Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 04/06 – The Secret Bitcoin Easter Egg On Your Mac

Episode Date: April 6, 2023

More examples of chatbots hallucinating might lead to the first lawsuits. Did you know that you have a copy of the bitcoin white paper on your Mac right now? You don’t know it, but you do. I’ll tell you why. Substack is the latest to launch a Twitter clone. And why E3 had to die. It’s called direct to consumer, or, I guess, gamer. Sponsors: Mimecast.com OregonState.edu Links: ChatGPT invented a sexual harassment scandal and named a real law prof as the accused (Washington Post) The Bitcoin Whitepaper Is Hidden in Every Modern Copy of macOS (Waxy.org) Google CEO Sundar Pichai Says Search to Include Chat AI (WSJ) Google to prohibit personal loan apps from accessing user photos, contacts (TechCrunch) Substack’s new short-form ‘Notes’ feed looks a lot like Twitter (TechCrunch) Streaming Killed E3 (Wired) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the TechMame Right Home for Thursday, April 6, 23. I'm Brian McCullough today. More examples of chatbots hallucinating might lead to the first lawsuits. Did you know that you have a copy of the Bitcoin white paper on your Mac right now?

You don't know it, but you do. I'll tell you why. Substack is the latest to launch a Twitter clone and why E3 had to die. It's called Direct to Consumer, or I guess, gamer. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Lots of chatter about this piece in the Washington Post today with, the added news item of, I believe, maybe our first defamation suit of the AI era. Just going to quote, one night last week, the law professor Jonathan Turley got a troubling email. As part of a research study, a fellow lawyer in California had asked the AI chatbot chat GPT to generate a list of

legal scholars who had sexually harassed someone. Turley's name was on the list. The chatbot, created by OpenAI, said Turley had made sexually suggestive comments and attempted to touch a student while on a class trip to Alaska, citing a March 2018 article in the Washington Post as the source of the information. The problem, no such article existed. There had never been a class trip to Alaska, and Turley said he'd never been accused of harassing a student. A regular commentator in the media, Turley had sometimes asked for corrections in news stories, but this time there was no journalist or editor to call and no way to correct the record. It was quite chilling, he said, in an interview with the post. An allegation of this kind is incredibly harmful, end quote.

Turley's experience is a case study in the pitfalls of the latest wave of language bots, which have captured mainstream attention with their ability to write computer code, craft poems, and hold eerily human-like conversations. But this creativity can also be an engine for erroneous claims. The models can misrepresent key facts with great flourish, even fabricating primary sources to back up their claims. In a statement, OpenAI spokesperson Nico Felix said, quote, When users sign up for chat GPT, we strive to be as transparent as possible that it may not always generate accurate answers. Improving factual accuracy is a significant focus for us, and we are making progress, end quote.

On Wednesday, Reuters reported that Brian Hood, regional mayor of Hepburn Shire in Australia, is threatening to file the first defamation lawsuit against Open AI unless it corrects false claims that he had served time in prison for bribery. Kate Crawford, a USC professor, said she was recently conced. contacted by a journalist who had used chat GPT to research sources for a story. The bot suggested Crawford and offered examples of her relevant work, including an article title, publication date, and quotes. All of it sounded plausible and all of it was fake. Crawford dubs these made-up sources hallucinations, a play on the term hallucinations, which describes AI-generated falsehoods and nonsensical speech. Indeed, it's relatively easy for people to get chatbots to produce

misinformation or hate speech if that's what they're looking for. A study published Wednesday by the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that researchers induced Bard to produce wrong or hateful information 78 out of 100 times on topics ranging from the Holocaust to climate change, end quote. This is odd. MacOS users have found that a copy of the Bitcoin white paper exists on every single Mac running MacOS, Mojave, or newer. Why? Quoting Andy Bio and Waxy.org.

If you're on a Mac, open a terminal and type the following command. You'll have to check the source that I've linked to to see the actual terminal command that you would need to do to make this happen. Quoting again, if you're on macOS 10.14 or later, the Bitcoin PDF should immediately open in preview. In the image capture utility, the Bitcoin white paper is used as a sample document for a device called Virtual Scanner 2, which is either hidden or not installed for everyone by default. It's not clear why it's hidden for some or what exactly it's used for, but Reed Beals suggested it may power the import from iPhone feature. In image capture, select the virtual scanner to device if it exists, and in the details set the media to document and media DPI to 72 DPI. You should see the preview of the first page of the Bitcoin paper. Of all the documents in the world, why was the Bitcoin white paper chosen? Is there a secret Bitcoin maxi working at Apple?

