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November 14, 2022: Lurking dangers of tech

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Today: Lurking dangers of tech: things the tech-bros forgot to mention.

• Cleveland man with a nature app: (Cleveland.com, Oct 10, 2022):

A nature-identification app on his phone had identified it as an edible mushroom. The 54-year-old beekeeper and amateur naturalist from [the Cleveland area] had grown and picked mushrooms in the past, and regularly enjoyed identifying plants. So he did what he thought was the responsible thing: he used the plant identification app on his phone to determine the species of mushroom.

When the app matched his photos of the backyard mushrooms with an edible species, Hickman collected them, took them home, and sautéed them with onions, garlic and butter. Then he ate them on top of the mushroom tortellini his wife had made for dinner. . . . sometime in the middle of that night roughly eight hours later, Hickman became violently ill with crippling stomach pain, and continuous vomiting and diarrhea.

. . . “I think if I wouldn’t have had my phone, I wouldn’t have picked them. I know I wouldn’t have. There’s no question in my mind,” Hickman said.

• Personal Heart Monitors Can Be Dangerous (letter to the WSJ, Robert Saldivar, M.D., Oct 10, 2022): “In my suburban practice, I often see someone who has received a device alert. Rarely will we find a serious condition . . . Most often, the frequent alerts from the device have led to a high level of stress, which can exacerbate an underlying anxiety condition. None of these devices can detect the electrical indicators of a heart attack. . . If [users] feel ‘off’ and the device gives no alert or reads normal, they may feel falsely reassured and not seek medical attention.”

• America’s Ring doorbell camera obsession highlights the scourge of mass surveillance (by Evan Greer and Anna Bonesteel from Fight for the Future, opinion piece in NBCNews.com, Nov 1, 2022): “In October, a man walked down his Florida street to return a neighbor’s package that had been accidentally delivered to his address. But unbeknownst to this good Samaritan, he was being watched by an Amazon Ring doorbell camera on the front porch, reported The Washington Post. Police told The Post that the Ring device sent an alert to the homeowner and his teenage son, who — assuming there was an intruder — grabbed .45-caliber handguns and opened fire on a woman (not the package returner) sitting in her car.”

  --> See also: They got a Ring doorbell alert, then opened fire on a bystander, police say (Washington Post, Oct 19, 2022) and Ring Cameras Are Going to Get More People Killed (Oct 24, 2022)

• The YouTube baker fighting back against deadly “craft hacks” (Technology Review, Sep 23, 2022): “Ann Reardon spends her time debunking dangerous activities that go viral on the platform—but the craze shows no signs of abating.” The story focuses on the YouTube channel “5-Minute Crafts, currently the 13th most subscribed channel on YouTube; every week, the channel gains around 30 million more views.” One analysis estimates that the channel generates up to $6.8 million annually for the creators. The channel features “craft hacks” that are often potentially lethal, like “poaching eggs in a microwave, bleaching strawberries,” and as Tech Review points out, “a tutorial on spinning molten sugar into cotton candy with an electric drill; a tutorial on making a glue gun out of a sliced soda can and a lighter; and a video in which a mysterious hand lights antibacterial gel on fire before swiping fingers through it.”

  --> Another type of “craft hack” that Reardon warns against is fractal wood burning, which is potentially lethal. From the Journal of Burn Care & Research, Mar/Apr 2021, Shocked Though the Heart and YouTube Is to Blame – The Rising Incidence of Accidental Trans-cardiac Electrocution From Do-It-Yourself Fractal Wood Art:

YouTube users account for more than 45% of the world’s entire online population, including more than 73% of American adults. Many are turning to DIY online videos to inspire new ways of passing the time. As a result, the world has seen a startling increase in DIY-related injuries. . . . DIY-related fatalities have also been on the rise. . .

