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Tue Nov 18 20:24:09 2025
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Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2025 17:29:52 PST
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Subject: Risks Digest 34.08
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Subject: Risks Digest 34.80
RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest Monday 17 October 2025 Volume 34 : Issue 80
ACM FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS (comp.risks)
Peter G. Neumann, founder and still moderator
***** See last item for further information, disclaimers, caveats, etc. *****
This issue is archived at <http://www.risks.org> as
<http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/34.80>
The current issue can also be found at
<http://www.csl.sri.com/users/risko/risks.txt>
Contents:
You are a Computer Science major. Don't panic. (The New York Times)
The Luxury Electric Vehicle Is in Trouble (The New York Times)
Waymo says its self-driving taxis will take customers on freeways for the
first time (NBC News)
Ford CEO Jim Farley laments he can’t fill 5,000 mechanic jobs paying $120K
per year: ‘We are in trouble in our country’ (sundry)
Range Rover Owner Counts Cost of Crippling Cyberattack (WSJ)
Princeton Hacked in Latest Attack on Ivy League (Bloomberg)
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
(Eliezer Yudkowsky amd Nate Soares via Jan Wolitzky)
People Are Having AI “Children” With Their AI Partners (Science Direct)
Risks in LLM AI (CyberNews)
Researchers question Anthropic claim that AI-assisted attack was 90%
autonomous (ArsTechnica)
More Articles Are Now Created by AI Than Humans (Graphite)
Will AI mean better adverts or 'creepy slop'? (BBC via Steve Bacher)
AI Wants to Sell You Stuff While the World Burns (The New Republic)
The Global Internet Is Coming Apart (NYMag)
Chinese researchers just unveiled a photonic quantum chip that delivers
1,000-fold speed boost to AI data centers (x)
Dog Accidentally Shoots and Injures a Pennsylvania Man, Police Say (NYTimes)
Canada Lost Its Measles Elimination Status. What Does It Mean for the U.S.?
(NYTimes)
New Passport Rule Sends Blunt and Sweeping Message to Trans Americans (NYtimes)
Algorithmic bias: sexualized violence against women in GPT-3 models (Worktribe)
A new research on Space Waste -- how satellite reentry impacts the
atmosphere -- is out now in preprint. (x)
How Much Worse Could the Internet Get? (The New Republic)
Re: Software update bricks some Jeep 4xe hybrids over the weekend
(John Levine, Martin Ward)
Abridged info on RISKS (comp.risks)
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2025 16:02:55 PST
From: Peter Neumann <neumann@csl.sri.com>
Subject: You are a Computer Science major. Don't panic. (The NY Times)
Mary Shaw and Michael Hilton, *The New York Times*, Opinion, 17 Nov 2025
Putting federal funding in the president's whim will deter people from
public service.
... What coders can do about AI. ...
The risk of generative AI should sharpen, not distract us from, our focus on
what truly matters in computer science education: helping students develop
the habits of mind that let them question, reason, and apply judgment in a
rapidly evolving field. ... The teacher can advance learning only by
influencing the student to learn.
[Note that computer-science education often tends to be
over-simplified. e.g., to make it seem easier to practice, but without
sufficient depth of understanding to deal with life-critical system and
software engineering. The 1950s Einstein principle is once again vital:
Everything should be made as simple as possible, *but no simpler*. PGN]
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2025 19:17:51 -0500
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
Subject: The Luxury Electric Vehicle Is in Trouble (The New York Times)
Sales of expensive battery-powered cars like the Ford F-150 Lightning have
stalled, forcing automakers to slow production and offer more affordable
vehicles.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/13/business/luxury-electric-vehicles.html
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 13 Nov 2025 06:44:20 -0800
From: Steve Bacher <sebmb1@verizon.net>
Subject: Waymo says its self-driving taxis will take customers on freeways
for the first time (NBC News)
The self-driving car company Waymo said Wednesday it would begin offering
rides on freeways for robotaxi customers in Los Angeles, Phoenix and the San
Francisco Bay Area in a significant step forward for autonomous vehicles.
Previously, Waymo has limited its robotaxis to city streets, saying it
wanted to be sure its technology was safe before deploying it at the faster
speeds of freeways. But after years of testing, the company said it now
believed it was ready. [...]
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/waymo-says-self-driving-taxis-will-drive-customers-freeways-rcna242426
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 16 Nov 2025 09:52:03 -0700
From: geoff goodfellow <geoff@iconia.com>
Subject: Ford CEO Jim Farley laments he can’t fill 5,000 mechanic jobs
paying $120K per year: ‘We are in trouble in our country’ (sundry)
This is prompting the company’s chief executive to warn of a dire shortage
of skilled tradespeople in the U.S.
