Agentic AI-based services are the new Shadow IT. Change my mind.

via Hackernews. It really is comical the lengths to which companies will go to avoid being contacted by their customers. What the fuck is a ‘fuck off contact page?’ "A “fuck off contact page” is what a company throws together when they actually don’t want anyone to contact them at all. They are usually found on the websites of million or billion dollar companies, likely Software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies that are trying to reduce the amount of money they spend on support by carefully hiding the real support channels behind login walls. These companies tend to offer multiple tiers of support, with enterprise customers having a customer success manager who they can call on this ancient device we call phones, whereas the lower-paying customers may have to wrangle various in-app ticket mechanisms. If you solve your own problem by reading the knowledge base, then this is a win for the company. They don’t want to hear from you, they want you to fuck off."

The f*** off contact page - Nic Chan

How to get people to NOT contact you

They had me at the headline: AI isn’t replacing jobs. AI spending is "From Amazon to General Motors to Booz Allen Hamilton, layoffs are being announced and blamed on AI. Amazon said it would cut 14,000 corporate jobs. United Parcel Service (UPS) said it had reduced its management workforce by about 14,000 positions over the past 22 months. And Target said it would cut 1,800 corporate roles. Some academic economists have also chimed in: The St. Louis Federal Reserve found a (weak) correlation between theoretical AI exposure and actual AI adoption in 12 occupational categories." "Yet we remain skeptical of the claim that AI is responsible for these layoffs. A recent MIT Media Lab study found that 95% of generative AI pilot business projects were failing. Another survey by Atlassian concluded that 96% of businesses “have not seen dramatic improvements in organizational efficiency, innovation, or work quality.” Still another study found that 40% of the business people surveyed have received “AI slop” at work in the last month and that it takes nearly two hours, on average, to fix each instance of slop. In addition, they “no longer trust their AI-enabled peers, find them less creative, and find them less intelligent or capable.” https://www.fastcompany.com/91435192/chatgpt-llm-openai-jobs-amazon

Meta, Meta, Meta. So Meta. This Reuters report is 🔥 "Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show" "Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, documents seen by Reuters show. And the social media giant internally estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day. Among its responses to suspected rogue marketers: charging them a premium for ads – and issuing reports on ’Scammiest Scammers.’ https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortune-deluge-fraudulent-ads-documents-show-2025-11-06/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

I've been trying to get the cybercrime journalist @npub1z08h...w6tq to abandon their seat at the Nazi Bar, or at least to also post here. So please join me in giving them a follow and a friendly hello.

Jimmy Kimmel has been must-watch over the past few days. Total 🔥 monologues. Also, Spinal Tap!

Democracy in the US is under serious threat by a deranged orange comestible, but you wouldn't see any signs of that from watching the absolutely delusional stock market, which seems to only care about AI stocks continuing to lift the entire market thanks to their outsized value in it and all the wealth tied up in some fairly shaky but critical assumptions. In other news, Financial Times reports just now that Oracle's market value jumped $200B thanks to a surge in AI investment, taking Larry Ellison's worth to that of Elon Musk.

I've never before seen this particular 550 error in response to an email that was sent to me by a reader. Proton seems to be dunking on their own user here. "550 5.6.0 Message rejected due to potential violation of our ToS by the recipient"

Alternative headline: Biggest purveyor of bullshit machines complains there's too much bullshit on the interwebs.

TechCrunch

Sam Altman says that bots are making social media feel 'fake'  | TechCrunch

After watching Reddit's OpenAI and Anthropic communities, Sam Altman thinks social media cannot be trusted. And bots are to blame.

I'm not sure how I ended up there, but this morning I watched a YT video about the most valuable comic books from the 1980s, and it turns out I have a ton of these in near mint condition, including The Punisher #1 and all the Secret Wars series. It would probably take several days to go through the whole collection, which has incredibly survived in a stack of boxes under the stairs for eons. It's just wild b/c I sort of forgot I had all those.

