CirruSafe

News about TikTok. Perhaps no better than Facebook.

TikTok’s Secret ‘Heating’ Button Can Make Anyone Go Viral TikTok and ByteDance employees regularly engage in “heating,” a manual push that ensures specific videos “achieve a certain number of video views,” according to six sources and documents reviewed by Forbes.

I suppose cybercrime is becoming business as usual. Check out the article.

More organizations are paying the ransom. Why? - Help Net Security Most organizations (71%) have been hit by ransomware in 2022, and most of those (63%) opted for paying the requested ransom.

Interesting concept

The Future of Digital Cash Is Not on the Blockchain If you want the privacy of paper money, you need something that leaves no paper trail.

While this is basically bad news, imagine using these Artificial Intelligence techniques for legitimate marketing email.

AI Wrote Better Phishing Emails Than Humans in a Recent Test Researchers found that tools like OpenAI's GPT-3 helped craft devilishly effective spearphishing messages.

The CDC Covid Tracker. Take a look. Nearly the entire country is in red. I want to share the following that I sent to a cousin in an email:

There are certain facts we can believe. Facts that have unfortunately been learned the hard way. No one can deny that the deaths and hospitalizations due to Covid-19 outstripped the capacities of hospitals last year. We know that the virus exists. It's not a figment of our imagination. It is clearly more contagious than the flu. And, it is possibly more deadly, particularly when present in individuals with certain medical conditions. It's frightening because it uses our own immune system to attack us. Our friend becomes our enemy.

Currently we are learning, the hard way, that the majority of the patients being hospitalized for the Covid-19 variant are people who have not been vaccinated.

Yes, some people, as with any of the medications science offers us today, react negatively to the vaccination. But unlike the Covid-19 virus where we know someone or know someone who knows someone that has been hospitalized or even possibly died from the virus, we probably don't know anyone who fell sick from getting vaccinated. And just to get on my "employer" soap-box, these same people who strike because their employer requires vaccination would sue their employer for not providing them adequate protection. I recently went through forensic data gathering for one of my clients in this situation.

It's my opinion that the virus is real, highly infectious, and has the potential to kill; that the government and medical community are scrambling in an attempt to get ahead of something they don't completely understand and are responding to questions without highly qualified facts to a public that is relatively uneducated in the vaccination technology; and the "untested" vaccination is the best weapon we got to fight with. My strategy is to use the weapon I have available and hope we win the battle so we can look back later and find the truth. As my mother would have said "Hindsight is 20/20".

COVID Data Tracker CDC’s home for COVID-19 data. Visualizations, graphs, and data in one easy-to-use website.

Looks like the "kick back" from government concern about crypto currency is building steam: I wondered whether the US or China would lead:

China to shut down over 90% of its Bitcoin mining capacity after local bans - Global Times Many Bitcoin mines in Southwest China’s Sichuan Province – one of China’s largest cryptocurrency mining bases – were closed as of Sunday, according to after local authorities ordered a halt to mining in the region on Friday amid an intensified nationwide crackdown against cryptocurrency mini...

Credit to "The Markup" for this article. A bit tedious to read, but you get the idea. Blatant disregard for privacy by one of the big tech monopolies.

Google Promised Its Contact Tracing App Was Completely Private—But It Wasn’t – The Markup Researchers say hundreds of preinstalled apps can access a log found on Android devices where sensitive contact tracing information is stored

After 50+ years of being a technologist I can't help seeing humor in a 30 year old being concerned about keeping up with technology. There are some interesting ideas addressed at the end of the response to his question. Things everyone should consider.

Do I Have a Moral Obligation to Be On TikTok? I'm only 30, and already feeling like I owe it to society to keep up.

It's always fun to read an Exposé that uncovers truth's about social media.

'Fake Famous' Review: A Fun Window Into Instagram Influencers In Fake Famous, journalist Nick Bilton sets out to document how easy it is to manufacture celebrity online.

And if you really want to boggle your mind, read about the darkest of arts here. A difficult read, but an exposure of how internet advertising policies foster the monetization of society’s fringes.

Follow the Money: How Digital Ads Subsidize the Worst of the Web From Covid conspiracies to election scams, automated advertising software plays a large—and largely unseen—role.