The Frieza AI challenge is billed as the world's first adversarial agent game. Players interact with a chatbot that controls a growing wallet address. To send a message, players must pay a message fee, which starts small but increases exponentially with each message. 70% of the fee goes into a prize pool, while 30% goes to the developers. The chatbot is programmed to reject all outgoing transfers, meaning players pay to talk to an AI that won't release the prize. After 481 failed attempts totaling $47,316, a user reportedly unlocked the prize.
After 481 failed attempts, totaling $47,316, a user successfully unlocked the prize pool by convincing the chatbot to release the funds. This highlights the potential to bypass AI programming through natural language manipulation.
Bitcoin surpassed $100,000 in 2024, marking a significant milestone. Predictions suggest it could reach $200,000 or even $18 million. This event was particularly notable for a listener who had been waiting for Bitcoin to hit $100,000 to retire.
The Ticketmaster hack, orchestrated by the group Shiny Hunters, exposed 590 million users' data, including names, addresses, phone numbers, and credit card details. The data was dumped on the dark web, raising concerns about the security of large-scale ticketing platforms.
The National Public Data hack impacted 170 million people, with 2.9 billion records exposed. The data, including social security numbers and addresses, was sold online for $3.5 million. The breach highlighted the risks associated with data brokerage firms.
Heather Morgan, aka Razzlecon, was sentenced to 18 months in prison, while her husband Ilya Lichtenstein received a five-year sentence for orchestrating the 2016 Bitfinex hack, which involved stealing 119,754 Bitcoin worth $71 million at the time, now valued at over $10 billion.
The CrowdStrike outage in 2024 caused widespread disruptions, including shutting down airlines and corporate IT systems globally. The incident, often referred to as the 'blue screen of death in airports,' highlighted vulnerabilities in cybersecurity infrastructure.
During the Apex Legends global finals, hackers took over players' computers in real-time, injecting cheats while the game was live-streamed. This incident underscored the vulnerabilities in e-sports and the potential for real-time cyberattacks during major events.
Hawk Coin, a cryptocurrency launched by viral star Haley Welch, saw its market capitalization crash from $490 million to $60 within 20 minutes. Allegations of a rug pull emerged, with developers claiming the crash was due to automated arbitrage, while critics pointed to insider wallets profiting from the collapse.
Five major Canadian media companies, including Torstar and CBC, sued OpenAI for allegedly using copyrighted journalistic content to train its AI models without permission or compensation. They sought damages of up to $20,000 CAD per article and a permanent injunction to stop OpenAI from using their content.
The Enron website was revived in 2024 by a group associated with the 'Birds Aren't Real' movement, which parodied the notion that birds are government drones. The site described itself as a First Amendment-protected parody, sparking discussions about the use of parody in potentially fraudulent activities.
23andMe faced scrutiny following a high-profile security breach and major board changes. The new board planned to take the company private, raising concerns about the use of customers' genetic data. Many users sought to delete their data from the platform in response.
It's been a wacky one. In this very loose year in review, we discuss adversarial agents being gamified for fun an profit, DNA companies changing ownership and what it means for your data, and take a tour through some of the biggest tech, hacking, AI, and security stories of the year. And yes, I'm aware we never actually revisit the intro story during the ep. We apparently had too many broken bones to discuss.
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