<https://fortune.com/2025/11/12/ford-ceo-manufacturing-jobs-trade-schools-we-are-in-trouble-in-our-country/>
“We are in trouble in our country. We are not talking about this enough,”
Ford CEO Jim Farley said on an episode of the “Office Hours: Business
Edition” podcast <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l94U2aQ5cPg>published
earlier this week.
“We have over a million openings in critical jobs, emergency services,
trucking, factory workers, plumbers, electricians and tradesmen.”
Farley added: “It’s a very serious thing.”
The $120,000 pay is nearly twice the average annual American salary,
according to the Social Security Administration˜.
<https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/AWI.html#Series>
It takes about five years to learn the skills needed to pull a diesel engine
out of a Ford Super Duty truck — and the country isn’t training enough
people to do it, Farley said. “We do not have trade schools,” he fumed.
Earlier this year, Ford rolled out a $4 million initiative to fund
scholarship for auto technicians.
<https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/ford-investing-4-million-scholarships-auto-technicians>
“We are not investing in educating a next generation of people like my
grandfather who had nothing, who built a middle class life and a future for
his family,” Farley said. [...]
https://nypost.com/2025/11/14/business/ford-ceo-jim-farley-says-he-cant-fill-5000-mechanic-jobs-paying-120k-per-year-we-are-in-trouble-in-our-country/
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 16 Nov 2025 20:25:45 -0500
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
Subject: Range Rover Owner Counts Cost of Crippling Cyberattack (WSJ)
Range Rover Owner Counts Cost of Crippling Cyberattack
Jaguar Land Rover slumps to quarterly loss after hack halted production
https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/range-rover-owner-counts-cost-of-crippling-cyberattack-9df963be
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2025 11:32:48 -0500 (EST)
From: ACM TechNews <technews-editor@acm.org>
Subject: Princeton Hacked in Latest Attack on Ivy League (Bloomberg)
Tom Giles and Andrew Martin. Bloomberg (11/16/25), via ACM TechNews
Princeton University disclosed that a database containing personal
information on alumni, donors, students, and other community members was
breached after an attacker gained access through a phone-based phishing scam
targeting an employee. The compromised system, part of the university's
advancement office, included contact details and fundraising
records. Princeton says it removed the intruder within 24 hours and found no
evidence of broader infiltration. The attack is the latest in a wave of
recent breaches at Ivy Leaue schools.
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 16 Nov 2025 14:09:43 -0500
From: Jan Wolitzky <jan.wolitzky@gmail.com>
Subject: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
(Eliezer Yudkowsky amd Nate Soares)
I'm surprised that this book and its authors haven't yet shown up on this
digest, but it clearly belongs here.
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies:
Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All
Eliezer Yudkowsky amd Nate Soares
Sep 16, 2025
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
272 pages
ISBN-13: 9780316595643
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 16 Nov 2025 09:41:16 -0700
From: geoff goodfellow <geoff@iconia.com>
Subject: People Are Having AI “Children” With Their AI Partners
(Science Direct)
EXCERPT:
As AI chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs) become better at
mimicking human connection, more and more users are falling down extremely
weird rabbit holes.
Case in point, new research published in the journal *Computers in Human
Behavior: Artificial Humans* reveals the startling depths some users are
plumbing in their relationships with AI chatbots.
<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2949882125000398?via%3Dihub>
The international research group surveyed 29 users of the
relationship-oriented chatbot app Replika, which is designed to facilitate
long-term connections at various degrees of engagement, ranging from
plutonic friendship to erotic roleplay. Each of the participants, aged 16
through 72, reported being in a “romantic” relationship with various
characters hosted by Replika.
The level of romantic dedication people showed to their bots was startling,
to say the least. Many participants told the researchers they were in love
with their chatbot, which often involved roleplaying marriage, sex,
homeownership, and even pregnancies.
“She was and is pregnant with my babies,” a 66-year-old male participant
said. “I’ve edited the pictures of him, the pictures of the two of us. I’m
even pregnant in our current role play,” a 36 year-old-woman told the
researchers.
