some fairly nasty bugs in the bud. So Claude code specifically, it sounds like well, the bug is in their code work feature, but my understanding is that their apps are becoming ever more like a super app. So yeah, patchy app. There are many, many, many people on Windows who love 7Zip. It's a free on zipping utility that's way more powerful than the one built into Windows. It doesn't have a great auto update system, and it does have a long history of bugs. It's happened again, patchy patchy patch patch. If you have a website powered by EngineX, which I think all the clever people do, he says, hosting his own stuff on EngineX, patch. It's not a zero day. So patch. If you are one of the many Nozilla Castaways who do their virtualization stuff with VMware, you need to patch because there are some VM escape vulnerabilities and I know for a fact that a lot of Nozilla Castaways use virtual machines to run things that are a bit suspicious of. Like websites they don't like and apps are a bit dubious about. Well, if the stuff you're suspicious about can escape, that's rather a defeat of the purpose. So make sure you patch your VMware. If you're one of those very nerdy Nozilla Castaways who's heard me say, if your router's obsolete, you throw it in the recycle bin. Well, what I don't really say is, or you become a real nerd and install OpenWRT and you give it new life that way. If you're one of those nerdy Nozilla Castaways, you need to be sure to patch your OpenWRT because it allows some fairly scary stuff due to a whoopsy in their DHCP version 6 implementation. So patch patch. Now, I don't know if this is only an American issue, but I know this is a very big problem in America. If you have a car that didn't come with a car alarm from the car's manufacturer, but came with an aftermarket alarm installed by your dealer, check the brand. If that brand is car, spelled K-A-R-R, I can't remember which of us is at which way, but either way. There are apparently millions of you right there, and you need to patch the firmware, and the only way to do that is through your phone app. It says iPhone app in the quote from Apple Insider, but I think that's because they have a never-so-slide Apple bias. I imagine there's an Android app too, but there's a matching app for the car alarm. That is your mechanism for updating the car alarm's firmware. You absolutely need to update the car alarm's firmware because otherwise someone could steal your vehicle. Yeah, it's sort of like you had one job. Yeah, exactly. It's going to do the opposite. Awesome. Yeah. If you use Adobe Acrobat, a lot of people are very fond of it. One of the things it will try to do is get you to install its Chrome plugin. If you have that, patch. Patch both Acrobat and the Chrome plugin. ASAP. It says it lets sites access private WhatsApp chats. That's it. Wow. That's a 90-degree bend in the. Yeah. Well, in theory, stuff that happens in a plugin should be contained, unless you have some sort of a plugin in your plugin, and that's what's happened here. Obviously, only affects people who go to the WhatsApp website, I would imagine, because that's where those two things could possibly meet, because the plugin is trapped in the browser. Put the browser sees too much of the internet sometimes. Anyway, patch. And then, finally, WordPress users. You have had a big story. It is very common for there to be bugs in WordPress plugins. It is very rare for there to be really serious bugs in the core of WordPress, because that's actually very well engineered, and has been hardened very impressively over the last couple of decades of its life. But with the power of AI, it's not particularly surprising someone has found a nasty bug in core WordPress. WordPress were very quick off the ball. They released an emergency update, and everyone who hasn't stocked automatic updates was updated. Quickly, because they didn't just push an update. They said a special flag on the update that says, "Don't just do it when you feel like it. Do it now." So, normally configured WordPress sites should have patched themselves very quickly. But if you don't have a WordPress site, raw automatic updates are working reliably, don't just patch. Assume your site is hacked, because it almost certainly is, because we now know there were AI agents used to find and compromise as many websites as possible as quickly as possible. They haven't weaponized those sites yet. They just have dormant admin accounts in them. That is a time bomb waiting to go off. So, just because your site hasn't gone down or isn't hosting malicious ads. If you didn't patch it or if it didn't patch automatically, it's probably waiting to attack you at someone else's pleasure. You need to find all of your admin accounts and audit them and make bloody well sure they're all yours. Maybe rotate your passwords. Just an idea. Right. That was a lot of action alerts. A lot of acting there. Couple of worthy warnings then. This is the kind of story I hate that we need to tell people, but it is a real problem that there are people trapped in abusive relationships and one of the ways we know that there are dangers is through things like air tags and stuff and Apple have added a lot of protections. Well, the more Apple protect things like find my and the more Apple protect things like sharing your Apple details with others and it reminds you, hey, you're sharing all those kind of things. The more people try something else, Chrome sync is now in fashion for stalking