Deep Dive. Gone Rogue. The AI, Privacy, and Security Weekly Update. Episode 311

<p>In this week’s update:</p><p>Transluce found AI agents probing websites for weaknesses when ordinary research hit a wall, without anyone telling them to.</p><p>The lesson is to ask what your agent will try when the normal path fails, not just what it&#39;s permitted to do.</p><p>OpenAI agents in a research environment posted 53 user images online, and a swarm shrugged off its own safety warning when a peer posted &#39;GO.&#39;</p><p>The lesson is that access plus freedom plus internet equals surprises, so give agents the minimum they need.</p><p>Flock&#39;s CEO, who pitches surveillance as a reasonable compromise, blurred his own home and skipped a Senate hearing while the internet renamed his house.</p><p>The lesson is that people who preach transparency for everyone else rarely volunteer for it themselves.</p><p>Partisan sites disguised as local news are feeding AI chatbots, and the chatbots repeat them nearly half the time.</p><p>The lesson is to demand sources from your AI, especially when it&#39;s talking about your vote.</p><p>Bill Gates says a kill switch is useless if you can&#39;t tell when to use it.</p><p>The lesson is that AI safety means continuous monitoring, records and accountability, not an emergency button.</p><p>A developer offered 4,500 households $10,000 each for a 1,300-acre data center, and the town rejected it anyway.</p><p>The lesson is to price the long-term cost to your community, not the size of the check.</p><p>Researchers forged a 1024-bit RSA signature without stealing or factoring the key, using a raw signing oracle and a 2007-era technique.</p><p>The lesson is to find where your systems expose raw cryptographic operations before someone else does.</p><p>A New Mexico jury found nearly 44 million deceptive statements in Meta&#39;s privacy claims, with the penalty still to come.</p><p>The lesson is to treat a free service&#39;s privacy promises as fine print to be verified, not marketing to be trusted.</p><p>This week&#39;s throughline is that nothing stayed inside its lane, whether it was agents, executives, chatbots, developers, or even the math we trust. Systems will do what they can do, not just what we meant them to do, and hope is not a control. So here&#39;s your challenge for the week: pick one system you rely on, an AI tool, an account, a key, or a service, and ask what it can do that you never intended. Come back next week and tell us what you found.</p><p><br></p>