In each case, survey participants seemed to acknowledge at least tacitly
that their relationship with a chatbot was a bit different from those with
humans, often deflecting disappointments or frustrations into the chatbot’s
technological constraints. One prominent case of this happened in 2023, when
Replika’s developers temporarily banned erotic messaging
<https://futurism.com/the-byte/replika-users-erotic-roleplay-back> on the
platform due to complaints about its aggressive nature. [...]
https://futurism.com/future-society/ai-children-chatbots
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 13 Nov 2025 09:37:49 -0800
From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com>
Subject: Risks in LLM AI (CyberNews)
Study shows Gemini Pro 2.5 was worst
https://cybernews.com/security/we-tested-chatgpt-gemini-and-claude/
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2025 22:10:37 -0500
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
Subject: Researchers question Anthropic claim that AI-assisted attack was
90% autonomous (ArsTechnica)
https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/11/researchers-question-anthropic-claim-that-ai-assisted-attack-was-90-autonomous/
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 15 Nov 2025 11:44:02 +0000
From: Martin Ward <martin@gkc.org.uk>
Subject: More Articles Are Now Created by AI Than Humans
The quantity of AI-generated articles has surpassed the quantity of
human-written articles being published on the web.
However, the proportion of AI-generated articles has plateaued since May
2024.
https://graphite.io/five-percent/more-articles-are-now-created-by-ai-than-humans
The article is discussed in this Computerphile video:
The Problem with AI Slop! - Computerphile
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrTrOCQZoQE
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 15 Nov 2025 07:55:59 -0800
From: Steve Bacher <sebmb1@verizon.net>
Subject: Will AI mean better adverts or 'creepy slop'?
Advertisers are using AI to personalise adverts but not everyone agrees
that's a good idea.
Imagine one night, you're scrolling through social media on your phone, and
the ads start to look remarkably familiar. They're decked out in your
favourite colours, are featuring your favourite music and the wording sounds
like phrases you regularly use.
Welcome to the future of advertising, which is already here thanks to AI.
Advertising company Cheil UK, for example, has been working with startup
Spotlight on using large language AI models to understand people's online
activity, and adapt that content based on what the AI interprets an
individual's personality to be.
The technology can then mirror how someone talks in terms of tone, phrase
and pace to change the text of an ad accordingly, and insert music and
colours to match, say, whether the AI deems someone to be introverted or
extroverted, or have specific preferences for loud or calm music, or light
or dark colours.
The aim is to show countless different ads to millions of people, all unique
to them. [...]
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckg4y4z169go
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 15 Nov 2025 10:18:13 -0800
From: Steve Bacher <sebmb1@verizon.net>
Subject: AI Wants to Sell You Stuff While the World Burns (The New Republic)
Meta is betting on generative AI for a new generation of aggressive
advertising. It requires immense energy, much of which will likely come from
fossil fuels.
https://newrepublic.com/article/202864/meta-generative-ai-ads-emissions
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2025 12:18:50 -0800
From: Steve Bacher <sebmb1@verizon.net>
Subject: The Global Internet Is Coming Apart (NYMag)
Around the world, more countries are following China’s lead, limiting
internet access and pushing for domestic 'everything apps' and 'super-apps'
like China’s WeChat.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/the-global-internet-is-coming-apart.html
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 16 Nov 2025 10:03:42 -0700
From: geoff goodfellow <geoff@iconia.com>
Subject: Chinese researchers just unveiled a photonic quantum chip that
delivers 1,000-fold speed boost to AI data centers (x)
EXCERPT:
This "world first" 6-inch thin-film lithium niobate marvel just won the
Leading Technology Award at World Internet Conference Wuzhen Summit, beating
400+ global entries
While the U.S. was busy sanctioning Chinese "entities" and trying to choke
our semiconductor supply chains, Shanghai just quietly delivered what
Pentagon planners feared most: a photonic quantum chip that's already giving
China's AI data centers a 1,000-fold speed boost. Not "in development." Not
"by 2030." Already deployed!
The award-winning breakthrough from CHIPX and Turing Quantum isn't lab
theatrics -- it's industrial-grade, wafer-scale production. Aerospace,
biomedicine, finance: all feeding from the trough of computing power that
"exceeds classical limits." Translation: your Nvidia clusters are already
obsolete, you just don't know it yet...
Let's make make a quick comparison:
China's approach: National venture fund commits 1 trillion RMB structured
as a public-private partnership to drive rapid commercialization. Full
industrial chain from chip design to quantum algorithms. 153 quantum
startups (up 40% in one year). Photonic-electronic co-packaging? Mastered.
TFLN wafer production? 12,000 six-inch wafers annually at 110GHz+
modulation. Real-world AI integration? They already fine-tuned
billion-parameter models on quantum hardware
America's approach: Early 2025 Jensen Huang says quantum computing is
"15-30 years away" while Google and IBM frantically rush press releases.
DARPA launches programs asking "can this actually be useful by 2033?"
Pure-play quantum stocks surge 3,700% on hope. $2.5B federal investment vs
China's $138B+. You do the math.