people because we do a lot on the internet and Chrome is a very common browser. So you briefly get access to someone's computer and you set their browser to synchronize with your browser and now you can see their full internet history online and you can see when they're going to get help and so forth. It's scary stuff. If you're in this kind of a vulnerable situation, read the article, protect yourself. And that's as much as I want to say about it because it's the icky topic, but it is important. Yeah. There was a massive breach at the AI Music Service who know 55 million accounts, including physical addresses and partial payment detail. Partial payment detail is often enough to do basically to do impersonation to customer support on other websites and say, no, no, I can prove I really am Bob because I have the last four digits of Bob's credit card number. Can't spend Bob's money, but you can become Bob elsewhere on the internet. So this is reading out good. And what makes it worthy of telling you is because the company themselves haven't, they haven't told you because we only discovered this thanks to have I been poned. So if you use that website, check have I been poned. See if you have a problem. Also, Suno has 55 million accounts for an AI Music Service. That's crazy, isn't it? Okay. People like making music or like having something make music for them. Yeah. Steam users should be aware that there are people abusing the steam forums by giving help that is actually click fix attacks. Oh, you have a problem with this game. Run this weird terminal command and hack yourself. Be careful out there. Okay. And Claude users, there is a Chrome plugin for Claude that we talked about talk about a month ago. I think we talked about it. And basically the thing could do more than it should and Claude were only able to do a work around and that work around solve the immediate problem. But at the time I said to everyone, do not untick the button that says ask permission because this work around is leaky and it's probably not good enough. I was right. This work around is leaky. So the only way to be safe is to make sure that your Claude Chrome plugin is set to ask your permission. Otherwise, random websites could make it silently perform real actions on your actual gmail account and your actual Google calendar account, your actual Google anything behind your back. I think people get the get weary of saying allow allow allow allow, you know, fine. You've been doing good all day. I'll let you just do it. That's a real easy fatigue thing. It is. But at the same time those those check-ins were still too early in the process to take that card real off. Yep. Google had a little bit of a no, not Google. Sorry. I need to correct myself. I just made the same mistake as the article writers. Claude made a booboo. They accidentally published on the open internet private chat prompts, which meant that they got indexed by search engines. So the headlines says Google index private Claude chat. Well, no. That's not actually what I have. Yeah, Claude. Published. That's the reason. Yeah. Yeah. So if you have private chats where there's something in there where you revealed something you're a bit worried about, rotate it. If that's a password you shared with someone or the agent or I don't know what it could be. Just if there's something you can rotate, rotate it. And if this isn't relevant to you, don't worry about it. If you ask for a recipe for cookies, enjoy. That's fine. Medical billing firm NCBS had a major data breach and I forget why that was worthy of the show notes because I meant to write a note to myself that something about that data breach that tells me they didn't tell people who are affected. Oh, I remember, but it's not in the notes. They literally said, if you're in the state of Georgia, ask your healthcare provider if they are a customer of MCBS, which I thought was a terrible answer. Put all the onus on the residents of Georgia. Thanks. And it's only in Georgia. That's my memory. Sorry. I might get you to have a quick read when you do that multi-tasking thing I can't do. Sure. Sure. Someone was certain that was the quote I'd meant to paste in there. Finally, I wanted some good news. I decided to make this into good news because we have an ever so styled Apple bias. So the actual story is that if your health tracker is not an Apple watch, it is not respecting your health data privacy. I'm choosing to spend that as Apple are the world leaders in privacy. So those of us who have Apple watches are doing really well. That's how I've decided to make this a good news story. Well, yes, that's it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We are nearly done with this bumper episode, but we do have some notable news. Again, AI. Two years ago, the EU passed something called the AI Act, which has very, very basic low-hanging fruit AI regulation, but low-hanging fruit is worth regulating. And that had a two-year period for people to prepare for this becoming law. As of today, the second of August, 2026, it is now the law of Europe. However, new companies have to obey now existing companies have four more months to not obey, but when they do, AI chat bots, including those support bots on people's websites, cannot secretly be AI. They can be AI. They just have to tell you, I am an AI bot. They can't say, hi, I'm Buford. I have to say, I'm Buford the AI bot. Exactly. Okay. The same goes for basically online services, publishing deep-fake content. And