We’ve all had a family dinner, Netflix binge, or otherwise relaxing moment ruined by a telemarketer trying to sell you something you didn't need – a magazine subscription, insurance, you name it! But recently, people have been getting calls that are much more sinister in nature; people claiming to be employees of Microsoft, or Apple, or Amazon, have been calling unsuspecting victims and urging them to pay the caller in exchange for cleaning their computer of viruses. Viruses that don’t exist. None of these people work for the companies they claim to, but rather are a small cog in a larger machine working to defraud the public.
On this episode of Security Unlocked, hosts Natalia Godyla and Nic Fillingham kick off a three-episode arc discussing tech support scams. To get started, they speak with Anup B Kumar, Microsoft’s Digital Crime Unit’s Asia lead of investigation and analytics, to get a better sense of who is behind these scams, what their motivations are, and some ideas on how to stop them.
In This Episode You Will Learn:
Who these scammers target and why
How the scammers trick victims into trusting them.
Why working with law enforcement is crucial to stopping the problem
Some Questions We Ask:
Do the scammers know that they are scamming?
How pervasive is this scam?
Can we stop the scam by helping to facilitate legitimate employment?
The vote to open a debate about the For The People Act, which would make it easier to vote, strengthen campaign finance rules, and end partisan gerrymandering, was blocked in the Senate yesterday with all 50 Republicans united against it. With moderate Democrats like Manchin and Sinema refusing to budge on the filibuster, the future of voting rights is uncertain. We spoke with Crooked Media's Political Director Shaniqua McClendon about what might happen next.
And in headlines: Biden won’t hit his July 4th vaccine goal, Teamsters start nationwide project to unionize Amazon workers, and L.A. County wants its residents to stop feeding peacocks.
Show Notes:
Vote Save America: HR1 or We're Fucked – https://votesaveamerica.com/forthepeople/
For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday
What is “wokeness” in America today? How did we get here?
Are "woke" corporations a threat to this country? What risk do we run if we don’t push back?
Vivek Ramaswamy, the author of the forthcoming book "Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam," joins "The Daily Signal Podcast" to discuss wokeness and the dangers it poses to American society and beyond.
"If wokeism is a religion, then an employer can no longer force that religion down the throat of their employees any more than they could force down Christianity or Islam or any other religion. So, then, that raises the question of, well, 'Is wokeism a religion or not?'" Ramaswamy said.
"And I think on the facts, the answer is abundantly clear ... . There are certain words you can't say, certain clothes you can't wear, certain apologies you must recite, and an excommunication that follows, whether or not you recite it," he added.
We also cover these stories:
The White House says it won't meet President Joe Biden’s coronavirus vaccine goal of vaccinating 70% of American adults by Independence Day on July 4.
In an op-ed for The Washington Post, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., reaffirms her stance on retaining the Senate filibuster.
Black Lives Matter is criticizing Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., for his membership in a reportedly all-white beach club.
Welcome to your new life! As a reborn person, your job is now to serve others, in this case by listening to all of our podcasts. Remember, every podcast is a face of god, so maybe listen twice!
As an antidote to the constant glowing profiles of tech executives and venture capitalists, TMK is starting an ongoing, occasional series where we highlight the stories and experiences of radical tech workers: people who are disaffected by the industry, discontented with its broken promises, and committed to working towards different models of funding, building, and using technology for a truly better world. To kick us off we are very pleased to be joined by (returning champion) Wendy Liu and Jason Prado—both longtime tech workers—for an amazing discussion about their time working in Silicon Valley, their political journeys, and the alternative paths they took. Big shout out to the tech workers in the TMK Discord who have inspired this series!
