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If you took a walk in Hayes Valley, San Francisco’s epicenter of AI froth, and asked the first dude-bro you saw wearing a puffer vest about the future of the interface, he’d probably say something about the movie Her, about chatty virtual assistants that will help you do everything from organize your email to book a trip to Coachella to sort your text messages.

Nonsense. Setting aside that Her (a still from the film is shown above) was about how technology manipulates us into a one-sided relationship, you’d have to be pudding-brained to believe that chatbots are the best way to use computers. The real opportunity is close, but it isn’t chatbots.

Instead, it’s computers built atop the visual interfaces we know, but which we can interact with more fluidly, through whatever combination of voice and touch is most natural. Crucially, this won’t just

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In 1983, while on a field recording assignment in Kenya, the musician and soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause noticed something remarkable. Lying in his tent late one night, listening to the calls of hyenas, tree frogs, elephants, and insects in the surrounding old-growth forest, Krause heard what seemed to be a kind of collective orchestra. Rather than a chaotic cacophony of nighttime noises, it was as if each animal was singing within a defined acoustic bandwidth, like living instruments in a larger sylvan ensemble. 

Unsure of whether this structured musicality was real or the invention of an exhausted mind, Krause analyzed his soundscape recordings on a spectrogram when he returned home. Sure enough, the insects occupied one frequency niche, the frogs another, and the mammals a completely separate one. Each group had claimed a unique part of the larger sonic spectrum, a fact that not

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Summary

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center (DC3) are releasing this joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) to warn network defenders that, as of August 2024, a group of Iran-based cyber actors continues to exploit U.S. and foreign organizations. This includes organizations across several sectors in the U.S. (including in the education, finance, healthcare, and defense sectors as well as local government entities) and other countries (including in Israel, Azerbaijan, and the United Arab Emirates). The FBI assesses a significant percentage of these threat actors’ operations against US organizations are intended to obtain and develop network access to then collaborate with ransomware affiliate actors to deploy ransomware. The FBI further assesses these Iran-based cyber actors are associated with the Government of Iran (GOI) and—separate from the ransomware activity—conduct computer network exploitation activity in support of the GOI (such as intrusions enabling the theft of sensitive technical data against organizations in Israel and Azerbaijan).

This CSA provides the threat actor’s tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and indicators of compromise (IOCs), as well as highlights similar activity from a previous advisory (Iran-Based Threat Actor Exploits VPN Vulnerabilities) that the FBI and CISA published on Sept. 15, 2020. The information and guidance in this advisory are derived from FBI investigative activity and technical

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