Data Breach

Yep, Still Dead

The 23andMe hack remains absurd. Henry Kissinger is still dead. A massively anticipated trailer finally released. ChatGPT makes laws now. WaPo staff plan to walk off the job.

Endeavorance

Dec 6, 2023 — 4 min read

Shameless Plug

Do you like fun? Great. You will love my brand new podcast with the wonderful DianaOfTheRose, The Atlas Loom, an exploration of worldbuilding for tabletop and beyond.

The Atlas Loom is a longer form podcast featuring myself and Diana discussing worldbuilding, a passion we both share in our core. If you are at all interested in storytelling, worldbuilding, tabletop or just being imaginative, we think you'll love it. It also has a healthy heaping of us just shooting shit.

Okay. Now on to your regularly scheduled word dump.

Your DNA? My DNA.

The 23andMe hack continues to be completely absurd.

6.9 (nice) million (not nice) users of the service have had their data stolen. The wild part? Hackers didn't breach all those accounts. Instead, they breached just 14,000 accounts using previously stolen credentials from other websites, then used features of 23andMe to network through their systems and nab user data without permission.

The result? Hackers are selling people's genetic information on the dark web. "But Endeavorance," you begin, "why would I care about my genetic info being stolen?" Well, dear reader of whom I am speaking for, bad actors are already using this information to try and target ethnic minorities. They have a trove of user information sorted by genetics, and a distinct lack of a moral compass. That spells danger.

Anyway, yet another reminder to use a password manager (or passkeys) and never use the same password twice. Also consider using an email service which can generate unique emails for you when signing up for sites so that if your data is stolen in one place, its that much harder to tie back to you or log in to your other accounts.

I recommend Bitwarden.

Henry Kissinger Pulse Check

This is a quick update: It is December 6th, 2023 and Henry Kissinger is still dead. You may continue to celebrate.

GTA 6 Trailer Dropped

Rockstar Games has released the first trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6, one of the most highly anticipated games probably ever. At time of writing, after being up for a little over a day, the trailer has over 100,000,000 views on YouTube, which is a few more than I usually get on my videos. For real though its like, record breaking.

The trailer was released earlier than expected after it was leaked online, resulting in the official version being posted about half a day early.

The game looks pretty gorgeous, and seems to center around a couple who is Doing Some Crime, so. Seems about right.

LegalGPT

Alright so you should hopefully be aware that ChatGPT is trained using a gargantuan pile of stolen data, right? That data includes all sorts of stuff. They didn't just feed Wikipedia into it, they slurped up millions of private PDFs, personal information and more. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has gone to great lengths to prevent having to reveal their training data. They don't even try to hide it: they say that revealing their training data would open them up to too many lawsuits.

Anyway, some security researches recently found out that if you asked ChatGPT to repeat a word on loop forever, it would eventually start breaking at the seams and just start outputting raw information from its training data set. It's honestly pretty wild, it just goes from repeating the word over and over into just spewing private information from a massive document database.

In response to this, OpenAI has made it against the terms of service to ask ChatGPT to repeat a word forever.

I…

Alright.

Anyway, ChatGPT has also co-authored a nonzero amount of passed legislation in both the US and Brazil at this point, so.

Henry Kissinger Pulse Check

I did another quick look, he's still dead. Party on.

Washington Post Staff Strike

About 700 members of the Washington Post workers union will be walking off the job on the 7th, protesting stalled negotiations for a contract with better working conditions and pay. They say the company has been dragging their feet and seeking solutions such as a staff buyout and staffing reductions which the union will not stand for.

The striking workers have requested for others to stand in solidarity with them by not engaging with Washington Post media at this time, including publications, podcasts and more.

On This Day…

On this day in 1956, an infamous water polo match took place during the 1956 Olympics. The match was dubbed the "Blood in the Water" match, as the opposing teams were Hungary and the USSR during while the 1956 Hungarian revolution was ongoing.

Tensions were super high, and the match got its name after a Hungarian team member was punched by a member of the Russian team and had blood spilling out from just above his eye. Physical altercations were quite common throughout the match.

Hungary won 4-0.