New scam, purporting that you are not FICA compliant

 As usual the trick is the url: it says portmap.io instead of standardbank.co.za




Popular posts from this blog

Ditto music does not promote meaningful music

Image
  Ditto Music Blocks Anti-Fascist Release: A Statement on Free Speech and Corporate Censorship This week I received a message from Ditto Music regarding my forthcoming release titled Dulce et Decorum Est . In their words: “In compliance with music platform guidelines your release contains content that is deemed insensitive or showing political or cultural bias. For this reason we are unable to distribute your content to stores.” Let’s be clear: what they mean is that my music is politically engaged — and more to the point, it is intolerant of fascism . The track in question deals with the realities of war, nationalism, and settler-colonial violence. In other words, it dares to challenge the status quo. It refuses to be neutral in the face of injustice. It honours Wilfred Owen’s legacy not by sanitising it, but by updating it for the brutalities of our time. If Ditto Music finds such content objectionable, then the inference is hard to avoid: they are protecting fascism from c...
Read more

Risks of ChatGPT

 Having fiddled with ChatGPT for a while now, I have identified the following two risks. 1. Hallucination . It sometimes just makes stuff up. This is particularly annoying when you give it the information and it goes on a tangent and makes stuff up that was not in the source information. For example, when I gave it some meeting notes, it went on a tangent about N-P completeness in computer science. OK?!? 2. Memory errors . The memory feature that they have added messes up a lot. I have noticed that it performs two mistakes: Recites what it gave you previously , even if the topic was utterly different . For example I gave it some meeting notes to summarise and it spat out some Python code that I had asked for last year. Totally irrelevant! Recites what it gave you previously, because the content was similar , in its opinion. I created a new chat, gave it the meeting notes, and it gave me the PREVIOUS summary of the previous set of meeting notes. In one case it was even worse! It g...
Read more

The risks of Deepfakes and a proposal to combat them - Edited

  Proposal to United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) Pre-empting the problem of Deepfake videos   Dr J Ostrowick, 2021   Background   We presently stand on the edge of an abyss in which social media threatens to uproot our world order and cast us into chaos, as we see with the recent attacks (6 January 2021) on the American Capitol by conspiracy theorists incentivised on social media.   Deepfake videos are motion pictures that are created to look like they depict the actions and words of an existing person, usually a celebrity, but which contain content, words or actions which were not performed by that person and which may impugn on thei r dignity.   Other risky technologies include photoshopping, that is, using the well-known graphics software, Adobe Photoshop ( www.adobe.com/photoshop/ ), to modify a photo of a person to change the context of an image. For example, it is possible to photoshop a picture of a head of state and place them amongst undesirabl...
Read more