The file name is simple doc. PDF, and it's only 184KB. Maybe it was just a convenient, lightweight, multi-page PDF for testing purposes never meant to be seen by end users. There's virtually nothing about this online. As of this moment, there are only a couple of references to Virtual Driver 2 or the white paper file in Google results. A little bird tells me that someone internally filed it as an issue nearly a year ago, assigned to the same engineer who put the PDF there in the first place, and that person hasn't taken action or commented on the issue since, end quote. From the we know, but when is it actually going to happen, file, Sundar Pichai says Google plans to add generative AI to its search products

and dismisses the threat of AI to its ads business generally, quoting the journal. The opportunity space, if anything, is bigger than before, Mr. Pichai, who also heads Alphabet, said in the interview Tuesday, dismissing the notion that chatbots pose a threat to Google's search business. Google has long been a leader in developing computer programs called large language models or LLMs, which can produce and respond to natural language prompts with human-like pros. But it hasn't yet used the technology to influence the way people use search, something Mr. Pichai said would change. Will people be able to ask questions to Google and engage with LLMs in the context of search? Absolutely, Mr. Pichai said.

Mr. Pichai said Google hasn't yet achieved a goal of becoming 20% more productive, a target he set in September. He said the company was comfortable with its pace of change, though he wouldn't directly address the prospects of another round of layoffs, end quote. Google also announced plans to restrict personal loan apps from accessing sensitive user data like photos, videos, and contacts. This will start on May 31st, and it's apparently in response to recent predatory behavior. Quoting TechCrunch. According to recent accounts, an emerging trend has raised concerns as certain individuals who have acquired credit via mobile apps have experienced harassment by debt collectors. These recovery agents have allegedly accessed the borrower's personal contacts informing friends and family of outstanding debts. In more extreme cases, agents have employed manipulated images

to further intimidate and distress those in debt. Tragically, a number of these targeted individuals have succumbed to the pressure and taken their own lives. Such instances were well reported in markets including India and Kenya. Google responded initially by blocking hundreds and thousands of personal loan apps from the Play Store after alerted by law enforcement agencies and central banks. The company also introduced rules to ban unlicensed loan apps from the Android App Store, end quote. Separately, Google says Play Store apps that allow account creation will soon need to also let users initiate account and data deletion from within the app and online, quoting 9 to 5 Google. Moving forward, apps that allow account creation from within the application,

quote, must allow users to request for their account to be deleted, end quote. This deletion option must be readily discoverable inside the app and outside, like on the web. The latter requirement means a user can request account and data deletion without having to re-install an app. Developers will have to provide those links to Google with the Play Store directly surfacing that URL in the app listing. Google specifies that Play developers must, quote, delete the user data associated, with that app account. Impacting all apps globally, Google is slowly rolling out this policy requirement

given the work that devs will have to put in, end quote. From the watching the Twitter competitor's beat, Substack has unveiled notes, letting users share posts, quotes, images, links, and more shown in a short form feed that may look like familiar social media feeds in substack's words. You get what they mean, quoting TechCrunch. Once you share a note,

It's essentially like posting a tweet. Each note displays a like count and comment count. There's also the option to restack or retweet a post. The company seems to agree that the new feature looks similar to Twitter. However, Substack argues that notes differs from traditional social media feeds because it doesn't run on ads. The lifeblood of an ad-based social media feed is attention, the company wrote in a blog post. By contrast, the lifeblood of a subscription network is the money paid to people who are doing great work within it. Here, people get rewarded for respecting the trust and attention of their audiences. The ultimate goal on this platform is to convert casual readers into paying subscribers. In this system, the vast majority of the financial rewards go to the creators of the content, end quote. Substack also argues that notes won't feel like traditional media and that the goal with the new product is not to create a, quote, perfectly sanitized information environment, but to allow for constructive discussion where there is enough common ground to seek understanding, quote, while holding on to the worthwhile attention needed for great art and new ideas, end quote.

