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Cyber Thoughts Newsletter
September 2024
As we leave a sweltering summer, the hottest one on record in Las Vegas, we move into Free Speech Fall(™)!
X, formerly Twitter, has been shut down in Brazil for violating local laws. The company was directed by local courts to take down “misinformation”; this led to a standoff between a judge, Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, and Elon Musk. Currently, X is being blocked in its fourth largest market, and now Musk’s Starlink has entered the fray by refusing to abide by the block in Brazil.
We’d have a lot more sympathy for Mr. Musk if he hadn’t blocked information in Turkey at the request of their strongman leader Edrogen. Since Musk pals around with Edrogen he apparently felt it was good policy to abide by their laws. It’s therefore quite an about-face that in Brazil X decided not to comply with local laws on misinformation.
In other news, Pavel Durov, the founder of the encrypted messaging site Telegram, was arrested in France. The French authorities have charged him with 12 counts including drug trafficking and child exploitation. While Telegram is known as a place where criminals congregate, that doesn’t mean the CEO is liable for those meetings any more than the CEO of AT&T would be liable for the phone calls made by mafia dons. The critical question is what did Telegram facilitate and did it comply with local laws when requested.
To round out the Free Speech Fall(™) we have a homegrown, USA, set of laws with free speech implications. In a bipartisan effort, the US Senate recently passed two new bills: Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0). These laws would represent significant updates in online child safety. The bills would hold tech more accountable and raise the age of protected minors online from 13 to 17.
There are detractors from these bills, most significant to us is the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a group we respect, who worry that if these became law they could have a chilling effect on free speech and that their vague wording has the potential for abuse. As parents, we want help with making the Internet safer for our children, as much as you can make a lawless MadMax-like hellscape safe for children, but we’d also like to support free speech.
Maybe we’ll just get all the kids old school dialup AOL accounts and tell them that’s the Internet? ;)
Below are a few of the articles that caught our attention this month. Moreover, we’ve inserted one or two sentences in italics, summarizing each article’s importance. We hope you enjoy and appreciate the material.
Lastly, if you appreciate our highlighted content, please follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn, where we regularly post about things worthy of attention.
What We're Reading
Here's a curated list of things we found interesting.
Brazil’s supreme court upholds ban on Elon Musk’s X over ‘illegal conduct’
The Brazilian government has gotten into a fight with X/Twitter for violating Brazilian law. This is spilling over into Starlink as well, since they have refused to block X in Brazil.
Members of Brazil’s supreme court have unanimously voted to uphold the ban on X, after Elon Musk’s refusal to comply with local laws led to the social network being blocked in one of its biggest markets.
TL;DR: Every AI Talk from BSidesLV, Black Hat, and DEF CON 2024
Great work by Clint at TL;DR Sec to summarize every AI talk at this summer's hacker conferences. It’s a great way to see what cutting edge research is happening.
This past Hacker Summer Camp (BSidesLV, Black Hat USA, DEF CON), there were over 60 talks related to AI. …I spent tens of hours so you can get up to speed in ~15 minutes.
NEA led a $100M round into Fei-Fei Li’s new AI startup, now valued at over $1B
Nope, totally not a bubble. Nothing to see here. This is all totally rational and justifiable. There is no way that investors are getting caught up in a hype cycle. No way!
World Labs, a stealthy startup founded by renowned Stanford University AI professor Fei-Fei Li, has raised two rounds of financing two months apart, according to multiple reports. The latest financing was led by NEA and valued the company at over $1 billion,
Transactions
Deals that caught our eye.
Check Point snaps up external risk management firm Cyberint
The sale was reported by Infosecurity Magazine to be in the range of $200M. The area of SOC management and automation is heating up with new players entering with AI and acquisitions by incumbents.
Expected to close by the end of 2024, Check Point said the acquisition will enhance its security operations center (SOC) capabilities as well as broaden its range of managed threat intelligence solutions.
Podcasts
What we’re listening to.
DATA SKEPTIC: MACHINE INTELLIGENCE - I LLM and You Can Too
It took a massive financial investment for the first large language models (LLMs) to be created. Did their corporate backers lock these tools away for all but the richest? No. They provided commodity priced API options for using them. Anyone can talk to Chat GPT or Bing. What if you want to go a step beyond that and do something programmatic? Kyle explores your options in this episode.
About Lytical
Lytical Ventures is a New York City-based venture firm investing in Corporate Intelligence, comprising cybersecurity, data analytics, and artificial intelligence. Lytical’s professionals have decades of experience in direct investing generally and in Corporate Intelligence specifically.