It’s the unofficial start of the weekend and I’m glad to be back on with Mark Starling, Seth, John, and the First News 570 crew. This week, Big Tech gets big exploited again, sellers buy fake Amazon reviews in bulk, and Epic goes Meta-Human. You can listen to Mark and I point and laugh while talking about the wild and crazy technology world every Thursday morning, LIVE at 6:43am Eastern.
EPIC GAMES CREATES METAHUMAN CREATOR I CREEP OUT
Yeah. It’s like that. For real, if you have a moment head over to YouTube an check out Epic’s metahuman creator. Using the latest in AI technology and rendering techniques Epic has created a people maker. The intro video shows an editor that’s not unlike Adobe Photoshop. The editor allows you to pick a human gender, a skin tone, eyebrows, facial hair, eye color, complexion, and more. Epic announced the product as a tool for creators to make more realistic content. It is totally amazing an possibilities are endless.
WANT FREE STUFF, WRITE AN AMAZON REVIEW
If you are an Internet denizen you already know about the, scam. And fake reviews are nothing new. Amazon has tried, and sometimes been successful, in taking down sellers who pay people to write fake reviews. Positive Amazon reviews are worth their digital weight in BitCoin. I was at dinner one night and was asked if I wanted in on a flat panel TV scam. You buy the TV from a specific manufacturer, write a 5 star review, and they’ll PayPal you the total cost of the TV. Well, according to the consumer group, Which?, fake Amazon reviews can now be bought in bulk. For about $30, an Amazon Marketplace seller can purchase one fake review but for a few hundred dollars tens of reviews can be bought. For more, thousands. Once seller had over 702,000 reviewers according to Which?
BIG TECH COMPANIES PAY BUG BOUNTIES TO HACKERS
The hits keep on coming don’t they. Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, and 33 other technology companies have ha their supply chain systems comprised with some companies paying ransoms for being exploited using online, open source packages from NPM, PyPI, and RubyGems. Security researcher Alex Birsan found the exploit by using a technique called squatting where he created a nefarious, but publicly available software component that used the same name as another component. When the supply chain programs automatically downloaded the exploit, he was able to compromise their systems. The moral hear is to be careful, and make sure you are installing the proper packages in your end systems.