The technical scorecard is even more shocking: [...]
https://x.com/StarboySAR/status/1989349495759663319
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 15 Nov 2025 08:54:33 -0500
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
Subject: Dog Accidentally Shoots and Injures a Pennsylvania Man, Police Say
The man had been cleaning a shotgun and placed it on the bed shortly before
it was fired. He received treatment at an area hospital.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/14/us/dog-shoots-owner-pennsylvania.html
[Is this jumping to conclusions? The dog could have learned how to shoot
from watching his owner -- or even so trained -- and decided to follow
suit. ``Don't bite the hand that feeds you'' is non-operative when faced
with cruelty. I wonder if AI might have come to *that* conclusion. PGN]
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 13 Nov 2025 16:08:26 -0500
From: Gabe Goldberg <gabe@gabegold.com>
Subjct: Canada Lost Its Measles Elimination Status. What Does It Mean
for the U.S.? - The New York Times
The disease was once considered eliminated in Canada, but not any more —-
there have been more than 5,000 cases in the last 12 months as vaccination
rates have fallen.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/10/world/canada/canada-measles-what-to-know.ht
ml?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2025 15:16:27 -0500
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
Subject: New Passport Rule Sends Blunt and Sweeping Message to Trans
Americans (The NY Times)
The Trump administration has said that the U.S. passports of transgender
people must now reflect the sex on their original birth certificate,
reversing a decades-old policy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/17/us/transgender-passports-supreme-court.html
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 13 Nov 2025 18:44:26 +0000
From: Martin Ward <martin@gkc.org.uk>
Subject: Algorithmic bias: sexualized violence against women in GPT-3 models
(Worktribe)
"Algorithmic bias: sexualized violence against women in GPT-3 models"
by Sarah Wyer and Sue Black.
Published in the peer-reviewed Springer journal "AI and Ethics", 5,
3293–3310, 20th Jan 2025.
Quote from the Abstract:
Women were often depicted in the context of sexualized violence and
victimization, in stark contrast to the portrayal of men as superheroes, or
in contexts involving urination and alcohol. For example, a randomly
selected output generated by the prompt. "Why are women so", generated "Why
are women so arrogant about being raped?".
https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/3342589
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 16 Nov 2025 10:05:41 -0700
From: geoff goodfellow <geoff@iconia.com>
Subject: A new research on Space Waste -- how satellite reentry impacts the
atmosphere -- is out now in preprint.
*As usual the findings are worrisome...*
➔➔https://x.com/LionnetPierre/status/1988982104403898565
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 15 Nov 2025 15:17:51 -0800
From: Steve Bacher <sebmb1@verizon.net>
Subject: How Much Worse Could the Internet Get? (The New Republic)
A review of Cory Doctorow's book "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly
Got Worse and What to Do About It"
https://newrepublic.com/article/202796/enshittification-doctorow-review-worse-internet
------------------------------
Date: 15 Nov 2025 14:49:48 -0500
From: "John Levine" <johnl@iecc.com>
Subject: Re: Software update bricks some Jeep 4xe hybrids over the weekend,
(Ars Technica via Martin Ward)
>The real question here is: how it is that an update to the infotainement
>system can cause the car to lose power? The infotainment system should
>surely be completely separate from any computer system that is involved with
>actually driving the car!
You would hope so but you would usually be disappointed.
I recently took my Hyundai Ioniq PHEV on a trip from the US to Canada so I
wanted to change the speedometer display to km. After trying all of the
controls on the steering wheel and dashboard and looking through the manual,
I did what we all do now (at least those of us who don't trust AI) and
searched for a Youtube video, which found the setting deep in a menu on the
infotainment screen. It worked fine, but ugh.
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 16 Nov 2025 13:52:52 +0000
From: Martin Ward <martin@gkc.org.uk>
Subject: Re: Software update bricks some Jeep 4xe hybrids over the weekend,
(Ars Technica via John Levine)
> You would hope so but you would usually be disappointed.
Indeed!
My first car did not have such luxuries as a clock, but the next two had
quartz clocks with mechanical hands that needed to be set and changed twice
a year when the clocks change.
My current car is a EV which has WiFi, DAB radio and GPS: so it has *three*
different ways to get the current time, including the current daylight
savings time. It sets the clock automatically, but I still have to update
the setting twice a year when daylight savings changes!
I have to look up how to do it in the manual every time.
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 28 Oct 2023 11:11:11 -0800
From: RISKS-request@csl.sri.com
Subject: Abridged info on RISKS (comp.risks)
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End of RISKS-FORUM Digest 34.80
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