Follow Wendy: twitter.com/dellsystem
Buy Abolish Silicon Valley: abolishsiliconvalley.com/
Follow Jason: twitter.com/jasonpjason
Subscribe to Venture Commune: venturecommune.substack.com/
Check out the Drivers Cooperative: drivers.coop/about-us
Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! patreon.com/thismachinekills
Grab your TMK gear: bonfire.com/store/this-machine-kills-podcast/
Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (twitter.com/braunestahl)
Tam O'Shaughnessy and Sally Ride, the first American woman to fly in space, shared a passion for getting girls involved in STEM. It led them to co-found Sally Ride Science, a company focused on equity and inclusion in science education. But, there was much more to Tam and Sally's relationship. Tam gives us an intimate look at their decades-long partnership: how they met and fell in love, the pressures they faced as a queer couple, and their long-awaited and public coming out with Sally's death in 2012. We want to know which LGBTQ+ scientists have inspired you! Email the show at shortwave@npr.org.
When Jette was studying mathematics in the early 2000s, his focus was on computational biology, and more specifically, phylogenetic trees, and DNA sequences. He wanted to understand the evolution of certain traits and the forces that explain why our bones are a certain length or our brains a certain size. As it turned out, the algorithms and techniques he learned in this field mapped very well to the emerging discipline of automatic speech recognition, or ASR.
During this period, Montreal was emerging as a hotbed for artificial intelligence, and Jette found himself working for Nuance, the company behind the original implementation of Siri. That experience led him to several positions in the world of speech recognition, and he eventually landed at Rev, where he founded the company’s AI department.
Jette describes Rev as an “Uber for Transcription.” Anyone can sign up for the platform and earn money by listening to audio submitted by clients and transcribing the speech into text. This means the company has a tremendous dataset of raw audio that has been annotated by human beings and, in many cases, assessed a second time by the client. For someone looking to build an AI system that mastered the domain of speech to text, this was a goldmine.
Jette built the earliest version of Rev’s AI, but it was up to our second guest, Josh Dong, to productize and scale that system. He helped the department transition from older technologies like Perl to more popular languages like Python. He also focused on practical concerns like modularity and reusable components. To combine machine learning and DevOps, Dong added Docker containers and a testing pipeline. If you’re interested in the nuts and bolts of keeping a system like Rev’s running at tremendous scale, you’ll want to check out this part of the show.
We also explore some of the fascinating future and promise this technology holds in our time with Jenny Drexler. She explains how Rev is moving from a hybrid model—one that combines Jette’s older statistical techniques with Dong’s newer machine learning approach—to a new system that will be ML from end-to-end. This will open up the door for powerful applications, like a single system that can convert speech text across multiple languages in a single piece of audio.
“One of the things that's really cool about these end to end models is that basically, whatever data you have, it can learn to handle it. So a very similar architecture can do sequence to sequence learning with different kinds of sequences. The model architecture that you might use for speech recognition can actually look very similar to what you might use for translation. And you can use that same architecture, to say, feed in audio in lots of different languages and be able to do transcription for any of them within one model. It's much harder with the hybrid models to sort of put all the right pieces together to make that happen,” explains Drexler.
If you’re interested in learning more about the past, present, and future of artificial intelligence that can understand our spoken language and learn how to respond, check out the full episode. If you want to learn more about Rev or check out some of the positions they have open, you can find their careers page here.
Rob explores indie-rock darling Pavement’s critically acclaimed hit “Gold Soundz” by discussing their quirky charm, enigmatic lyrics, and unique fan following.
This episode was originally produced as a Music and Talk show available exclusively on Spotify. Find the full song on Spotify or wherever you get your music.
Akhil and Andy continue their tour of the 9 established colleges at the Founding, 7 were in the Ivy League, so the Ancient Eight will inevitably stand out in our survey - but they are not alone, as we discuss. Still it is remarkable that such a tiny portion of the population yielded so many familiar names. Latter-day scholars from these institutions still loom large as well, from Daniel Webster and Charles Beard to Gordon Wood and Maggie Blackhawk - giants all. And learn about one of the greats that you may not know well - Douglas Adair.
Not sure about how to use an IRA or which type to choose? Money Girl cuts through the confusion and explains the pros and cons of IRAs and how to know if a traditional or Roth account is best for you.
