Links: Week of 22 Aug 2026
- DT
New newsletter: CHANGE ALL YOUR PASSWORDS *NOW*
Cybersecurity expert @alexstamos predicts that the next two years could be chaotic, as open-weight AI models with advanced cyber capabilities get into the hands of hackers, turning Grade C scammers into Grade A hackers; and allowing bad individuals to do the kind of work previously only possibly by large teams.
Phishing attacks will become more sophisticated and more common, putting individuals at risk, and mid-tier companies with inadequate code and IT will cough up username-password combinations at an accelerated clip.
The time to up your password game—and to get your parents and older relatives to up their own—is now.Repeating this theme from last week. This is absolutely one of the top concerns for me these days - scammers will come for us all in increasingly sophisticated ways and just one mistake can be costly. Password managers to create unique and complex passwords, 2FA where possible are the bare minimum. What other steps do we need to take?
Do we all need family & friends passwords / passpharases to ensure you are talking to a family member on the phone, when they ask for money / help? Do we need to diversify our financial accounts so that the damage is limited if one is compromised? What about protecting / recovering from the mental health impact after being scammed - see the piece on the jury duty scam from last week. The emotional tolls on the scammed person and their relationships can be huge.
We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility
In July, one bookseller told me they received a very large order of around 1,000 books on Biblio, one of these marketplaces. The seller agreed to put an Apple AirTag provided by 404 Media in one of the books included in this order so we could see where the book was going. And by extension, which company, AI or otherwise, was behind this massive order.
and
The book ended up delivered to the VGT3 corner of the LAS8 Amazon facility in the north east of Las Vegas, where the entrance carried this on-the-nose logo of a dinosaur with a book! Online forum discussions between Amazon workers confirmed that VGT3 destructively scans large volumes of books.
and
ARWow, seems like Google is buying Spirit Airlines' enterprise data for $10m (outbidding Mercor at $7.5m).
Basically includes every internal document, email, workflow, and codebase for a once $6B company.
Honestly, $10m for 34 years of operational data really seems like a steal.
Clearly, the frontier labs have an unlimited appetite for human generated text, for training their models and the budgets to match. I wouldn't get too worked up about the destructive scanning of "rare" books - most are likely rare for a good reason. And as long as they are saving the scans, I wouldn't worry that we are losing much here at all and in fact this might even be a net gain.
The question I have is how long will these scans be saved by the labs. The cost of permanently saving such a large trove may not be trivial and even if it is, some corporate boffin 10 years down the line may decide to "optimize".
The ideal solution would of course be for the labs to make these scans open and accessible but that would mean open to their competitors as well, and that is something I don't see happening.