The growing popularity of fractal wood burning is increasing the incidence [of] high-voltage electrocutions occurring at home. The pre-eminent association for wood art in the United States, the American Association of Woodturners (AAW), has issued a policy against fractal wood burning citing more than 24 deaths attributed to the technique. . . . A casual online search using the terms “how to fractal wood burning” and “how to Lichtenberg art” yields hundreds of results including dozens of videos . . . frequently accompanied by links and “pop up” advertisements selling the electrical equipment necessary to build a high-voltage transformer and produce a finished work of art. While some videos depict methods to “improve safety” such as holding the electrified jumper cables with oven mitts, these methods are by no means safe.

Tim Carter of the Washington Post’s “Ask the Builder” column warned readers not to believe what they see on YouTube. He cautioned, “I’ve watched hundreds of YouTube videos showing the exact wrong way to do something.” However, prior to their accidents, all of our patients believed Lichtenberg burning was safe. . . . [and] any of them could have easily been killed by the transcardiac shock they experienced.

• Palmer Luckey Made a VR Headset That Kills the User If They Die in the Game (Vice, Nov 7, 2022), relying on “explosive modular charges. He tied them to a narrow-band photo sensor that detects the headset views a specific red screen that flashes at a specific frequency. ‘When an appropriate game-over screen is displayed, the charges fire, instantly destroying the brain of the user,’ Luckey said.” This appears to be true, and confirmed by Luckey's own post on Nov 6: If you die in the game, you die in real life. Luckey hypes up “NerveGear, the incredible device that perfectly recreates reality using a direct neural interface that is also capable of killing the user. . . . we are halfway to making a true NerveGear. . . . so far, I have only figured out the half that kills you. The perfect-VR half of the equation is still many years out.”

• Tesla faces U.S. criminal probe over self-driving claims (Reuters, Oct 27, 2022): “Tesla is under criminal investigation in the United States over claims that the company’s electric vehicles can drive themselves. . . . The U.S. Department of Justice launched the previously undisclosed probe last year following more than a dozen crashes, some of them fatal, involving Tesla’s driver assistance system Autopilot, which was activated during the accidents, the people said.”

• Your Smart Thermostat Isn’t Here to Help You (Ian Bogost in the Atlantic, Sep 26, 2022): “utilities don’t encourage adoption of smart thermostats to produce individual household energy or cost savings. They do so to encourage residences to allow the utility to control their air-conditioning. . . . Google is the usual suspect in such indictments, and the tech giant does indeed collect and use Nest devices in that way. . . . But it’s not alone. Even seemingly normal, boring home-thermostat makers such as Honeywell do the same sort of thing—and also reserve the right to share that data with third parties. In this account, the overall data economy becomes the beneficiary of the smart thermostat. . . ."

• KFC Apologizes for Linking Chicken Promotion to Kristallnacht (NYT, Nov 11, 2022): Artificial intelligence using very real anti-semitism to sell fake food. “On Wednesday, KFC Germany sent a message to users of its app with the title ‘Anniversary of the Reich’s pogrom night,’ according to reports in the German news media and screen shots of the promotion that circulated widely on Twitter. The message invited customers to enjoy ‘tender cheese with crispy chicken.’ . . . KFC Germany apologized again in a statement to news outlets, saying that its ‘obviously wrong, insensitive and unacceptable’ message about Kristallnacht resulted from an automated push notification that had been sent by accident.”

• Internal Documents Show How Close the F.B.I. Came to Deploying Spyware (NYT, Nov 12, 2022): “Christopher Wray, the F.B.I.’s director, told Congress last December that the bureau purchased the phone hacking tool Pegasus for research and development purposes.” NSO Group's Pegasus can target any individual iPhone or Android phone, “reading text messages, tracking calls, collecting passwords, location tracking, accessing the target device’s microphone and camera, and harvesting information from apps” (reports Wikipedia). Not to worry, the FBI says they bought Pegasus just “to be able to figure out how bad guys could use it.”

• Apple Limits iPhone File-Sharing Tool Used for Protests in China (Bloomberg, Nov 9, 2022): “iOS 16.1.1, released Wednesday, caps the window in which users can receive files from non-contacts at 10 minutes. . . . Apple made the change to AirDrop on iPhones sold in China. The shift came after protesters in the country used the service to spread posters opposing Xi Jinping and the Chinese government.”

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