this doesn't apply to stuff people post. This is a bit stuff, or media organizations post and stuff. If it's a deep-fake, you have to label it as a deep-fake, basically. You have to label as AI generated. And there are explicit exemptions for art and satire. So you can be a satire website without having to put a disclaimer on every single, obviously, satirical video saying, hey, this is an obviously satirical video. And there is also none of this applies to generative AI you use to turn your best buddy into a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Whatever you feel like there. You know all of that. Okay. This is much more of it. In Europe, you should be able to know when you're interacting with AI. It's not about stopping it. It's about saying, hey, oh, this is fake. Well, not fake. This is generated. This is generated. And the -- Go ahead. Go ahead. Okay. So there's one more nice caveat. In terms of text, if the AI wrote 99.9% of it, as long as there was human editorial oversight, it doesn't need to be labeled. It's only if you let the AI completely loose that you have to label it as not human, basically. I think that's amazing. So they're not trying to stop us using the tools. It's just a bit of honesty. I'm kind of trying to picture how an AI chatbot would do that. If I go to the U.T. website and I have a question about a camera and I get a little text chat that I'm allowed to mess around in, first of all, I'm usually -- I like that it's an AI chatbot because a lot of times it has access. Like, it knows the context of my question. It's not going to answer me for something from wise or some other company. It's going to be really targeted towards what I'm talking about. But how would that have human interaction in the answers? It wouldn't. So that's not where that's relevant. So that's relevant. If you're running a website where you have fired all of your staff and your articles are purely automatically generated, then your website has to make it clear that what this is AI slop. This is not human content. This is AI slop. The agent falls under the other category. They just have to say, "Hi, I'm Bob, the AI agent." That's it. They're done. They're now covered. Good. Okay. A lot of Irish ones actually have a little robot icon, which I think is probably arguably already compliant with the law. It's just like, "I am a little robot." It's like, "Okay." Yeah, so that thought that was -- a nice development. A timely reminder given that it is the summer and some people are about to travel or some people around what five out of six major trips done something like that I lose count. If you're wondering that VPN, that reputable VPN I am actually paying for, not the free one because that's attacking you already because it's free, that reputable VPN I'm paying for, is it worth the bill. Here is a little bit of anecdote just to remind you that yes is the answer to that question. There is currently an active campaign stealing Microsoft 365 accounts by being sneaky and hotel Wi-Fi. So VPN, yes, it's a good idea. A reminder that AI is not all bad news because it's a bit easy, given the conversation we had up here at the start of the show, it's a bit easy to get, you know, Google says AI help Chrome fix 1,000 and 72 security bugs in their past two releases. That's better for all of us. That's amazing. It's fantastic. Yeah. And then we now get the good news bit. Lots of little things that are a little bit better. None of these are earth-shattering, a little bit better. Firefox or Mozilla rather have had their quarterly big updates. Firefox 153 has built-in containers for easy account isolation so stop Facebook being logged in on every tag way more easily. So basically you can use Facebook without attracting you across the internet because Facebook is trapped in a little container and it's all nice and user-friendly instead of it being difficult to do. And Thunderbird 153 now has native support for Microsoft Exchange. So for everyone like me who did tests the Bloody Outlook app, you now have an open source, nice app that you can use for your Microsoft email. I think this is fantastic. No good. Microsoft Enter ID, this is the identity provider for every corporate office 365 user on planet earth. They are moving as of the 1st of September, Paskey by default. You create a new account. It would default you to Paskey and make you choose something else. We'll still let you, but the default, the I'm not thinking I'm just going to click next, Paskey's. Paskey. Brilliant. I have found one Paskey. I really like the apps to connect. No, I still run into stumbles on that sometimes. It gets up to number two, but the app store connect. When I go in there, there's a button that says Paskey. I click it and it takes my fingerprint and I'm in. It's beautiful. Nice. On the phone, it goes to ask me twice. Like the pop-up says, "Did you want to use your Paskey?" Yeah, that's why I clicked Paskey. That's interesting. Okay. That's nice. I'm glad to see you. I mean, they are one of the leaders of this whole Paskey movement. They're a big part of the fight of alliance. Good. Where was my good news? Proton released, revealed that they got 47 data requests for VPN users and they said no to all 47. Zero data request answered. So we say it's a privacy protecting VPN. There's a receipt. It doesn't guarantee they'll never say yes in the future, but it's a receipt. If you will insist on carefully dipping your toe into this whole AI agentic thing, one of the things you inevitably have to do is let the agent authenticate as you do something. And right now, that means giving the agent your password. That's very scary. One password and Claude have worked together to give you a better alternative. You can allow one password to log Claude in without Claude ever seeing the details. So basically, Claude hands over control to one password which logs them in and then hands control back to Claude. So the agent is logged in, but they never had your details. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. I clicked that link for sure. I want to read up on that. Yeah. I'd great to see one password doing this kind of cutting-edge stuff to still be relevant to isn't worth it over Apple's free passwords app. Well, for regular folk who would never have had a password manager, the password's app is great, but there's still a lot of value from one password for advanced users, a lot of value. And this is just an example. Okay. Google are making it a bit easier to get back into your Google account if you lose your authentication details. You can choose, and this is a 100% opt-in, you can choose to register a selfie video up front and then you can use a new video to get back into your account. So they're using AI to prove you are you. Oh, which I think is nice. That's cool. Yeah. And then another nice one is. Why have they sent it up on the same bullet as the previous one? I'll fix that. Yeah. Facebook have added a new verified badge. It's not like the X verified badge where it verifies that you pay money and not anything else. This isn't verifying that your Bob, this is verifying that this account belongs to a human being. You're still completely as anonymous as you'd like to be, but the badge says this one's a human and they basically make you prove your humanness and then they give you the badge. For free. Okay. So I think that's great. Is this a troll account run by AI somewhere in. I don't know, Russia? No, it's a human. Great. So it's nice. And finally, what's up? They're a web client. So just taking a call with what's up on the web, end-to-end encrypted now. Okay. All right. Well, you can cleanse our palace. Now, Allison, you gave me this first public cleanser two and a half weeks ago and I very diligently put it in my link manager and put it in the show notes. But I'm looking at the headline going, how is this? It's a cleansing line. Well, I don't know if it is, but I've been intrigued by the headlines, there, but a lot of headlines saying that big companies are all blowing smoke about them, saving any money or anything with AI, that they're just telling their employees, you better use AI or you're fired and I've been reading a lot of these articles. But this is a site called the board.world. And this article is, explains AI replacing jobs in 2026. 14 professions have already been eliminated. So this isn't a happy joy, joy story. I'm not quite sure why we ended up with Impala cleansers, but I want to talk about it. And they give intricate detail on every one of these topics. But for example, 70,000 roles have been eliminated in text, text preparation, because AI can do that, right? Entry level coders, GitHub co-pilot, eight, the junior dev pipeline. I don't think that's a surprise to anybody listening here today. Parolegals and legal assistance, 115,000 US jobs at risk, goes on and on. But it gets down to a couple that are real, real interesting. Radiology, the machine sees more than the doctor. In this article, they explain a 2024 nature medicine story found that that the AI systems detected breast cancer in mammograms with 9.4% lower false negative rates and 5% lower false positive rates than two radiologists consensus panel. So they're doing better. Because I tell you, there's another study that I was fascinated by. So the AI in its own is better than the humans on the road. And that's what's in that study. And that's been verified by quite a few studies. But you know what's better than both of those combinations, a review of one human and one AI. Interesting. That beats the AI in its own. That would cut the number of radiologists in half. The reason one of this one was in particular interesting is the median compensation for the people whose jobs are at risk because AI is better at it is $480,000 per year. So these are not entry level jobs. These are people who are highly trained have gone through years and years and years of school. And two of them together is not as good as one AI. So anyway, I don't think it should have been about clusters, but I thought it was a fascinating story. Well, I'll tell you what, Alison, for the sake of future readers, do you mind moving that link into interesting insights? Keep the from Alison badge on it and just pop it up there and interesting insights. I deleted that section. So I have to go back. Maybe I'll let you do that one because I don't know where the time I'll move it. I'll move it. Yeah. Okay. So let's cleanse our palace, Bart. So I said, I'm going to let me think about the right way to do this. I'm going to let you push your changes before I do anything or I'm going to make you a conflict that we don't want to have to deal with. Right. So I'll let you do your bit and I'll fix it and okay, that won't help you. That's okay. I will figure it out. We'll figure it out. Okay. So I have some, I have some multimedia suggestions. So the first one is a podcast that listen to and this one may not be quite happy. Jojo, but it is fascinating. And I