Making it easier for Americans to access their own health records is a laudable goal. I am constantly amazed at how difficult it is sometimes to get our own records from healthcare providers -- even when it is a matter of urgency or a critical health issue. But creating a system where Big Tech gets to share your medical records so you can access them wherever is an extremely bad idea for health data security. For starters, it does nothing to address the reality that healthcare companies in general have absolutely atrocious security practices and some of leanest security budgets you've ever seen for large organizations trusted with such sensitive information. More importantly, we still don't have any data privacy laws that are relevant to life in the 21st century. How about we work on that before we just punt a broken system to the tech bros?

AP News

Trump administration is launching a new private health tracking system with Big Tech's help

The initiative will focus on diabetes and weight management, conversational artificial intelligence that helps patients, and digital tools such as ...

New, at KrebsOnSecurity.com: Marko Elez, a 25-year-old employee at Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has been granted access to sensitive databases at the U.S. Social Security Administration, the Treasury and Justice departments, and the Department of Homeland Security. So it should fill all Americans with a deep sense of confidence to learn that Mr. Elez over the weekend inadvertently published a private key that allowed anyone to interact directly with more than four dozen large language models (LLMs) developed by Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI.

DOGE Denizen Marko Elez Leaked API Key for xAI – Krebs on Security

I've written so many stories about John Clifton Davies, the serial con man who continues to slick-talk tech companies into thinking he's a billionaire investor. In reality, his scam is simple: Find companies that are desperate for investment, dangle $20-$100M investments, and then insist the whole thing is managed by a third-party "due diligence" firm that is actually run by them and is a complete scam. They just go around bilking companies out of tens of thousands of dollars in due diligence fees, and then disappear and rebrand. Over the past month I've heard from a bunch of his new victims, some of which have already sent his firms money. Incredibly, these scammers are still re-using the same boilerplate text in their bullshit investment sites that they used in past scam sites. It's a reliable "watermark" for them that they never bother changing, no matter how many times I point it out in a story. Not sure I can be bothered to write about this guy yet again, but for the record his current scam due diligence firms are ROI Capital (roicap.co) and Apertura (apertura.uk).

John Clifton Davies – Krebs on Security

The POTUS has issued a memo ordering a federal investigation into Chris Krebs, former head of DHS's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). The president fired Krebs after the CISA director declared the 2020 election that Trump lost was the most secure in U.S. history. "Trump's orders revoked the security clearances for Christopher Krebs, the former head of DHS's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and Miles Taylor, a former senior DHS official who wrote a highly critical tell-all book about his time in Trump's first administration."

Trump orders probe of former cyber chief over 2020 election

The White House

Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Addresses Risks from Chris Krebs and Government Censorship

RESTORING TRUST IN GOVERNMENT: Today, President Donald J. Trump signed a Presidential Memorandum revoking any active security clearance held by Chris

When Trump first took aim at Chris Krebs back in 2020, I started getting tons of hate mail that was directed at him. People full of ignorant rage figuring we're the same person because we share a last name. We're not even related. Now it's happening again. Here's one I just got less than an hour ago: From: Eric <eticket@countermail.com> Subject: Accountability Message Body: Krebs: I used to be an admirer of yours but, ever since the 2020 election, I lost all respect for you. You either lied or were complicit in the 2020 election theft and DJT is coming after you. Krooks like Krebs need to be held accountable and I can't wait.

Imagine being so drunk on the Kool-Aide that you can't listen to someone trying to help your company. Reached out to an executive at a manufacturing company about a security issue, and their reply was: "I'd like to help you. However, in checking out your website it is clear you suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome. I don't like the guy but he is our President and a refreshing change from a mentally incapacitated do nothing President." Oh well, I tried.

I have a feeling that the story I'm about to publish about a privacy company whose CEO apparently has founded dozens of people-search businesses is not going to end well for the privacy company or CEO.