For example if your total ratio is 0.60, set the target ratio to 1.67.

The Stanford Prison Experiment, one of the most famous and compelling psychological studies of all time, told us a tantalizingly simple story about human nature.

The study took paid participants and assigned them to be “inmates” or “guards” in a mock prison at Stanford University. Soon after the experiment began, the “guards” began mistreating the “prisoners,” implying evil is brought out by circumstance. The authors, in their conclusions, suggested innocent people, thrown into a situation where they have power over others, will begin to abuse that power. And people who are put into a situation where they are powerless will be driven to submission, even madness.

The Stanford Prison Experiment has been included in many, many introductory psychology textbooks and is often cited uncritically. It’s the subject of movies, documentaries, books, television shows, and congressional testimony.

But its findings were wrong. Very wrong. And not just due to its questionable ethics or lack of concrete data — but because of deceit.

With the “Pilnacek” case, the debate on corruption in Austria – ongoing since the „Ibiza affair“ (May 2019) but largely inconclusive so far – is heading for a new high point. The affair showcases massive political influence on the Austrian criminal justice system and proves that it is challenging to bring the problem of corruption under control. One of the main reasons is that Austria has not made the necessary adjustments to the European „acquis communautaire“ since its (relatively late) accession to the EU and keeps ignoring fundamental principles of EU law. Since 2000, there have even been setbacks. The case of Christian Pilnacek illustrates the problem of corruption in Austria in an exemplary manner. Likewise, it underlines the continuing backlog of reforms in Austria and the country’s unwillingness to adjust to the European rule of law.

The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations.

A more interesting “bear case” for AI is that, if you look at the list of industries that leading AIs like GPT-4 are capable of disrupting—and therefore making money off of—the list is lackluster from a return-on-investment perspective, because the industries themselves are not very lucrative. What are AIs of the GPT-4 generation best at? It’s things like:

writing essays or short fictions

digital art

chatting

programming assistance

Researchers in the UK claim to have translated the sound of laptop keystrokes into their corresponding letters with 95 percent accuracy in some cases.

That 95 percent figure was achieved with nothing but a nearby iPhone. Remote methods are just as dangerous: over Zoom, the accuracy of recorded keystrokes only dropped to 93 percent, while Skype calls were still 91.7 percent accurate.

In other words, this is a side channel attack with considerable accuracy, minimal technical requirements, and a ubiquitous data exfiltration point: Microphones, which are everywhere from our laptops, to our wrists, to the very rooms we work in.

The European Union continues on its path to eIDAS 2.0, which includes the controversial Article 45 that basically tells browsers which certification authorities (CAs) to trust. eIDAS, which stands for electronic identification and trust services, is a framework aimed at regulating electronic transactions. As part of this proposal, the EU wants to support embedding identities in website certificates. In essence, the goal is to bring back Extended Validation (EV) certificates.

Browsers—of course—don’t want that, but the real problem is the fact that, with the legal text as it is at the moment, in its near-final form, the EU gets the final say in which CAs are trusted. The global security community has been fighting against Article 45 for more than two years now; we wrote about it on a couple of occasions. As of November 2023, the European Council and Parliament have reached a provisional agreement. The next step is for the law to be put to the vote, which is usually a formality.

Not all ads are created equally sleazy. The privacy harms from surveillance ads, though real, are often hard to pin down. But there's another kind of ad – or "ad" that picks your pocket every time you use an ecommerce site.

This is the "sponsored listing" ad, which allows merchants to bid to be among the top-ranked items in response to your searches – whether or not their products are a good match for your query. These aren't "ads" in the way that, say, a Facebook ad is an ad. These are more #payola, a form of bribery that's actually a crime (but not when Amazon does it).

Amazon is the global champion of payola. It boasts of $31 billion in annual "ad" revenue. That's $31 billion that Amazon sellers have to recoup from you. But Amazon's use of "most favored nation" deals (which requires sellers to offer their lowest prices on Amazon) mean that you don't see those price-hikes because sellers raise their prices everywhere.