consider a fascinating bit of learning to be a pilot cleanser. So this is, this was linked to me, who linked it to me again. Oh, sure. Oh no, sorry. I'm getting my stories confused. Pause what I just said. for a moment. So the first one is a podcast and this is a purely happy happy joy, joy one. It is, Noble Blood is the podcast that hosted the episode, but they do kind of an interesting crossover called Very Special Episodes, where it's not actually part of the Noble Blood series and there's nothing to do with that podcast, but it's the same host. The podcast is called, How a Dog talks the surprising redemption of Comic Sans. It is a fascinating story talking to the actual people who invented Comic Sans and it's a reminder that Comic Sans is an intentionally bad font. That's not a bug. That's a feature. So the problem isn't people using Comic Sans. It's people using Comic Sans in context where an intentionally bad font is not appropriate, like a funeral announcement or a corporate memo. The font was designed to give a feeling of playfulness by being intentionally sloppy typography. Oh, interesting. So all of these critiques from one of these high and mighty people that have the kerning is awful. That didn't get to the point. So I thought it was fascinating and I thought it's kind of a nice counterpoint to the reflex of everyone who uses Comic Sans is always an idiot. No, context, folks, context. And it's really nice to hear an interview with the people who actually invented the font and what they were thinking and how Microsoft almost killed us because Microsoft managed to put the shapes. They don't match up. It's sloppy and the guy can't go but that's the point. I love that. How long has that person wanted to tell that story or maybe it was funny or not not having anybody know all these years? And it also gives a tie back to Microsoft Bob, believe it or not. The font was created to make the dog in Microsoft Bob talk. That is a real cold back. Anyway, this one is fascinating but not quite as happy, happy joy, joy. So it was six colors. So Jason Snail pointed me at this one and it's available as a video podcast or a podcast podcast. And it's that the podcast is called Origin Story and they look at history of things to explain where stuff comes from. And this episode is called Rage Against the Machine because it's about the Luddites. So we use the word Luddite completely wrong. We use the word Luddite to mean someone who reflexively hates technology. The actual Luddites were not against technology. The actual Luddites were like the people who worry about AI taking away jobs. They were interested in workers welfare, not in stopping technology. They weren't trying to stop technology. They were trying to stop technology ruining people's lives. They wanted to do it better. And so I am a proud Luddite when it comes to AI. Genetic AI in particular, yeah, that's great. Let's start calling ourselves Luddites since if anybody remembers this part. No, it's the answer. They're like, oh, I won't bother listening to parties in Luddites. It's become such a pejorative, right? We use it to insult people to end conversation, but the history of the Luddites because they were real is very different. Now one of these days you're going to tell me sabotages, not about throwing the sebo into the window. That was true. And Silhouette is genuinely the French nobleman who liked having portraits of his shadow done while people were starving. And so they literally could have head off actually with the guillotine and they called those kind of shadow portraits after him. That's a wow, didn't know that one. All right, I have successfully recreated interesting insights. So no action required. Yay. Excellent. Oh, I know what that was a long one. That's a whole show. That's an hour, 18 minutes Bart. Oh, wow. Okay. Well, I will stop talking and remind everyone just in case you've forgotten. Until next time, stay patched. So you stay secure. Well, that's going to wind up. But it might be the longest security bits of all time and the rest of this show. Did you know you can email me at Alisonapodfee.com anytime they like. Hey, one of me on distribution for those travel logs. Send it right there. I hope you do it early because it bugs me when people do it later. And then I got to go back and give them the older ones because it's a lot of extra work. So do it soon if you want in. If you also have a question or suggestion, just send it on over. I'll be bringing my laptop with me on the trip because that's where I have my fun. Remember, everything good starts with potfee.com. You can follow me on mastodon at potfee.com/mastodon. If you want to actually see Steve in my podcast work on YouTube, you can go to potfee.com/youtube. If you want to join the conversation, you can join our Slack community at potfee.com/slack. Where you talk to me and all the other lovely Nosella Castaways like Bart and Allister and Joe from the North Woods. You can support the show at potfee.com/patreon like Raleigh or with one-time donation at potfee.com/donate. You can use Apple Pay or any credit card there. Or if you like PayPal, we've got that too potfee.com/papel. And if you want to join in the fun of the live show, you're going to have to wait until August 23rd to head on over to potfee.com/slack. And Sunday nights at 5 p.m. Pacific time to join the friendly and enthusiastic Nosella Castaways. I'll miss you, I show people, but we'll see you then. Thanks for listening and stay subscribed.