Amid heated debates about the potential pitfills of artificial intelligence, the technology has finally taken a form we can probably all get behind — an “AI granny” created expressly to waste scammers’ time.

British telecom company Virgin Media O₂ on Thursday introduced Daisy, a custom-made human-like chabot that answers calls in real time, keeping fraudsters on the phone as long as possible in a bid to annoy and frustrate them, just as they do to consumers worldwide. Daisy (that’s “dAIsy”) automates the practice of “scambaiting,” which involves people posing as potential victims to squander scammers’ time and resources, publicly expose their wily ways, gather information useful to law enforcement and even confuse the con artists’ devices.

Daisy, newly dubbed O2’s “head of scammer relations,” impersonates an older adult, making her part of a demographic that’s particularly vulnerable to scams. Unlike human scambaiters who need to sleep and shower once in a while, Daisy can spend all day and night on the phone with swindlers. “While they’re busy talking to me they can’t be scamming you, and let’s face it, dear, I’ve got all the time in the world,” Daisy says in the introductory video from O₂ embedded below. The video personifies her as a photorealistic AI-generated woman with gray hair, glasses and pearls talking on a pink landline.

The Dstat.cc DDoS review platform has been seized by law enforcement, and two suspects have been arrested after the service helped fuel distributed denial-of-service attacks for years.

The seizure and arrests were conducted as part of “Operation PowerOFF,” an ongoing international law enforcement operation that targets DDoS-for-hire platforms, aka “booters” or “stressers,” to seize infrastructure and arrest the operators.

These platforms are responsible for service disruptions to online services and can cause significant economic damages, as well as impact to the operation of critical services, such as healthcare.

R.I.P. Phil Philip George Zimbardo. March 23, 1933 – October 14, 2024.

“Success is not about reaching a destination; it’s about the journey and the person you become along the way.”

Philip G. Zimbardo, one of the world’s most renowned psychologists, died Oct. 14 in his home in San Francisco. He was 91.

Broadly, Zimbardo’s research explored how environments influence behavior. He is most known for his controversial 1971 study, the Stanford Prison Experiment, with W. Curtis Banks, Craig Haney, and David Jaffe. The study, intended to examine the psychological experiences of imprisonment, revealed the shocking extent to which circumstances can alter individual behavior. To this day, it is used as a case study in psychology classes to highlight both the psychology of evil as well as the ethics of doing psychological research with human subjects.

Yet Zimbardo’s research went far beyond the prison experiment. In a career that spanned over five decades, Zimbardo examined topics including persuasion, attitude change, cognitive dissonance, hypnosis, cults, alienation, shyness, time perspective, altruism, and compassion.

“This makes the scam much harder to spot, as the information provided is personally relevant to the victims, arrives via the expected communication channel, and the linked, fake websites look as expected.”

What’s more, the diversification of the victimology footprint has been complemented by improvements to the toolkit that allow the scammer groups to speed up the scam process using automated phishing page generation, improve communication with targets via interactive chatbots, protecting phishing websites against disruption by competitors, and other goals.

Telekopye’s operations have not been without their fair share of hiccups. In December 2023, law enforcement officials from Czechia and Ukraine announced the arrest of several cybercriminals who are alleged to have used the malicious Telegram bot.

Ransomware victims have paid $459,800,000 to cybercriminals in the first half of 2024, setting the stage for a new record this year if ransom payments continue at this level.

Last year, ransomware payments reached a record $1.1 billion, which Chainalysis previously predicted from stats gathered in the first half of the year when ransomware activity grossed $449,100,000.

We now stand at approximately 2% higher than 2023’s record-breaking trajectory from the same period despite significant law enforcement operations that disrupted large ransomware-as-a-service operations, such as LockBit.

He Jiankui, who went to prison for three years for making the world’s first gene-edited babies, talked to MIT Technology Review about his new research plans.

So I serve a hundred years in one day…’- Joe Haldeman, 2011.

Robot Preachers Found To Undermine Religious Commitment ‘Tell me your torments,’ the Padre said, in an elderly voice marked with compassion. — Philip K. Dick, 1969.

Gaia — Why Stop With Just The Earth? ‘But the stars are only atoms in larger space, and in that larger space the star-atoms could combine to form living matter, thinking matter, couldn’t they?’ — Robert Castle, 1939.

Europol is proposing solutions to avoid challenges posed by privacy-enhancing technologies in Home Routing that hinder law enforcement’s ability to intercept communications during criminal investigations.

The agency has previously highlighted in its Digital Challenges series that law enforcement problem of end-to-end encryption on communication platforms is a hurdle when it comes to collecting admissible evidence.

A little scifi sold again as near future situation.

Introducing Cognify, the prison of the future. This facility is designed to treat criminals like patients. Instead of spending years in an actual prison cell, prisoners could finish their sentence here in just a few minutes. Cognify could someday create and implant artificial memories directly into the prisoner’s brain. It could offer a new approach to criminal rehabilitation, transforming how society deals with offenders by focusing on rehabilitation rather than punishment. #Science #Technology #Research #NeuroScience #psychology.

Follow me everywhere: https://muse.io/hashemalghaili

The TY-3R Air-Water Rescue Drone system was designed with maintainability in mind. Four hatches on the drone provide access for maintenance or replace batteries.

Didiok Makings envisions the TY-3R to become an integral tool for emergency responders, law enforcement agencies, and maritime organizations dedicated to safeguarding lives on water. The company has set up an after-sales department and flight test base to provide customers and operators with optimal service and training.