The launch of notes isn't the only way Substack has attempted to capitalize on the Twitter chaos in recent months as the company rolled out a chat feature last November. It also took a more direct shot at Twitter when it warned in a post last year that, quote, Twitter is changing and it's tough to predict what might be next, end quote. The post had encouraged creators of all sorts to port their Twitter followers base to Substack. The new Notes product, which is pretty much a Twitter clone, takes Substack's hopes on capitalizing on the Twitter chaos even further. It's worth noting that with notes, Substack is not only taking on Twitter, where many back-and-forth threaded discussions between writers and readers already take

place, but also other online communities where writers have been building out networks of their own, like Discord, Slack, and Telegram. Today's announcement comes a week after Substack opened up a community fundraising round, letting writers invest in and own a piece of the company. As of today, substack has 7,138,000 in pledges. The company revealed that readers have paid writers more than $300 million through Subststack and that the platform now has more than 35 million active subscriptions, including 2 million paid subscriptions. Substack also revealed that more than 17,000 writers are earning money on Substack with the top 10 publishers on Substack, collectively making more than $25 million annually, end quote. Finally today, a Requiem for E3. Wired

makes the case that E3 is dying, because with things like Nintendo Direct and various PlayStation events streamed directly to audiences, the companies simply don't need anyone else to showcase their new offerings and create buzz. The pandemic didn't help, of course, but, quote, As top players have embraced direct-to- audience streams like Nintendo Direct and PlayStation Direct, E3 has floundered. Today, it's events like the Game Awards creator Jopheightly's Summer Game Fest, a combination of private in-person events and content specifically tailored for online enjoyment that fill this role. In an interview with Gamesindustry.Biz, ESA president and CEO Stanley Pierre-Louis pointed to the pandemic and economic headwinds as factors in the decision to

cancel E3. Additionally, Pierre-Louis said, quote, companies are starting to experiment with how to find the right balance between in-person events and digital marketing opportunities, end quote. In contrast to fan conventions like PACs or even knowledge and networking focus gatherings like the game developers conference, E3 was one big marketing event mutually benefiting the people who made games and those who covered them. Its value was in who it could bring to the event and how much access attendees could get to those companies. In the past, Nintendo, Microsoft, PlayStation, Ubisoft, Bethesda, and a handful of others would hold back-to-back press conferences that kicked off the event ahead of its official opening. But thanks to streaming platforms like Twitch and YouTube, companies

now have the power to deliver news to consumers in-person and online simultaneously, without the need for public relation firms or journalists. Nintendo, for example, has perfected this with Nintendo Direct, its series of hyped and tightly controlled pre-recorded marketing events. Similarly, Kightly's Summer Show, built during a time when no one could safely gather, is envisioned as a digital savvy event that can run without the need for a physical presence. Between game companies creating their own events and Kiley's growing chokehold on the streaming space, thanks to the popular of the game awards, E3 is largely redundant. Even before E3 organizers began canceling the event due to COVID-19 concerns, attendance was dwindling. In previous years, celebs like Keanu Reeves,

Aisha Tyler, and Pele, would come to tout their involvement in various games. Miyamoto showed up once to swing a master sword from the legend of Zelda Twilight Princess. Stephen Spielberg and James Cameron delivered excruciating on-stage cameos. None of those things even seemed possible for 2020 as Sony, Xbox, Nintendo, Ubisoft, Sega, and Tencent all dropped out in the weeks leading up to this year's would-be event, opting to focus on presentations elsewhere. While the ESA isn't saying that this is the end of E3, the cancellation, a mere two months ahead of the show without even a digital component to carry on, is a dire sign. But maybe it's time for the event to pass.

There will always be value in physical gatherings where people in the industry can network and talk about the undertaking of game creation, but that's never been E-3's strongest play. It's a marketing event, one that has battled Peter Pan syndrome for years. The place has never lost the feeling of being an adult playground where the business of taking it all seriously is relegated to interview rooms and suites. As the industry grows more critical of the ways games are made, that is who makes them, who is allowed to make them, and under what conditions they are made, its tolerance for unexamined hype is shrinking.

Publishers have grown wise to the tools that allow them to reach their audience without interference. E3's greatest value now isn't in the event it can produce. It's in whatever blood organizers can ring from its legacy and the power of its name, end quote. We had a lot of fun, we had a lot of money, we had a little son, and we thought we'd call him Sunny. Sonny gets married and moves away. Sunny has a baby and bills to pay. Sunny gets sunnier day by day by day by day. Don't know why I've been on a Paul Simon kick lately. Talk to you tomorrow.